On Screen Addiction
How the disease you didn't know you had is ruining your life
I’ll never forget my first cell phone. Not because it was some cosmic life-altering event, but precisely because of how forgettable I found it to be at the time. Less than 48 hours after my parents handed me the thing, it got thrown in the washing machine by mistake. I had left it in my jeans pocket, and just like that, it was ruined.
The year was 2008. I was 12 years old.
Fortunately, the phone wasn’t anything fancy. It was just a flip phone — the kind you used to be able to buy at CVS — and probably cost my parents no more than $20. But I find it remarkable now how little I seemed to care about it then. In the nearly two decades since, I have developed a pretty thorny addiction to my phone, and to screens in particular.
Like many millennials, I grew up with a ‘computer room’, a special alcove in our house reserved for the family desktop. There, I typed up homework assignments, chatted with my friends on AIM, and played computer games. Instead of being perpetually latched to me like some sort of parasitic tick, the internet was a physical place that I could periodically leave and return to at will.
Sadly, this boundaried relationship with screens didn’t last forever. A few weeks after I forgot my cell phone in the washing machine, my seventh-grade history teacher asked my class a question.
“How many of you own an iPhone?”
No one raised their hand.
“I guarantee you that in ten years’ time, every single one of your hands will be raised.”
We all scoffed in disbelief. “There’s no way,” we said. “Only super rich people have iPhones.”
Of course, my teacher turned out to be right, and it took a lot less than ten years for him to be vindicated. By the time I turned 16 — a mere four years later — most of the kids in my high school, myself included, owned an iPhone.
Within a few years of graduating from a flip phone to an iPhone and the family desktop to a laptop, my once balanced relationship with screens turned into a full-blown addiction. It was the first thing I grabbed in the morning and the last thing I looked at at night. Every buzz felt like an emergency, every ding a Pavlovian command. I had become an absolute slave to it.
The irony is that I hated being on it.
As the years progressed and my addiction deepened, I began to notice that my attention span was significantly shorter. Once able to sit for hours at a time reading, I now struggled to focus for longer than a few minutes on a book.
This problem isn’t unique to me. Every single one of my friends and family members have complained of the same thing.
After doing some research, I discovered that this is a classic symptom of something called ‘digital dementia.’ Coined by German psychiatrist Dr. Manfred Spitzer, ‘digital dementia’ is a form of cognitive decline caused by excessive screen time. In addition to a shortened attention span, it causes memory problems, brain fog, and weakened inhibitory control, as well as a decline in reasoning, motor skills, spatial awareness, problem-solving and language learning.
In other words: brain rot.
But wait, it gets worse! Screen addiction doesn’t just damage your brain; it also costs you your life — or at least, a huge chunk of it.
A recent study estimated that the average young person will spend one third of their life — roughly 25 years — on their phone. This staggering figure does not even account for the vast additional time they will inevitably spend on their computers and tablets. If we add all of that time together, it’s possible that some of us may spend as much as 50 years of our lives staring at a screen.
Naturally, upon realising this, I was horrified. I thought back to all the hours I had already wasted staring at screens instead of experiencing the real world — hours that I can never get back — and wondered what I could have accomplished within that lost amount of time. I imagine that by now, you are probably wondering the same thing.
Maybe the real reason you haven’t yet written a book or mastered the violin or taken up taekwondo isn’t because you ‘don’t have the time’, but because you’re spending all the time you do have staring at a screen.
Had Orwell spent his days doom scrolling through posts about societal collapse on Twitter, he might never have written 1984. Had Van Gogh opened Instagram every time he felt depressed, he might never have painted Starry Night. Had Mozart wiled away his terminal illness on TikTok, he might never have written his Requiem.
You get the point.
It is precisely those uncomfortable, boring moments in life that tend to give way to creative breakthrough. That’s why so many brilliant ideas come to us in the shower; once away from the mind-numbing lull of the screen, we are finally forced to contend with our thoughts.
This brings me to the real heart of the problem, and perhaps the biggest reason why we struggle so much with letting this addiction go: we are all terrified of being alone with ourselves.
When you are alone with yourself — I mean, really, truly alone — thoughts and feelings you have long pushed down rise to the surface like scum from the bottom of a pond. They are often ugly, inconvenient and uncomfortable, and may force you to re-examine yourself or the way you’ve been living your life. It is far easier to scroll on your phone than to face this discomfort head-on.
So, every would-be silence is filled with the music, podcast, movie or TV show of our choice. Every potential moment for boredom is pulverised by an incoming text message, email or breaking news headline. Every opportunity to connect with people face-to-face is threatened by the buzz! and ding! of that vampiric little rectangular-shaped albatross stuffed into each and every one of our pockets.
In a way, this isn’t really our fault. These machines are designed to be addictive. Have you ever opened a social media app and thought, “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I’ll know it when I see it”? This is a common phenomenon, and it occurs because they use variable rewards like unpredictable notifications, infinite scrolling and pull-to-refresh features to trigger dopamine hits in our brains, much like slot machines. The uncertainty of not knowing what comes next is the very thing that keeps us coming back for more. Every swipe of a finger to a screen addict is like the rolling of dice to a gambling addict. The next post may be either exciting, boring or soul crushing; there’s simply no way of knowing until you’ve scrolled down.
We were not designed to be available to other people 24/7, nor were we designed to constantly consume other people’s lives, opinions and emotions. After a certain point, it becomes difficult to distinguish between one’s own internal experiences and another’s. The line between what is mine and what is yours blurs, and we are left feeling less sure of ourselves than ever before.
By now, you’re probably wondering: Okay, fine, I admit that I have a problem — so how on earth do I fix it?
I wish I had a simple, straight-forward answer to this question. Although I’ve largely come to terms with my screen addiction, I haven’t yet cured it. Over the course of writing this essay, I found myself constantly distracted. Even after putting my devices on Do Not Disturb, I was tempted again and again to open up a new tab and check on this thing or that.
When it comes to treating other forms of addiction, such as to alcohol, drugs or gambling, one of the key steps is to stop engaging in the destructive behaviour entirely. The trouble is, we can’t really do that with screens. Unless you want to be completely cut off from society (which, to be honest, sounds increasingly tempting) then you still have to engage with screens at least somewhat.
This is what makes screen addiction so difficult to cure — and it’s no accident. Our puppet masters want us to be pacified, unthinking dummies who are happy, dull and complacent like the characters in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But, to quote John the Savage, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
Apart from the very obvious and very useless advice of simply using your phone and computer less, I advise you to cultivate an inner and outer life so rich and fulfilling that you feel no need to escape from it. Assume your God-given role as the co-creator of your own life. Become its active participant, rather than its passive victim. Reconnect with the things that lit you up as a child. Learn to transmute your pain into wisdom, rather than avoid it. Then slowly, day by day, you will start to heal.
At the end of the day, no one is coming to save us from our screen addiction. The responsibility to cure it lies solely within ourselves — and, in fact, we must cure it. If we don’t, we risk losing those core parts of ourselves that make us human. We cease to be free agents in our own lives. And without agency, we might as well not be living at all.