The Real Reason We Struggle With Screen Time

Does anyone have a truly healthy relationship with their phone?

I don’t see much evidence of it out there. Personally, the phone is undeniably useful but still feels like a foreign object in my hand — a feeling that was brought into stark relief the second my kids were old enough to pick up a screen. To them, a tablet or phone offers an enticing, comforting, and even productive space. Not healthy, exactly, but familiar. For me, it’s alien — and ground zero for a cultural battle against brain rot, attention loss, and reality itself. Phones stress me out.

I ran into a much needed perspective on this dilemma in a long, thoughtful essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the brilliant Norwegian writer with an uncanny ability to see the world as it is, in meticulous detail. My struggle, as he helped me to see, comes from those most influential years in my life — the years before the smartphone. “To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said,” writes Knausgaard in Harper’s Magazine. “The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

My Napoleonic prime was in the 2000s — shortly after the advent of Facebook, but right before the iPhone was in everyone’s hands. For Knausgaard, who is 56 years old, the internet barely existed in his twenties. He admits that he has been ignoring the fundamental influences of such technological advances since. “Not once in those forty years have I turned my attention to technology and tried to understand it,” Knausgaard writes, “how it works in itself, how it works in me. It’s as if I had moved to a foreign country and not bothered to learn its language, as if I am content with not understanding what is happening around me and just settling for my own little world. This lately feels like serious neglect.”

This resonates. While I spend considerable time trying to understand and control the impacts of screen time on my kids' developing brains, I hardly pay attention to my own use. What am I doing when I check for emails, Slack messages, and texts with lab rat-like repetition, or scroll Reddit News and The New York Times at every down moment, or get lost in Instagram and YouTube rabbit holes? More importantly, what should I do about it?

Knausgaard found his technological insight by heading out to Athens, Greece to talk to James Bridle, an author and artist with a specialty in nonhuman ways of thinking (and what orangutans can teach us about politics). In a sense, Bridle sees technology as getting in the way of experience. Sounding like a free range parenting proselytizer, he says that “the only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself. You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically — because you’re part of the world.”

Bridle takes this deeper, offering the example of an ancient Eleusinian cult in which initiates were led into a dark room, shown a “whirlwind of impressions, without anyone telling them what they were seeing or what it meant” and being left to interpret that on their own. The next year, they were shown the initiation from the outside, “and you could say that only then, when the gaze from within was complemented by the gaze from without, was the initiation completed.”

This metaphor for the digital world made it all click for me. We’re all too often inside looking at the whirlwind of the internet with little control and understanding. There are more of us now trying to step outside of this world — to see the puppet masters at play in order to walk away from it all.

We’re not going back to 2006, that innocent year before the iPhone was introduced. And I don’t think that should be the goal. The technology that has been introduced since my childhood is incredible, powerful, and a big piece of human progress. But it’s no replacement for the real world lessons I get when I put down the phone and experience life, unfiltered.