“What is?” I asked.

“The sea.”

We were sitting on the beach in Tel Aviv, staring at the Mediterranean Sea, which was angry that day. Angry isn’t quite the right word actually. More like wild and purposeful, just like the army of Awakened Trees in Prince Caspian. We’d been reading the book together for the last few months and had just come across this description of the tree warriors the other night:

“But soon neither [the enemy’s] cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter’s army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines. Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild southwester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being tied to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers.”

My iPhone—which I begrudgingly brought with me on this trip since my flip phone doesn’t work outside the U.S.—pinged with a text, yanking me out of my reflections about Narnia, the Mediterranean, and the delightful connections my daughter was making between the two. With a flip phone, this would have been a brief distraction but not a huge deal. I could have quickly responded to the text and gone right back to peacefully staring at the wild and purposeful waves. But with a smartphone, it’s another story. As soon as you unlock your phone, the entire internet is there, beckoning. It’s a battle of wills to stay on task.

I answered the text and then came the predictable urge to swipe over to my email and the news—something that just doesn’t happen with a flip phone. In preparation from this trip, I had actually deleted the email and news apps off my smartphone in a desperate attempt to “add friction” to the device since I knew I’d be using it daily. But who was I kidding? Opening my email on the app takes about half a second. Checking it on the browser takes maybe two seconds longer. This is not friction. Hacks like this do not suddenly turn our digital slot machines into simple tools, and we are kidding ourselves if we think these are sustainable solutions to the attention crisis.

Summoning willpower, I put the phone away without looking at my email or the news. But now I was irritated. I hate this device, hate having it on me. I hate constantly battling with myself to not succumb to digital distraction. I hate the space it occupies in my brain even when I’m not looking at it.

And this is what I think people should know about flip phone life. Having a flip phone is liberating because it totally removes the tension I’m describing. When you are out in the world, you don’t have to try to not look at your email, the news, or whatever thing online is calling you—because there’s no “online” in the first place. There is quite simply nothing of interest on your phone. Being present becomes second nature, not a struggle. It’s wonderful.

Some may be thinking, what’s the big deal about checking your email or the news for a couple minutes while you’re at the beach? The big deal is that I don’t want my attention hijacked by some annoying email that nine times out of ten doesn’t require an immediate response when I’m trying to focus it on something else. The same goes for the news. I have made a real effort to be more intentional about my internet use lately. I set aside a few hours in the morning to be online—during which time I respond to email and take care of any other “business” that requires the internet—all done on my laptop. After that I log off for the day (some days more successfully than others). This type of intentionality is damn near impossible to maintain when you carry a smartphone with you. Using one’s smartphone “as a tool” requires a level of willpower that is exhausting at best and impractical at worst.

And here’s another thing I HATE about smartphones that I’m being reminded of constantly on this trip: the camera. Because of smartphones, many people now typically experience the most special moments of their daily lives through a screen rather than firsthand. You see this happening at concerts, sporting events, school plays, beautiful sites in nature, family reunions, holidays, a night out with friends—basically anywhere that anything happens, people are filming and photographing it rather than living it, and in doing so robbing themselves of a more meaningful existence. And in the last few days on this trip with my smartphone, I’ve felt myself falling back into this trap as well—frequently reaching for my phone to take pictures rather than soaking everything in firsthand.

Which brings me to the next point: what are we modeling for our children when we live this way? I’ve written about this before but one of the most surprising delights of switching to a flip phone has been not feeling pressure to photograph my kids on a daily basis. When I first got a flip phone with a terrible blurry camera, I worried I was missing all these precious moments, but now I see that I was missing them before when I used to view them through a screen. I don’t want my kids growing up with a camera in their face multiple times a day every day. I believe this constant photographing of our kids throughout their childhood trains them to be preoccupied with appearances, and it also trains them to think that the best moments in their life should be repackaged as content for other people to consume. This is not the way, folks!

Yes, my smartphone has made this trip more convenient. I can shoot off a text in a few seconds rather than laboriously typing messages out on my flip phone’s T9 keyboard. I can head out the door into the unfamiliar streets of Tel Aviv with minimal planning because my GPS will lead me anywhere I need to go. Those are great “tools” that this phone offers.

But convenience isn’t everything, and this trip is reaffirming for me that the benefits of smartphones are not worth the cost.

I’ve reached a point where I don’t even want to try to convince the unconvinced anymore. I just want to name the problem in plain English and if people are ready to hear it, great. If not, oh well, maybe I’ve at least planted a seed. Frequently though, I feel like I’m just screaming into the void, which makes me want to pick up and move my family to rural Kentucky and join the type of “membership” that Wendell Berry writes about in Hannah Coulter, if such a thing even exists anymore.

So yeah, I’ve been in a bit of a slump (February in Wisconsin will do that to you).

BUT.

Two things happened recently that gave me a reviving dash of optimism. The first is that Republican senators in my state, Wisconsin, recently introduced a bell-to-bell phone-free school bill that received minimal push-back at the initial public hearing that was held about it last week. This bill would replace the current law, which bans phones during instructional time only (so students can still use their phones at lunch, between classes, etc.) A Democratic senator has since signed on as a cosponsor of the bill. This is a big win—and one that seemed extremely unrealistic a year ago. When I (along with other phone-free school advocates in the state) pushed for bell-to-bell legislation during a hearing last February, we got the impression there was no political appetite for it. Fast forward one year and we now have a bipartisan bill for exactly that.

The second thing that cheered me up is that the National PTA has finally broken up with Meta, its longtime sponsor—a move that is LONG overdue. The timing of this breakup coincides with a landmark trial that began this week in which Meta is accused of designing apps to addict kids.

When I first found out about the National PTA/Meta partnership about a year ago, I was infuriated. The National PTA’s alignment with a trillion+ dollar corporation whose business model is centered on the exploitation of children at scale is nothing short of a betrayal. I channeled my anger into an open letter that I drafted on behalf of Smartphone Free Childhood US last March asking the National PTA to cut ties with Meta. They said no.

Many other advocates and organizations have called out this shameful partnership too, including ParentsSOS and the Tech Transparency Project. But as the months passed and more whistleblowers came forward with appalling revelations about Meta’s complete disregard for the health and safety of kids online, nothing changed, and I was starting to feel like it never would.

But this week, it did!

I like to imagine that every single person who’s called this awful partnership out over the months and years may have planted a seed with someone, somewhere. And eventually, those seeds added up and…my uncaffeinated brain is losing the metaphor, but anyway, National PTA has done the right thing here and that’s worth celebrating.

To be clear, the National PTA still retains plenty of appalling “proud national sponsors,” like TikTok, Google, and Discord. It also promotes ConnectSafely, a “digital safety” org that is itself funded by the very tech companies that purposely made the internet so unsafe in the first place, including Meta. But the National PTA’s removal of Meta from their sponsor list is a big step in the right direction, and hopefully more steps will follow.

So the pep talk I’m giving myself this morning is that the day-to-day advocacy we’re doing is draining and even feels pointless sometimes, but it pays dividends. Change is happening, not nearly as fast as I’d like, but it is happening. One year ago, it didn’t seem likely that Wisconsin would introduce a strong phone-free school bill or that the National PTA would ever distance itself from Meta, but both of those things have now happened. I believe these wins are due in no small part to tiny seeds being planted by ordinary people all over the world who refuse to shut up about these issues.

