Here’s how much I use my phone by the numbers: my screen time last week averaged six hours and 45 minutes a day. This week, it went down: five hours and nine minutes a day.
I picked up my phone 111 times a day on average, usually to open the Messages app – I love texting. I received on average 297 notifications a day.
My most-used app over the course of last week was Instagram (three hours and 20 minutes over seven days); followed by Safari (two hours and 50 minutes); TikTok (two hours and 45 minutes); and Messages (two hours and 30 minutes). Two weeks ago, it was Netflix, with eight hours and 55 minutes – I binged Castlevania.
All of these minutes, in aggregate, are my life. I would no sooner call the time I spend using it wasted than I would call my life wasted. I edit technology news for a living. To me, digital life is real life.
This is my screenager’s manifesto: it does not matter how much time you spend on your phone.
•••
Phones now inhabit every aspect of our lives. That is not bad. It is not good, either: screen time is not a moral choice. However much time you spend on your phone should not be a judgment of your character.
The measure of whether you are living a good life is up to you – relationships, career, your own inner peace and happiness. The graph of the hours you’re using your phone is not that metric. Your screen time is no more significant than the number of minutes you spend taking photos, running or reading – likely all activities you do with your phone in hand, but not ones you would castigate yourself for were they done with a camera, a Walkman or a book.
When I do resent my screen time, it is not the phone itself I’m frowning at. It is some burden which is digitally delivered to me. The same, I imagine, is true for you: an overbearing job transmutes the device into a ball and chain of emails and Slack chats. The Guardian’s app alerts you to a politician’s inane and offensive remarks. A dating app match flakes via text. The phone is only the conduit for some unpleasant other thing.
There are certain things I can’t do on my phone. I can’t write in a serious way. I can’t edit news stories, which is my job, or write fiction, which is my hobby. In certain unproductive weeks, I look at my screen time and feel like those hours are indeed ones spent skirting work or challenging, fulfilling outside pursuits. But the measure of hours spent in Google Maps navigating the subways of New York City is not an indicator of whether I give others the attention and respect they deserve. In moments of self-flagellation, I am conflating all of my screen time with hours misspent on Instagram. My use of my phone becomes a proxy for anxiety over making slow progress writing short stories, but it’s not about my phone; it’s doubtful it ever was. If I had never owned a smartphone, I would procrastinate difficult tasks anyway. I found lots of ways to waste time in high school without one.
That dread is only my own projection.
•••
If you read the news, you’ll have no doubt noticed a newfound disdain for our devices. A new shelf of self-help books advises us to break up with our phones, as if these black bricks were tantamount to an inconsiderate boyfriend. We are told to learn how to do nothing – as if we long to once again wait unoccupied in lines. TikTokers offer tips to stop scrolling and accrue millions of views. Online courses and YouTubers detail 30-day plans to wean yourself from your device like fad diets, probably just as fruitless.
There is a feeling of hypocrisy and grift to this cottage industry, a suspicion it might be a new Silicon Valley marketing technique.
Nir Eyal, a pioneer of user psychology and behavior, wrote Hooked, a 2014 bestseller detailing how to build “habit-forming products”. He seems to have changed his mind, as he followed up just five years later with Indistractable, a book about how to remain focused and free of distractions. Recently, Eyal has pivoted yet again, advising us that the secret to staying focused lives within. “It’s not your phone or your laptop that’s distracting you,” he tweeted on 4 January. “The problem is NOT our technology – it’s our inability to deal with discomfort.”
An entire device that asked you to spend $350 to escape your phone, the 2019 Palm Phone, was reviewed as a failure. In a sublime twist, it didn’t come with digital wellbeing features but did come pre-loaded with apps users didn’t choose.
The rich no longer like their glass bricks now that everybody has one, and they want you to know it. Joe Rogan, Mayim Bialik and dozens of Ted Talkers are producing videos about putting devices down. BJ Fogg, a Stanford behavioral scientist who studies digital habits, said in 2019: “We will start to realize that being chained to your mobile phone is a low-status behavior, similar to smoking.” He predicted that a shift to “post-digital” would emerge.
All that is to say: consider carefully who is selling you a phone detox. You’re probably fine without it.
•••
As I write, I worry I might appear to be shilling for Apple’s iPhone or Google’s Pixel – “You can do anything on your $1,000 phone! Keep up with your friends and family! Connect to the world!”
No. The truth lies somewhere in the inchoate middle between 1 Apple Park Way and a monastery. I am not telling you to use your phone more. I am not telling you to use your phone less. I am telling you to use it with intention. Screen time is a neutral metric that you can use to tweak your choices as you see fit. I have resolved to never use mine during meals with someone else; nothing kills a conversation faster.
Forgive me for citing a meme in a serious discussion, but this one is prescient. A cartoon woman says to a many-tentacled Instagram logo: “Thank you for ruining my life.” The octopine app icon responds: “I’m literally an algorithm designed to maintain your attention by learning from your behavior and mirroring back that which, consciously or not, captivates you and the social worlds through which you move. I am literally one of the most fascinating tools for collective and personal shadow work ever created – that is, only if you can learn to recognize that you aren’t disturbed by social media, you’re disturbed by your own reflection.”
I agree with the sentient app icon. That is the hump I had to get over, learning to use my phone in a way that I would be happy to describe to another person, rather than divulging an embarrassing secret. When we look at the summation of our habits in our screen time, we look at ourselves.
I also do not have children. Were I making choices about screen use that would affect another person’s development and lifelong habits, I would feel differently. I might view the way I structured my children’s screen time as a moral choice. They would not know better than the limits I would set for them. They would not know of a time before smartphones at all.
But if I did have kids, I might not be the type of parent who frets over screen time anyway. A review of 40 studies on the subject published in 2020 found that the link between teen social media use and anxiety and depression was nearly nonexistent. Meta’s own research arrived at different findings. The science on kids’ screen time is not settled.
A 2023 study from the Oxford Internet Institute titled Global Well-Being and Mental Health in the Internet Age concluded that there was no link between internet use and mental health problems among 2 million subjects. Life, it would seem, is better with the internet for the vast majority of people. You are probably one of them, as am I.
Use your phone in a way that you would be fine describing to another person. Find a screen time buddy if you’re having difficulty turning away from the black mirror. The phone is not the problem, just as your life is not the problem. It is your life; you are spending it how you are. Your phone is not a ghost that haunts you and steals your intimate moments; that specter is only the image of your own enraptured face.
Blake Montgomery is tech editor for Guardian US
