Your Screen Is Mean

A very uncomfortable truth..

Brace for impact...

If you’re lucky enough to live to be 90, you will have lived a total of 1080 months. After you account for sleeping, eating, school, work, driving, personal hygiene, etc… you’re left with 334 months of “free time,” and right now the average 18-year-old in the US is on pace to spend... wait for it...

93% of their free time staring at a screen... TOTAL! (not including school)

Info taken from this TED talk.

That’s right, today’s youth are most likely going to spend 93% of the free time they have in their ENTIRE LIFE looking at a screen. To me, that is startling and terrifying.. partly because I know I’m on the same track... or at least heading in the same direction.

Luckily, I’ve successfully gotten my modern heroin addiction mostly under control. In other words, I’m off social media except for 3 hours a week, and most of that time is just posting and replying to DMs.

Now that I have a handle on social media, I’m quickly finding that there is another problem lurking just behind it... an addiction to my phone in general. Maybe I’m not scrolling Instagram, but now I’m scrolling my camera roll, checking the price of BTC, or just opening and closing random apps constantly...

On average, I’m checking my phone 105 times a day and have a daily average screen time of 5 hours.

In my opinion, this is waaaay too much. I’m honestly less concerned with the screen time than I am with the pickups though. I disengage from whatever I’m doing and pick up my phone too often, and I want more focus in my life.

Most of us think time is the most valuable thing in life, but really, focus is. Your attention is.

What good is time if you aren’t using it how you want?

It seems to me that the greatest enemy of focus in my life is my phone. It’s actually painfully obvious. I’d wager that if you’re reading this, you’re in a similar boat.

Now that we’ve established all of that... what to do about it?

I know that enabling grayscale mode can reduce phone usage by 30%, so I’ve literally just enabled that on my phone right now. It really isn’t as fun to look at a black and white screen. However, I do have times when I need to see color, and then I switch it back on and just end up leaving it on. Hopefully, my slowly increasing discipline will take care of that.

I’ve played around with locking my phone in a box for part of the day, but again, I just keep getting it out of the box... unsurprisingly, we are back around to a discipline issue. I could get a box that is a timed lock box, but then if I actually need my phone, I’m screwed.

Interestingly, when I’m really engaged in something I care about, it’s easy to stay off my phone. I’ve done projects where I probably only check my phone 5-10 times in a 10-hour period.

So, looking at it that way, maybe I should just try and do more things that basically force me to focus and be engaged.

Generally, the characteristics of these types of things are one or more of the following:

• Multiple people are involved

• There is a deadline

• The project costs money

• I’m held to an outside expectation or commitment

• I’m deeply enjoying what I’m doing

Because so much of what I work on is just made up and mandated by me, these factors often aren’t present. I know that some of them can be implemented by just changing the way I think, but I’m also realizing that I can just make different decisions that also put me in a position to HAVE to focus, and constantly checking or mindlessly using my phone just isn’t an option.

I’ll be working to implement the above solutions, but I’d like to hear from you! Is this an issue you face as well? How do you deal with it? Any advice? Any tips?

Part of my vision for this blog is for it to be collaborative. I’d like my readers to learn and grow with me. Thinking through all of this stuff solo is difficult. So far, the feedback and conversations I’ve had about the topics on here have been awesome, and I’d like it to keep building.

Don’t be shy! Comment, email me, DM me, whatever! If you’d like to have a more in-depth discussion, I’d also be open to scheduling a Zoom or Google Meet.

As always, thanks for reading!