We still have a really long way to go. Today, almost every teenager in the U.S. is on social media, even though many of their parents are increasingly uncomfortable with it. Parents of teens look at me like I’m hopelessly naïve when I suggest that teen social media use should not be a foregone conclusion. But maybe in another year, that idea won’t sound so crazy anymore. Maybe in another year, more parents will have deleted their own accounts.

So let’s keep at it. Because the work is far from done, as I’m reminded every time I get another email from Girl Scouts nagging me to hawk my first grader’s cookies for her on Instagram. That’s right, Girl Scouts is also partners with Meta. For now.

I’d like to signal my enthusiastic support of ’s Writer’s Against AI campaign, and I pledge that:

• I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

• I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

• I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

The good news is the resolution I’m asking you to consider is way easier than finishing War and Peace, eliminating plastics from your life, or getting through the 108 sun salutations (not that those aren’t worth taking a stab at!). This resolution is the low hanging fruit of a better life for you and your whole family. It’s one you can achieve in under a minute and instantly start reaping the benefits.

So, here it is: Let 2026 be the year you quit Facebook and/or Instagram for good. Not a detox, a clean break. Walk away and never look back.

Here are five reasons why you should refuse to line the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg with your swipes, likes, and comments for one second longer:

1. You are being exploited.

We often talk about how social media companies exploit the vulnerabilities of children for profit, but adults are not immune. Every time you open Facebook or Instagram, you are handing your precious attention over to a trillion-dollar company that does not have your best interests at heart. You would be better off giving that attention to a blank wall in your home, and you’d probably feel better afterward as well.

It is not an accident when you open your phone to check the time and find yourself involuntarily swiping over to Facebook and Instagram a moment later—dozens of times a day. It’s not a fluke when you’re out in the world enjoying the moment and then suddenly feel compelled to document that moment for your virtual audience, thereby ruining the moment. All that time spent scrolling and thinking about scrolling adds up—adds up to a life. A life that Meta is monetizing. Your life. This is happening not because you’re weak, but because the algorithms that keep drawing you in were engineered by some of the most sophisticated brain scientists in the world to capture your attention and keep you hooked.

But “technology is neutral” and “it’s how we use it that counts”!

Sure, keep telling yourself that. Keep beating yourself up when your willpower isn’t enough to resist the pull of the ‘gram and when “digital wellness” remains a phantom.

OR…you could accept that the game is rigged and that most people have as good a chance at achieving “balance” on social media as a toddler let loose in a candy store. And you could free yourself by opting out of the entire ruse.

2. Meta is an evil company.

From sparking a genocide in Myanmar to targeting teen girls with beauty ads the moment they delete a selfie on Instagram (and bragging about this ability to prospective advertisers) to assigning teenagers a “lifetime value” of $270, there is clearly no low Meta won’t stoop to its relentless pursuit of growth and profit. But the one that pissed me off the most this year was when Meta’s higher-ups got together and decided it was acceptable to let chatbots engage in sexy talk with children. That’s right. Per Reuters, Meta executives, including the company’s CHIEF ETHICIST, were debating where to draw the line regarding appropriate chatbot/child interactions, and this is where they landed:

Big Tech has a terrible track record of rushing to release products before they’ve undergone adequate safety testing. Kids and teens have died from resulting harms. But that’s not what happened here. This is worse. Meta’s chatbots were programmed to sext with minors not because of a safety oversight, but because people at the top of the company made the conscious decision to allow it. Why would they do that though? One word: engagement. Eyes on the screen = money in the bank for Zuck & co., and nothing sells like manufactured intimacy.

Parents were rightly outraged when Reuters broke this story a few months ago. My question is: what are we going to do about it? What message are we sending our children when we condemn Meta for sexually abusing children (because that’s what it is when an adult talks to a minor in a sexually explicit or suggestive way) but then carry on using Facebook and Instagram ourselves?

The time to take a bold stance against this company by opting completely the heck out of their platforms is NOW.

Related…

3. Actions speak louder than words, and our kids are watching.

We can tell our children that their life will be richer without the constant social comparison that is the bread and butter of social media platforms. We can tell them they are valued for who they are, not their accomplishments. But when they see us curating our own highlight reel online, what will they believe?

We can tell them that quality matters more than quantity, and that one real friendship is more valuable than a million Instagram followers. But when they see us checking our own follower count, what will they believe?

We can say that being present is what matters most. But when they see us breaking away from the present moment to check our notifications dozens of times a day, what will they believe?

If we want our kids to believe that life should be lived, not scrolled, then we need to practice what we preach, and getting rid of Facebook & Instagram is the perfect place to start.

4. You need these platforms less than you think.

I’ve talked to many parents who feel icky about Facebook and Instagram but still maintain accounts because they worry they’ll be isolated without them. I understand and stuck with Meta much longer than I wanted to (like years longer) because of this fear. I thought I needed my local parenting Facebook groups to stay connected and my Instagram feed to remain “in the know” about local happenings. FALSE. Turns out most of the “connections” I’d made on social media were artificial and transient, which is not anyone’s fault but simply due to the nature of the apps (the medium is the message!). If anything, I feel less isolated and more connected in my hometown since leaving those platforms.

5. Any benefits of social media are not worth the cost.

Like Boromir with the Ring of Power, I used to believe I could use Facebook and Instagram “for good”—namely to support my advocacy about kids and screens. I’ve changed my mind. Meta did not come out of nowhere. It emerged from a toxic cultural mindset that increasingly values quantity over quality, branding over authenticity, optimization over organic processes, convenience over healthy friction, and growth for the sake of growth alone (which, as Paul Kingsnorth rightly points out, is just another way of saying “cancer”). You cannot play the social media game without accepting these values on some level, and I no longer think it’s worth it.

I understand many people feel they have to use social media for professional reasons and I’m not judging—just asking you to think outside the box. What would happen if you opted out? What other ways could you promote yourself besides Facebook and Instagram?

You don’t have to go it alone.

Looking for solidarity and support in ditching social media? Check out these organizations that are boldly rejecting social media use as a foregone conclusion for humans from all walks of life, from tweens and teens to college students, working professionals, stay-at-home parents, retirees, and everyone in between.

• Off Movement

• Appstinence (Gen Z-led)

• Friends of Attention

And props to Smartphone Free Childhood US, which will soon be launching an off-Meta forum for like-minded parents to connect with each other!

My daughter and I have been reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe together nearly every night for the last month or so. It’s been slow going and, honestly, a bit rocky at times. Published in England in 1950, the book is full of words and expressions completely foreign to a child born in America in 2018. When the child in question has a tendency to respond with explosive frustration anytime she doesn’t fully understand something right away, reading a book like this can present some challenges, to put it mildly.

Case in point: a few nights ago, finally approaching the climax of the book, we spent a good 15 minutes going through a single paragraph spoken by the White Witch to Aslan:

“Tell you what is written on that very Table of Stone which stands beside us? Tell you what is written in letters deep as a spear is long on the fire-stones on the Secret Hill? Tell you what is engraved on the scepter of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea? You at least know the Magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to kill.”

Spear, fire-stones, engraved, emperor, scepter, traitor, lawful, prey, treachery. All unfamiliar words for her. Each one had to be explained and then explained again and then once more. Voices were raised. Tears were shed. Meltdowns escalated. My daughter wasn’t too happy either. ;-)

As I tucked her in that night, I worried it had been a bad idea to read this book. I wondered if we shouldn’t take a break and come back to it when she’s a bit older. I wanted to instill in her a love of reading and was afraid I was sabotaging that goal by insisting on a book that was so demanding.

