The Tension That Defines Modern Life
Sierra Campbell told me that she does “like 50 things a day” to try to curb her screen time. She has a widget on her home screen that shows a tally of the hours and minutes she’s been on her phone that day. She has Brick, a small, square device that blocks distracting apps unless you physically touch your phone to it. She carries around a tote bag filled with crossword puzzles and watercolors that she reaches for, instead of grabbing her phone, when she has time to kill. Sometimes she leaves her phone in “phone jail”—a special box that she purchased at Goodwill. And she spends one day a week completely phone-free.
She has not, however, attempted to get rid of her phone altogether. “I want to see my friends, and I want to stay informed,” Campbell, a 31-year-old who lives in Santa Cruz, California, said. “I really do love social media.” Social media is her job, in fact. She is a full-time lifestyle influencer who posts about her strategies for reducing screen time. “I want to use myself as an experiment for other people,” she said. “I feel like I’m a good person to stand in the gap.”
Many people do seem to want help standing in that gap between letting your phone totally take over your life and not having a smartphone at all. Although sales of so-called dumbphones have been on the rise in recent years, driven by people wanting fewer distractions, 91 percent of Americans still have a smartphone. The devices are so baked into everyday life that completely opting out isn’t practical or desirable for most people. At the same time, more than half of American adults said in a survey last year that they wanted to use screens less. In a 2022 Gallup survey, most respondents said that they used their smartphone too much, and most said that their phone made their life better.
[Read: A ‘radical’ approach to reclaiming your attention]
The word that describes many people’s relationship with their phone is ambivalence, Joshua Bell, an anthropologist and a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., told me. The technology, he said, “is wonderful, but it’s also very, very wacky, and it can cause a lot of harm and joy.” This ambivalence is one of the key tensions of modern life. And for many people, it cannot be eliminated—only managed.
Evidence of people’s desire to manage their phone use is everywhere. Campbell has gotten hundreds of thousands of views on her videos about how to put together an “analog bag” similar to her crosswords-and-watercolors tote. Screenless hobbies such as board games, needlepoint, and knitting have become popular. Stationery stores are reporting an increase in customers. The Artist’s Way, a three-month-long creativity program that recommends writing longhand “morning pages” every day and doing one week of “media deprivation,” is having a renaissance. Since 2018, iPhones and Androids have offered people the ability to set time limits for certain apps. Devices such as the Brick and safes that you can lock your phone inside have sprung up to meet the desire for a more formidable barrier to scrolling. Some people have also taken up more retro technology, including alarm clocks, Polaroid cameras, and physical media such as DVDs and records, as a phone-avoidance strategy.
One reason so many people feel a need to escape their phone is, of course, that it is essentially a Swiss Army knife on steroids—it does so much. A display at the National Museum of Natural History exhibit “Cellphone: Unseen Connections” illustrates just how many of life’s functions and activities have been gobbled up by the smartphone. A wall labeled Before Cellphones is studded with a planner, a photo album, video tapes, books, games, an egg timer, travel guides, a TV, a flashlight, cameras, a CD sleeve, an atlas, a boom box, a watch. All of it is “stuff that your smart device can replace,” Bell, who led the team that created the exhibit (which is sponsored, naturally, by Qualcomm and T-Mobile), said. The objects came from the curators’ homes—Bell pointed out a Game Boy and some They Might Be Giants concert tickets as his. The phone, Bell said, “becomes a tool for everything. And therefore, why wouldn’t you have it in your hand?”
Once it’s in your hand, even if you picked it up to do just one thing, all of the other things inside it clamor for your attention. Perhaps you went to take a picture or put an appointment in your calendar, and suddenly you’re “bombarded with messages saying something happened in the news, or ‘Here’s something from your Instagram feed,’” Hansen Hsu, a sociologist and a curator at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, told me.
Some of the devices on the museum wall—digital cameras and CDs, for example—have had renewed appeal of late, particularly among young people. That may be partly because of nostalgia: In 2023, a survey by The New York Times and the Harris Poll found that 60 percent of Gen Z wished they could go back to a time before everyone was “plugged in.” But the appeal of these retro technologies may also be that they do only one thing. You can focus on them without the risk of getting sucked into everything else. The smartphone bundled so many things into itself; now, it seems, many people would like to unbundle some of them.
Partial unbundling is likely the best that most people will be able to do—because so much of society’s infrastructure is designed around smartphones. Many workplaces expect employees to be reachable over email or Slack while they are not present in the office. Devices that accept Apple Pay or Google Pay are now available at large numbers of retailers and on many forms of public transit. Many restaurants default to QR codes instead of paper menus. You don’t have to have your airplane boarding pass or your concert ticket on your phone, but getting through airport security or into a venue sure is faster if you do. Getting an Uber or a Lyft tends to be far easier than finding a taxi. Friends share their location to find one another in crowded spaces, or Venmo each other to split restaurant checks. (You can try handing your friend $35 in cash to pay for your dinner, but it probably won’t fit in their magnetic smartphone wallet.) Even the Girl Scouts take Venmo for cookie sales.
The solution to the distraction and anxiety that smartphones can cause has to be some kind of self-discipline. That can take many forms: limiting what apps you have on your phone, accessing social media only on a desktop computer, setting screen-time limits and sticking to them, replacing some of your screen-based leisure time with analog hobbies. Taking up these activities tends to be framed in terms of improving one’s mental health or healing one’s attention span from damage done by too much screen time. People are onto something with that: Psychological research has found that blocking the “smart” features of smartphones can indeed improve a person’s well-being and attention.
The problem with self-discipline as a solution, however, is that its effectiveness rests on a person’s willpower. I’ve found myself swinging between extremes—deleting TikTok, then redownloading it, setting draconian limits for certain apps only to give in and click “Ignore” when the limit goes into effect.
Campbell found her motivation to get serious about screen time when she was pregnant with her first child a few years ago. She wanted to set a good example for her daughter. She knows from experience that a screen fixation can start early and be hard to kick. “I used to get in trouble for Tamagotchis in class in fourth grade,” she said. The habit continued from there, until she started implementing every strategy she could think of to curb what she refers to as an “addiction.” One of those strategies is to repeat an affirmation to herself when she’s tempted to doomscroll: “My kids deserve a drug-free mom.”
Although Campbell is trying to protect her kids now, a love-hate ambivalence about technology is something they may well have to deal with when they’re older. Society is unlikely to pivot to become less designed around smartphones, and tech companies will probably keep using every trick that they can to capture attention. “The tension is still there for me,” Campbell said, “and I have my screen time really under control.” If people can’t or won’t find a way to live without smartphones, they have to find a way to live with them. Or maybe 50 different ways.