I Feel Weird About My Relationship with My Phone
Maybe you do, too? And 4 ways I'm trying to fix it.
Hello,
I’ve mentioned this before, but I have a persistent and highly-irrational fear I’ll meet the poet Mary Oliver (she’s dead, so TBD where we’re meeting. On a Ouija board, maybe?) and I’ll have to confess to her that what I did “with my one wild and precious life” was spend it on my phone.1 God, how embarrassing.
I mostly feel bad about my phone usage on Sundays when my screen time report pings in. "Your screen time was down 5% last week, for an average of 5 hours, 12 minutes a day,” last week’s read. Down 5%? And it’s still over 5 hours? At least my phone wasn’t already in my hand when the notification arrived. That’s something, right?
My negative feelings about my online habits typically crescendo toward the end of the year when I stumble on an article—on social media, naturally—about what I could have done with all the time I wasted on my phone. Entrepreneur magazine says the average American could read 24 books per month if they quit their phone habit cold turkey. That’s not realistic, of course, but still sobering.