But then the next evening she asked to read the book again, and so we kept going, slowly. A few days after that, when she was supposed to be doing her homework (why is there so much homework in first grade? A question for another day…), I found her on the floor of the dining room with a box of markers, hunched over piles of construction paper. She was drawing pictures of the places, characters, and events of the book:

I was stunned. How many times had she shouted in frustration, “I don’t understand anything that’s going on in this book!”? But she did understand, even with all the big words, the unfamiliar, old-fashioned British lingo, the lengthy, formal speeches, and the many descriptive passages. Somewhere along the way, things started clicking for her, and she was hooked. In fact, I think she’s understanding this book better than many things we’ve read—perhaps because unlike most children’s books published nowadays, which are vapid, inane, or both (sorry but it’s true), there’s actually so much to understand in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

It also showed me something so beautiful about slow reading. When you read a book over a period of days or weeks, it’s like being in an extended conversation with the author. Reading doesn’t just happen when you’re looking at the words on the page (or having them read to you). It happens in the many hours in between as well. Even when the book is closed, your imagination continues to process what you read. Your mind draws connections between the book and things going on in your daily life, conversations you have, other books you’ve read in the past—all of it.

“When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone,” writes Maryanne Wolf.

Reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with my six-year-old has shown me that children are equipped to handle material that is so much more complex and rich than what our culture pushes on them these days in the form of YouTube shorts, dopamine-triggering video games, and even, sadly, many of the fluffy, condescending books you’ll find on display in the children’s section of a typical library. Not only are they equipped to handle more; I think they crave more. It’s up to us to give it to them.

The only question is: what should we read next?

The most important takeaway from the new JAMA study on kids and screens isn’t that parents don’t need to worry about their kids’ screen time, as suggested in some widely shared news articles. It’s that they should be worrying about something much more fundamental: whether their kids have access to phones, social media, and video games in the first place.

Why? Because the study found that it’s highly likely kids who use these products will become addicted to them, and that addictive use is associated with suicidal behavior and ideation.

What to Know About the JAMA Study

The researchers followed over 4,200 U.S. kids for four years to see whether addictive use of phones, social media, and video games was linked to suicide risk. Participants were nine or ten years old when the study began. Here are the key findings:

• Addictive use was extremely common for mobile phones (nearly 1 in 2 kids with “high addictive use”), social media (1 in 3 with “increasing addictive use”), and video games (over 40% with “high addictive use”).

• For mobile phones and social media, both high and increasing addictive use were associated with 2-3x greater risk of suicidal behavior and suicidal ideation.

• For video games, high addictive use was linked to increased risk of suicidal behavior and ideation.

• Addictive screen use was more common among black and hispanic children, as well as children from low income households and whose parents were unmarried or did not have a college degree.

The study’s conclusion: “High or increasing trajectories of addictive use of social media, mobile phones, or video games were common in early adolescents. Both high and increasing addictive screen use trajectories were associated with suicidal behaviors and ideation and worse mental health.”

The Media Buries the Lead

Let it sink in for a moment that youth addictive screen use is both rampant (again, the study found “high addictive use” of phones in nearly half of the kids) and associated with suicide, and then take a look at how this story was framed in two widely shared news articles in The New York Times and Parents.com:

A busy parent skimming this coverage might think the takeaway is that they don’t need to worry about screen time, only screen addiction—something with a connotation of being extreme and out of the ordinary. It’s not until midway through both articles that the staggering prevalence of youth screen addiction is mentioned. But how many parents in today’s rushed and distracted world would read that far?

By downplaying concerns about screen time instead of emphasizing how addictive these products are, both articles are missing the forest for the trees. A story that is quite simple—these products are harming our children on a massive scale—becomes something more ambiguous and academic: screen time is the wrong metric to focus on. The real takeaway is not that screen time matters less than screen addiction, but that the screens are addictive—period.

Unfortunately, problematic framing like this is common when we’re dealing with Big Tech. (See my post on the misleading media coverage of a recent Lancet study about phone bans in schools for another example). The tech industry, like the tobacco industry before it, is very savvy at manipulating media narratives to sow doubt about the harms its products cause.

The bottom line: When a study finds that nearly 50% of kids with phones are addicted to them and at a higher risk of suicide, and the media coverage leads by downplaying concerns about screen time, one can’t help but suspect that tech industry influence might be at play.

Borrowing From Big Tobacco’s Playbook, Experts Place Responsibility for Screen Addiction on Kids, Not Tech Companies

As research about the harms of smoking mounted, the tobacco industry pivoted from distraction and denial to framing these harms as a matter of personal responsibility, not the fault of cigarette companies. Big Tech is now recycling that strategy, with a big assist from its many enablers in the medical and scientific communities, as Richard Freed has demonstrated in Better Than Real Life. A case in point comes from the lead author of the JAMA study, Dr. Yunyu Xiao. Consider this quote from the NYT article:

“Dr. Xiao said interventions should focus on the child’s addictive behavior, which is typically treated with cognitive behavioral psychotherapy, rather than simply limiting access to screens.”

There’s a lot to unpack here, but let’s start with the fact that these products were engineered to addict children and then aggressively marketed to families and schools. We are handing our children digital slot machines before they’re even out of diapers and then blaming them for their “addictive behavior.” This is madness. We must stop pathologizing our children for being addicted to products designed to addict them.

Moving on…the idea that cognitive behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) is the answer to a screen addiction epidemic that affects nearly 50% of kids with phones, per Dr. Xiao’s own research, is equally ludicrous. CBT is costly, time consuming, and often difficult to access, especially for underprivileged families whose children are at the highest risk of screen addiction, according to this study. As writer Bill Schubart aptly puts it, we “charge them to get sick and then charge them again to get well.” Wouldn’t it be better to prevent screen addiction by not letting our kids use these addictive products in the first place?

Not according to Dr. Xiao:

“We do not know if just taking away their phone will help,” she continues in the NYT piece. “Sometimes it can create some conflict in the family, and that is even worse.”

As discussed in my recent blog post, How to Identify Propaganda From Big Tech, the idea that limiting screen access does more harm than good is one of the most common myths promoted by Big Tech. (Replace the word “phone” in Dr. Xiao’s quote above with “beer,” “cigarette,” or, wild card option, “Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play” to see how ridiculous this logic would be in the context of any other product known to present a serious risk to children’s health and safety.) The fact is that children’s developing brains are no match for the powerful algorithms engineered to keep them hooked, so limiting their access is exactly what we must do to protect them from harm.

The Solution Is Simple: Say No to Addictive Screens

When it came to light in 2019 that over 30 babies suffocated while lounging in Fisher-Price Rock ‘n Play sleepers, one of the most popular baby products on the market, we did not hem and haw about which metric we should look at to best understand the problem. We did not blame the babies. We did not tell parents to keep using the dangerous product and seek expensive medical treatment to help mitigate the inevitable harm.

Instead, the medical community raised the alarm, the media got behind the message, the government recalled the product, and millions of U.S. parents (myself included) got rid of their Rock ‘n Plays. Yes, it was inconvenient for exhausted parents; yes, it caused “conflict” with babies who loved their Rock ‘n Plays, but we did it anyway because the benefits of this product were not worth the risk.

On June 23 we observed Social Media Harms Victim Remembrance Day, honoring 245 U.S. kids and teens who lost their lives in connection with social media use. In the meantime, 95% of teens continue to use social media, as well as millions of children under the age of 13 (the minimum age requirement for most platforms). How many more children must lose their lives before our doctors, journalists, and government will find the courage to say “no” to these products?

Join the SFCxUS Community for Support in Protecting Kids From Addictive Screens

The Smartphone Free Childhood US community is rallying together to reclaim childhood from Big Tech. Here are a few ways to get involved and access support:

• Use the SFCxUS Parent Group Locator tool to connect with like-minded families in your local area

• Join the weekly community of practice calls on how to advocate for phone- and social media-free school legislation and other legislation related to preventing online harms—every Wednesday at 12pm EST

• Register for community call with Emily Cherkin, The Screentime Consultant, and Nicki Petrossi of Scrolling 2 Death on opting out of 1:1 devices at school—July 22 at 2pm EST.

• Read Reset Your Child’s Brain by Victoria Dunckley for the SFCxUS book club and register for the Zoom discussion with the author—July 28 at 8:30pm EST

This post was originally published on the Smartphone Free Childhood US blog.

Spreading awareness about social media’s harmful impact on children and teens is challenging when you’re up against powerful, multi-billion dollar corporations who do not want this message to be heard. But that is our reality. We live in a world where big tech exerts influence over many of our country’s most prominent children’s advocacy and health organizations, including Common Sense Media (funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab (funded by Snap Inc., TikTok, Roblox, and Character AI), Girl Scouts (funded by Meta), the National PTA (funded by Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Discord), and many others. Much of the digital wellness guidance provided by tech-funded organizations benefits Silicon Valley more than children, and this is no coincidence.

As David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception has pointed out, “We have to have systems where unconflicted experts examine the data because if you have a financial relationship with companies, whether it's football, whether it's a chemical, whether it's alcohol, I think there's a lot of evidence that you can't see what is obviously there and that can be seen by people who are unconflicted.”

In today’s era of information overload, it can be challenging to know which sources to trust and which have a conflict of interest. The good news is that propaganda from the tech lobby is pretty easy to spot once you know what to look for. Here are some tips to help you evaluate digital safety guidance, no matter where it’s coming from, with a critical eye.

Distinguish Screen Time Myths from Reality

Certain talking points emerge again and again in “digital wellness” guidance that is influenced or funded by social media companies. These talking points are actually nothing more than myths created by the consumer tech industry to serve their own interests. Whenever you encounter one of the myths below, there’s a good chance the tech lobby is behind it, and you should question their guidance.

Myth #1: Children’s lives have largely moved online now and there’s no going back.

Examples:

"Instagram and other social media apps are where [teens] express themselves, hang out with friends, explore ideas, grow and learn.”—Parent & Guardian Guide to Instagram (endorsed and promoted by the National PTA)

“For kids, digital life is real life. It's where they build friendships, take a stand on issues, and do so much more.”—Common Sense Media

REALITY CHECK: Just because something has been normalized in society, doesn’t automatically make it good, and it certainly doesn’t mean we can’t change it. There are many historical examples of this. Accepting the status quo in which kids spend an enormous portion of their waking hours glued to screens at the expense of healthier real world activities isn’t our only option. If this status quo isn’t working for your family, you can push back by limiting screen time in your home, delaying tablets, smartphones, and social media, and accepting that use of these technologies is actually optional, even for adults!

Myth #2: Limiting kids’ and teens’ digital access does more harm than good.

Examples:

“There should be no time limits on screens because that leads to deprivation and rebellion.”—Michael Rich, Director and Founder of the Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab

“Conflict over screens is likely to be more harmful to adolescents’ mental health than screen time itself.”—Common Sense Media

“Taking away a device or banning an app is rarely the right way to respond."—Parent & Guardian Guide to Instagram (endorsed and promoted by the National PTA)

“It can be tempting to want a set number of hours on screens that is ‘safe’ or healthy to guide your family’s technology use. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines.”—American Academy of Pediatrics current screen time guidelines (pediatrician Megan Moreno, who has received funding from Facebook, was the lead author of these guidelines)

REALITY CHECK: How does advising parents to be permissive about their kids’ screen time square with decades of research showing that kids benefit most from an authoritative parenting style, i.e., one that involves firm limits? What would happen if we applied this advice to other risky teen activities, like underage drinking? Finally, given the staggering opportunity cost of kids ages 8-12 averaging 4-6 hours of screen time per day and teens averaging up to 9 hours per day (AACAP), does it really make sense for parents not to worry about limiting screen time?

Myth #3: Teens can be taught how to use social media in a balanced, intentional way.

Examples:

“A healthy approach to digital usage is all about balance.”—Meta digital wellness guide

"If we do our job as parents...we can steer our children toward beneficial online experiences and help them benefit from this way of communicating."—Parent & Guardian Guide to Instagram (endorsed and promoted by the National PTA)

“Encourage your teen to develop healthy habits around their digital use…Emphasizing balance—both online and offline—can help teens manage their time and energy more effectively.”—Digital Wellness Lab

“[Digital leadership] badges teach girls to be responsible and safe online, manage their screen time, identify misinformation, and how to spot clickbait while using technology to connect and lead.”—Girl Scouts

“Adolescents should limit use of social media for social comparison, particularly around beauty- or appearance-related content.”—American Psychological Association

REALITY CHECK: Every time we log onto a social media platform, we’re up against a bevy of engineers behind the screen who are manipulating our behavior through persuasive design features (like the infinite scroll, constant push notifications, gamification, dopamine-fueling short videos, etc.) to keep us scrolling as long as possible—not because this is healthy, but because this is how the industry increases profits. This factual information is conspicuously absent from most consumer tech-funded “digital wellness” and “digital literacy” resources.

Many adults struggle to set healthy boundaries around their use of persuasively designed platforms, so why would we expect teens to be able to do so? As former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has said, social media’s harms “are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency or accountability.” What if instead of expecting teens to use social media platforms that were designed to be addictive in a “responsible” way, social media companies simply made their platforms less addictive? What if instead of telling teen girls not to use social media for “social comparison,” social media companies got rid of the features that make social comparison the entire point of their platforms? Finally, what if, rather than relying on willpower alone to manage our usage of these addictive, health-harming platforms in a “balanced” way (an exercise in futility for many people), we broke the status quo and normalized opting out of persuasively designed tech like social media altogether?

Ask Yourself Who Will Benefit If You Follow a Particular “Digital Wellness” Guideline

This one is pretty simple. When you encounter advice about digital wellness, ask yourself who will benefit if you adopt it. If the answer is “social media companies,” proceed with caution, because the goals of the consumer tech industry (increasing profits) and parents (raising healthy, flourishing kids) are often in conflict.

You can try this with each of the myths above.

1. Who benefits when we accept the status quo that “digital life is real life” for kids nowadays? Kids, who need lots of real world play and independence to thrive, or the social media companies determined to monetize kids’ attention?

2. Who benefits when parents don’t limit their children’s screen time? Kids, who need firm limits and confident leadership from their parents to flourish, or social media companies who, again, want to monetize kids’ attention?

3. Who benefits when the onus is on teens to use addictive, health-harming products like social media “responsibly,” rather than on social media companies to make their products safe? Teens, who have been set up to fail in this system, or social media companies, who are free from accountability?

Follow the Money

As psychologist Richard Freed demonstrates in Better Than Real Life: How Silicon Valley’s Secret Science of Persuasive Design Is Stealing Childhood, “key bodies that profess to protect kids’ from unhealthy technology have aligned, often financially, with the consumer tech industry. This has undermined parents’ and other caregivers’ ability to understand the harm being done to young people by persuasively designed consumer technologies. It also has enabled Silicon Valley’s takeover of childhood.”

As parents, we should make it a best practice to look into the funding sources of the digital safety experts and organizations we follow because the consumer tech industry is counting on us not taking the time out of our busy lives to do this. The Tech Transparency Project has a handy database of hundreds of nonprofits that are tech funded, and we’ve also compiled a short list of children’s health organizations with financial ties to the consumer tech industry below.

Use Caution When Reviewing Digital Safety Guidance from the Following Consumer Tech-Funded Children’s Health Organizations (this is not an exhaustive list):

• Common Sense Media - funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation

• Boston Children’s Digital Wellness Lab - funded by Snap Inc., TikTok, Roblox, Character AI, Discord

• Connect Safely - funded by Meta, TikTok, Roblox, Snap Inc., Open AI, Character AI; resources promoted by the National PTA

• Center for Digital Thriving - Promotes Common Sense Media

I’m one of the co-leads of Smartphone Free Childhood US, where we are fighting back against Silicon Valley’s takeover of childhood by calling out conflicts of interest when we see them (for example, we asked the National PTA to stop partnering with Meta in a community letter that was signed by over 370 PTA presidents, PTA members, parents, mental health experts, medical professionals, child-advocacy leaders, and best-selling authors) and by offering and amplifying digital safety resources created by experts who are not funded or influenced by consumer tech corporations. Subscribe to the SFCxUS newsletter to stay updated!

This post contains some spoilers about the show Adolescence.

One of the things you notice when you finally look up from your phone is how many people are still looking down. Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

A mother and her young daughter are having hot dogs at Costco. The mother is scrolling. The daughter is staring into space, effectively alone.

A father and his son, age nine or so, board an airplane. “Do you want to play your game?” the father asks as soon as they’re seated. The kid nods and the dad hands him a tablet, and then pulls out his phone. They spend the flight each in their own world.

A family with teens is dining at a restaurant. Everyone’s looking at their phone and there is no conversation happening.

A new mother is nursing her baby while watching Instagram reels about the struggles of parenthood. The baby looks up at her mother and tries to lock eyes. The mother doesn’t notice.

(That last one was me.)

Taking Our Eyes Off the Ball

“Maybe I took my eye off the ball a little bit,” the dad in Adolescence admits as he tries to process how his 13-year-old son could have become a murderer. “But he was in his room, weren’t he? We thought he was safe, didn’t we? ...You know, what harm can he do in there? I thought we were doing the right thing.”

If you haven’t seen Adolescence, it’s a new Netflix miniseries about a 13-year old boy suspected of murdering his female classmate. But it’s much more than a whodunnit; it’s about a broken youth culture where 13-year-olds casually swap nudes on Snapchat, cyberbullying is rampant, and Instagram’s algorithm pushes extreme content on vulnerable young minds, with disastrous consequences. Most damningly, it’s about a generation of parents who are willfully oblivious to their children’s dark reality.

The most disturbing thing about Adolescence isn’t the grisly murder. It’s how completely normal and relatable the parents of the adolescent murderer are. This is not a story about parental abuse or extreme neglect. It’s a story about regular, loving parents who, preoccupied with their own lives, missed the red flags as their son increasingly moved his life online. They took their eyes off the ball, not in one catastrophic moment but in a million ordinary ones that added up.

I think the reason Adolescence is causing so much panic among parents is because “taking our eyes off the ball” has become second nature nowadays and, deep down, we know it.

Grabbing a bite to eat, sitting on an airplane, nursing a baby—these used to be moments where face-to-face connection between parents and their children occurred organically. As we collectively sleepwalked into the era of smartphones and 24/7 internet access, however, those moments of connection happened less and less. By design, our phones make us feel like we have to be constantly plugged into everything—we are always working, always texting someone, always looking something up, always checking social media and the news—too often at the expense of being present with the human beings right in front of us. We now have to be “intentional” about making time to connect with our own flesh and blood. This is a sudden, drastic departure from the prior 200,000+ years of human history.

Distracted by devices and apps that were purposely designed to steal our attention, parents and kids are increasingly “alone together”—to borrow Sherry Turkle’s phrase. Over time, the opportunity cost of all these missed connections accumulates. Children’s attachment to their parents, which should be their anchor as they enter the stormy world of adolescence, is weakened.

We Can’t Hold On to Our Kids Like This

As parents across the globe collectively freak out about how to protect their kids from the dangers depicted in Adolescence, lots of good advice has been shared: delay smartphones and social media, get phones out of schools, give kids more opportunity for free play in the real world. I wholeheartedly agree with all of that and have been advocating for these things through my volunteer work with Smartphone Free Childhood US over the last year. But I think there is a critical missing ingredient: parents must hold on to their kids by actively meeting their primal need for attachment.

“The more the child needs attachment to function, the more important it is that she attaches to those responsible for her,” writes Gordon Neufeld in Hold On to Your Kids. “Only then can the vulnerability that is inherent in emotional attachment be endured. Children don't need friends, they need parents, grandparents, adults who will assume the responsibility to hold on to them. The more children are attached to caring adults, the more they are able to interact with peers without being overwhelmed by the vulnerability involved. The less peers matter, the more the vulnerability of peer relationships can be endured. It is exactly those children who don't need friends who are more capable of having friends without losing their ability to feel deeply and vulnerably.”

If we look at what went wrong for Jamie, the 13-year old murderer in Adolescence, one thing is clear: he could not cope with the vulnerability of peer relationships. Feeling rejected by his peers and not finding anything solid to grasp onto, he is an easy target for radicalization by the hateful “manosphere” content Instagram’s algorithm pushes on him. While there are no guarantees in parenting, if Jamie’s parents had met his need for attachment by holding on to him rather than passively allowing him to spend hours every evening alone in his room online, it seems fair to say things may have panned out differently.

And I think that’s one of the reasons this show is hitting such a nerve with parents. You can trace a line from the breastfeeding mom routinely ignoring her baby for Instagram (yep that was me) to Jamie’s dad, coming home from a long day at work and not interfering while his son spent entire evenings alone in his room on a device. In both cases, parents are putting connecting with their child on the backburner, and their child’s attachment to them is surely weaker for it.

Adolescence is a work of fiction that represents an extreme worst case scenario, but its depiction of modern parenting is disturbingly on the nose. “It’s the story of the modern child, the sacrificial lamb to parents’ desire to live in convenience. To avoid the hard things,” writes psychologist Nicole Runyon in the best take I’ve seen so far on this show. She continues: “what stands out to me most is the way the adults are depicted. They are weak, helpless, and powerless.”

That is, until they aren’t.

Messages of Hope from Adolescence

While Adolescence is extremely hard to watch as a parent because it holds up a mirror to our own BS, it also offers hope. One example occurs in episode two, when the head detective in the murder investigation visits the school that both Jamie and the victim attended to conduct some interviews. The detective is also a dad and it turns out his teenage son happens to attend the same school. As the detective observes the angry, out-of-control energy of the students in the school and learns about the horrific cyberbullying many of them are involved in, he’s jolted out of his own parental distraction. What he sees at his son’s school shocks and appalls him: “Does it look like anyone’s learning anything in there to you?” he asks his colleague. “It just looks like a f***ing holding pen. Videos in every class. [The history teacher] just walking in and out when he wants.”

Most jarringly, the chaos and cruelty he witnesses at the school shatter his illusion that he has any clue what his son’s life is really like or how he’s truly doing. Clearly overwhelmed by the daunting task of creating the type of relationship where his son might open up to him about his life, he is tempted to give up before he starts, to avoid doing the hard thing.

“Sometimes I don’t think I'm the right fit for [my son] as a dad,” he tells his colleague. “You know what I mean?”

But she doesn’t let him off the hook with this cop out. “Well, I know you. And I know you can be,” she replies.

It’s what he needed to hear and it helps spur him into action. He invites his son for an impromptu chips and Coke outing after school that day. “I’ve got some free time. I want to spend it with you. Because I love you. All right?”

His son’s initial confused response to this invitation makes it clear these types of father-son outings don’t happen often. But he doesn’t take much convincing.

“Yeah. I can be hungry,” he says, climbing into his dad’s car.

This is what holding on to your child looks like. It doesn’t take a grand gesture; it can be as simple as grabbing some takeout together and chatting about the day, with no agenda other than connecting.

We also see Jamie’s parents holding on to their teenage daughter Lisa (Jamie’s older sister) in the final episode. Wisely, they don’t overly shield her from their grief about Jamie; she sees their pain and that makes her feel ok about sharing hers too. But what I loved most was how the parents invited her into the lighter moments as well, like the scene where they’re driving to Wainwright’s and listening to a song that prompts them to reminisce about an embarrassing and very funny experience they shared at a school disco decades ago. In the beginning of the car ride, Lisa is engrossed by her phone, but her parents gradually draw her out and she’s begrudgingly laughing with them by the end.

These are the types of moments that create connection and strengthen attachment, giving kids the sturdy foundation they need to weather the slings and arrows of adolescence. What’s wonderful is they don’t require any planning or significant effort. They simply require our attention.

As Jamie’s parents wrestle with their guilt over raising a son who turned out to be a murderer, the dad references their therapist’s advice to not blame themselves. But the mom knows in her gut this advice isn’t quite right. “Should we have done more though?” she asks. “I think it’d be good if we accepted that maybe we should’ve done. I think it’d be okay for us to think that.”

While it’s too late to save Jamie and the girl he killed, we see Jamie’s parents consciously “doing more” for their other child, Lisa. Not through any major lifestyle changes, but in the most simple actions they take during episode four, like insisting she come with them to Wainwrights rather than stay home by herself. Drawing her into the conversation in the van rather than sitting “alone together” while she goes on her phone.

At a time when big tech’s hold over almost every aspect of modern life feels stronger than ever, I saw these examples as powerful messages of hope. We may not be able to get phones out of schools right away or force Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. to stop using persuasive design techniques that exploit the vulnerabilities of minors for profit any time soon (though we’ll keep trying!). But there’s no one who can stop us from holding on to our own children starting right now, today. This does not mean parroting gentle parenting scripts that Instagram feeds us. It means snapping out of our distraction and taking advantage of at least some of the countless opportunities embedded in the most ordinary of days to “collect our children.”

Relevant Upcoming SFCxUS Zoom Events

• Better Than Real Life book club discussion with author Richard Freed - April 2, 8:30pm EST

• Adolescence discussion with psychologist Nicole Runyon - April 14, 12pm EST

• Hold On to Your Kids book club discussion - April 30, 8:30pm EST

I’ve been trying to write an essay about Madame Bovary for over a month. I’ve gone on too many “meditative walks,” which have prompted too many thoughts and ideas that remained stuffed in my head. I couldn’t untangle them. Then Nicholas Carr’s new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart arrived in the mail. This seemed like it’d be a refreshing change of pace from Flaubert, so I put Madame Bovary on the shelf and dove in. (Superbloom also happens to be the February pick for the Smartphone Free Childhood US book club; we’ll be discussing it on Zoom on Feb 25. Register here to join!)

But, no offense to Nicholas Carr, it wasn’t a refreshing change of pace at all. Because it turns out Superbloom deals with the same problem that Flaubert was writing about 168 years earlier in Madame Bovary: namely, the emptiness of a life spent seeking instead of living. I can’t escape this crap! Nevertheless, I am thankful because Superbloom helped me untangle what I want to say about Madame Bovary.

Homo Sapiens and the Seeking Instinct: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The seeking instinct is the evolutionary drive we humans have to explore our surroundings in pursuit of new stimuli. It is the quest for dopamine. The seeking instinct is not about the joy of discovery, but rather the pleasure of the hunt itself.

The seeking instinct wasn’t always a problem for our species. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, it was actually key to survival. If we didn’t seek the unfamiliar, we wouldn’t find food, we wouldn’t detect threats, and…I wouldn’t be here today struggling over the umpteenth draft of my Madame Bovary essay.

Something very important to know about the seeking instinct, however, is that it needs to be kept in balance or else it has a way of taking over everything. A little seeking is good; too much, and things start to get dark. Because if we spend all our time seeking, then we can never be content with what’s right in front of us (Madame Bovary is, among other things, a case study in this).

“Our seeking instinct tells us that the familiar is without interest,” Carr writes in Superbloom, “but once the instinct is subdued, we begin to discover the rewards of looking long and hard at the world we know. The possibilities of art, science, and philosophy open up. The story of civilization is, among other stories, a story of the taming of the seeking instinct.”

Or, as Flaubert put it, “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.”

For most of human history, the seeking instinct was subdued naturally because there were limits to the number of unfamiliar things a person could possibly seek in their environment, as well as the amount of time one could spend seeking. Before the era of modern transportation, most people stayed very close to home for most of their lives, which helped tame the seeking instinct. In addition, households were primarily producers rather than consumers—growing and preparing their own food, making their own clothes and tools, and creating their own entertainment through songs and storytelling once the daily work necessary for the running of the household was completed. These activities took up the majority of people’s time and helped keep families rooted in the familiar rather than hooked on seeking.

Nowadays, however, most people obtain the necessities of life through consumerism rather than production. Consuming is more efficient than producing, which means it leaves us with a lot more downtime than our producer forebearers had. And there is so much to consume! Plus, with the invention of the radio, followed by TV, internet, and of course smartphones, one no longer needs to leave their own home to seek the unfamiliar—an infinite number of new and interesting stimuli are in reach every moment of every day. Unfortunately, the combination of lots of downtime plus constant access to a never-ending stream of new stimuli spells trouble for our ravenous seeking instinct. “We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves,” says Carr.

To recap: the seeking instinct has been a core characteristic of our species for millennia, but until recently, it was kept under control because most people spent their lives largely grounded in their familiar, physical surroundings. “The material world, with its spatiotemporal boundaries and its many frictions, tames the seeking impulse,” Carr states. Things used to be in balance. But as technology sped ahead in tandem with consumerism, that equilibrium fell apart. Even by Flaubert’s time—mid 1800s—things must have been starting to get out of whack, or else he would not have written a book like Madame Bovary.

How Madame Bovary Became a Slave to the Seeking Instinct

If you’re not familiar with Madame Bovary, here’s a quick recap (spoilers ahead!). Emma (Madame Bovary) is a country girl plagued by a nagging sense of ennui. As a young woman, she becomes smitten with the country doctor Charles Bovary, fancies herself in love, and quickly agrees to marry him. But the honeymoon doesn’t last—not because Charles is a terrible guy, but because, in Emma’s eyes, he’s so utterly commonplace. Depressed that married life doesn’t deliver the passionate romance she was anticipating, she tries to fill the void in her soul by buying lots of stuff—running up enormous debts along the way—and eventually taking some lovers. Ultimately (SPOILER), she brings ruin upon herself and her family with her extravagant spending, her lovers grow tired of her and she of them, and she commits suicide by swallowing a bunch of arsenic. Cheery stuff.

I am not a historian and don’t know much about life in 19th-century bourgeois France. But a few things are clear in this novel. Emma was rich enough that she didn’t have to immerse herself in her familiar, physical reality. She could spend her days browsing catalogs of pretty things to buy or reading romance novels. She had no “production” obligations to help root her to her own household, such as cooking, cleaning, or other domestic duties; the servants took care of all that. Even when she became a mother, she didn’t experience the friction of caring for her own infant. Forget “breast is best” vs. “fed is best.” In Flaubert’s time it was more like “guest is best”—the guest being your own baby sent to live in the home of a stranger “to nurse” for the first several years of life.

I feel obligated to note that as a woman during this time period, Emma’s options for finding fulfilling work outside of the home were also severely limited. There was nothing for her to do at home and nothing for her to do outside of the home—a tricky situation, to be sure. At the same time, despite undeniable progress in women’s rights since Flaubert’s time, it seems to me the seeking instinct is way more out of control for women, as well as men, today (more on that below). Admittedly, this makes me wonder whether our current obsession with “having it all” is really to our benefit. But that can of worms deserves a whole other essay!

Back to the 19th century. Feeling unmoored from reality, Emma becomes ruled by her seeking instinct and falls into a deep depression that rarely lets up in the novel. She begins an affair with the wealthy, womanizing landowner Rodolphe, which temporarily makes her feel alive again. But six months into it, the flames of attraction begin to cool and the relationship starts to feel rather routine. At this point, the ennui that’s plagued her through most of her adult life returns full force. She wonders: "Whence came this insufficiency in life—this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leaned?" While pondering the cause of her chronic unhappiness, Emma recalls a memory from her childhood, which I think holds some answers:

“She remembered the summer evenings all full of sunshine. The colts neighed when any one passed by, and galloped, galloped. Under her window there was a beehive, and sometimes the bees wheeling round in the light struck against her window like rebounding balls of gold. What happiness there had been at that time, what freedom, what hope!”

This is going to sound cliché, but bear with me. As a child, Emma was able to notice beauty in the familiar. Evenings full of sunshine, galloping colts, bees that looked like balls of gold. These simple observations from her familiar surroundings were all it took to fill her with delight. But somewhere between childhood and womanhood, she lost her ability to find beauty in regular life and developed an unquenchable desire for more—more passion, more excitement, more luxurious possessions. Emma became corrupted by the message that fulfillment wasn’t possible in a provincial setting or while married to an unambitious country doctor whose conversation was as “commonplace as a street pavement”—only in a dazzling place like Paris while surrounded by sophisticated, wealthy, attractive people. The tyranny of the seeking instinct causes her to look anywhere at all for fulfillment—except right in front of her:

“The nearer things were, moreover, the more her thoughts turned away from them…She confused in her desire the sensualities of luxury with the delights of the heart, elegance of manners with delicacy of sentiment. Did not love, like Indian plants, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears flowing over yielded hands, all the fevers of the flesh and the languors of tenderness could not be separated from the balconies of great castles full of indolence, from boudoirs with silken curtains and thick carpets, well-filled flower-stands, a bed on a raised dais, nor from the flashing of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveries.”

Caught in an incessant seeking loop, Emma can’t appreciate what’s right in front of her—not her devoted husband and not even her child. She can barely even see them.

How Charles Bovary Shows Us a Different Way of Being

Emma’s husband Charles is not without fault. Here’s a description of him from Emma’s point of view, soon after their marriage: “after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples.”

So, not exactly Mr. Darcy we’re dealing with here. And yet…there’s more to Charles than meets the eye. If Emma represents the emptiness of always reaching for something “better” in life rather than enjoying what you have, Charles is a perfect foil: so blissfully planted in the present moment that he doesn’t even see the slow-speed trainwreck that is coming for him via Emma’s destructive behaviors.

Take this description of Charles from the beginning of their marriage: “He was happy then, and without a care in the world. A meal together, a walk in the evening on the highroad, a gesture of her hands over her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the window-fastener, and many another thing in which Charles had never dreamed of pleasure, now made up the endless round of his happiness…For him the universe did not extend beyond the circumference of her petticoat.”

While Emma is constantly checked out of her actual life as she seeks the unfamiliar, Charles cannot imagine anything better than what’s right in front of him. Another example of this difference between them occurs as Emma and Charles anticipate the birth of their first child. Unable to afford the “swing-bassinette with rose silk curtains, and embroidered caps” that she wants for the baby, Emma emotionally detaches from her pregnancy, which foreshadows her complete disinterest in actual motherhood.

But Charles has a very different response: “When from afar he saw [Emma’s] languid walk, and her figure without stays turning softly on her hips; when opposite one another he looked at her at his ease, while she took tired poses in her armchair, then his happiness knew no bounds…The idea of having begotten a child delighted him. Now he wanted nothing. He knew human life from end to end, and he sat down to it with serenity.”

Charles, without even trying, is a master at looking closely at the familiar and finding beauty in it. Consequently, he spends most of his life feeling effortlessly content. He is grounded in his material world and better for it, versus Emma who “passes through life scarcely touching it.”

2025: the Seeking Instinct on Crack

“In the nineteenth century, Flaubert and Thoreau foresaw mud where others saw a perfectly rewarding way of life. Today we’re up to our eyes in it.”—Mark Greif, Against Everything

168 years ago, Flaubert wrote a novel about a woman who, due in large part to the culture she lived in, could not anchor herself to her physical reality. Consequently, she became enslaved to her seeking instinct, which led to her ruin. I find this extremely disturbing. Because if Flaubert was already sounding the alarm about the emptiness of the seeking loop long before electronic media was invented and before consumerism had cemented its grip on society, what hope is there for us today? If Emma Bovary, who “lived” before the invention of modern plumbing, needed more friction in her life to really live it—how screwed are we in today’s era of smart toilets? Don’t worry, I’m not about to start a Make Outhouses Great Again movement. But I am disturbed!

At least Emma had a pure childhood, spending her days immersed in the simple pleasures of her provincial life. It wasn’t until adulthood that her seeking instinct began to rule her life, leaving depression, decay, and arsenic poisoning in its wake. Unfortunately, most kids today don’t even have the advantage of a childhood rooted in the real world. Nowadays, we are, however unintentionally, programming our children to be ruled by their seeking instinct before they’re even out of diapers.

“Youth are now assaulted by a never-ending proliferation of marketing strategies that colonize their consciousness and daily lives,” writes cultural critic Henry A. Giroux. “Under the tutelage of Disney and other megacorporations, children have become an audience captive not only to traditional forms of media such as film, television and print, but even more so to the new digital media made readily accessible through mobile phones, PDAs, laptop computers and the Internet. The information, entertainment and cultural pedagogy disseminated by massive multimedia corporations have become central in shaping and influencing every waking moment of children’s daily lives—all toward a lifetime of constant, unthinking consumption.”

So…What’s the Solution?

This is all sounding quite bleak. But I think there is a way out, even for us dopamine-addicted Homo sapiens of the 21st century. It’s not easy given the filthy water we’re all swimming in, but it can be done. We can tame the seeking instinct and find richness and meaning in the familiar. In doing so, we can flourish.

I’m no expert in this, having spent the better part of the last decade enslaved to my own seeking instinct, but here are a few suggestions:

1. Be aware of the problem. Repeat after me: If I don’t control my seeking instinct, it will ruin my life. Make this your mantra. It may sound dramatic, but sadly, it’s accurate. As Mark Greif writes in Against Everything, “The attempt to make our lives not a waste, by seeking a few most remarkable incidents, will make the rest of our lives a waste.”

2. Consciously erect speed bumps in your daily life to slow your seeking instinct’s roll. We live in a culture of consumption that is constantly telling us we need more. The seeking instinct is here for it, but we need not be. We can subdue the seeking instinct by limiting our use of technologies and media that embolden it. Everyone has their thing—whether it’s online shopping, video games, news articles, social media, or something else. Quit or reduce the time spent on your “thing.”

3. Look for opportunities to embrace friction instead of always prioritizing efficiency and convenience. Contrary to what our efficiency-obsessed culture is constantly telling us, friction is not the enemy. Friction is our friend because it helps subdue the seeking instinct. A few things to try: go shopping in person rather than ordering everything on Amazon. Meet a friend for coffee or invite them to your home for dinner rather than catching up on text. Try growing flowers from seed. Go on long walks. What are some other ideas?

4. Try aestheticism. Aestheticism is not about vibey Pinterest boards or the perfect Instagram filter. As Mark Greif explains, it is a way of living in which “you treat the things you encounter and the things that you meet as capable of offering you the pleasures which, characteristically, we think of as coming from art, movies, paintings.” This cannot be done when we’re in seeking mode, only when we’re able to slow down and look closely at the familiar for a long time. In Madame Bovary, it’s not the beautiful, sensual Emma who practices aestheticism, but rather her soup-gurgling husband Charles.

5. Shield children from technologies and other cultural influences that cause the seeking instinct to run wild. Russell Banks wrote that our society dehumanizes children by transforming them “into consumers making them want, want, want, in order to sell them and their parents not what the children need but what they have been made to want.” We have to protect our kids from this. Their brains are still developing, and they need to be shielded from the culture of “unthinking consumption” that they were born into, if they are to have any shot at taming their own seeking instinct once they’re older. To that end, they need firm boundaries when it comes to addictive digital technologies and media. Let’s give kids a chance to put down deep roots in the material world before exposing them to the rot of addictive video games, smartphones, and social media.

“A life spent only in seeking is an empty life,” Carr writes. “What we see today as the real world’s shortcomings—its withholding of easy and immediate amusements, its stretches of solitude and boredom, its frictions and inefficiencies—are the very things that open the world’s possibilities to us. They push us to seek out and master difficult, complicated, and ultimately more satisfying ways to spend our time.”

The seeking instinct is part of human nature. We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon, but we can resist a culture that brings out the worst in us. We can structure our lives in a way that enables balance between the urge to seek and the ability to “sit down to life with serenity.”

“No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.”—E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops

We’ve all done it. Struggling to find the right words for a cover letter, newsletter, lesson plan, sales pitch, or whatever it might be, we turn to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT. In seconds, the machine churns out some “custom” content, and we breathe a sigh of relief. We can work with this. We spend a few minutes tweaking it to make it a touch more human and fire it off, thankful to have solved that particular problem in our day.

But did we really solve it? And at what cost?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, which is why an article with the snappy title “Balancing the Risks and Rewards of AI” published by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) caught my eye.1 I began reading, and just a few words into it, my BS radar was already going off:

“During the early days of the COVID-­19 pandemic, Dan Frezza—­then the vice president of strategic operations at William & Mary [my alma mater!]—considered how the “disconnected connectedness” of a remote-­first world would affect fundraising…. As the lockdowns ebbed and life returned to ‘normal,’ Frezza kept encouraging his team—­and fellow advancement leaders—­to embrace creativity. How could they provide more meaningful experiences to donors? And how could they find efficiencies in their processes to make those experiences happen?” (emphases mine)

If there’s one thing I know about creativity, it’s that it doesn’t have much to do with efficiency. I’m no expert, but I’ve found that slowing wayyyy down can actually help unlock creativity. Nevertheless. Trying (and failing) to keep an open mind, I read on…

“Tools like ChatGPT can create first drafts of email and direct mail appeals, as well as requests for donor meetings and thank-you notes. They can help overcome writer’s block when fundraisers need to create subject lines for emails or names for events to catch the attention of alumni, donors, and friends.”

The essay goes on to cheerfully explain how with all the time saved by not having to do laborious tasks like creating subject lines for emails, fundraisers will have greater opportunity “to forge the interpersonal connections that can, in turn, inform their AI work.” (Raise your hand if you think ChatGPT wrote that last bit.) All of this started to make more sense when I connected the dots that AGB, the publisher of this article, receives significant funding from a firm called Fundmetric, “the world's first fundraising real-time analytics platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand, predict and serve donors.” But I digress.

As I contemplated the article, I realized my biggest issue with all of this isn’t even that people are increasingly using AI to overcome writer’s block. It’s that many of them are doing so without first pausing to consider what they might be sacrificing in the process. There seems to be a pervasive mindset of “if a technology makes us more efficient, it’s a net positive, period.” But I grow more and more skeptical of this viewpoint.

Off the top of my head, here are the three biggest costs of delegating intellectual work like written communication to AI.

Cost #1: Slower Brain

Using technology to solve the problem of writer’s block creates a vicious cycle. The more we surrender to writer’s block—because that’s what we’re doing when we can’t think of the right words ourselves so we get a machine to do it for us—the more frequently we will experience writer’s block. Consider this tweet:

This may seem like an extreme example, but, for me at least, it’s not a surprising one. When I used to spend hours on my phone every day watching Instagram reels, skimming news articles, and texting, it had the impact of destroying my concentration to the point that reading entire books—one of my favorite hobbies in the past—felt really hard.

In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (published in 2010), Nicholas Carr ponders what he perceives as his own weakened attention span since he became an avid web surfer:

“What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

If surfing the web and watching Instagram reels—activities that seem almost quaint in the dawning era of AI—can compromise our attention span, what is chronic ChatGPT use going to do to our ability to write or even speak to one another in our own words? Are the “increased efficiencies” of using ChatGPT and similar programs really worth this cost? I think we must at least consider the question.

Further, if the reason so many of us are struggling to find the words for simple communications like an email subject line is because our “capacity for concentration” was already damaged by the internet and smartphones, does it follow that what we need now is more technology? In other words, is it wise to rely on technology (AI) to solve a problem that was created by over-reliance on technology in the first place?

Cost #2: Weakened Resilience

It’s not just our brains that get weaker when we routinely outsource the mental work we used to do ourselves—like writing our own emails—to machines; our resilience also takes a hit. Let’s return to the subject of writer’s block. I suffer from writer’s block a lot. In fact, I have already experienced it a few times since I sat down to write this post. But when I’m able to overcome it on my own, I get a fantastic feeling of competence. Then the next time it strikes, I remind myself that I’ve already overcome this silly thing a bunch of times in the past, and that gives me the confidence I need to work through it yet again.

This is how resilience works: 1) you encounter a challenge; 2) you face it head on and manage to overcome it; 3) you develop confidence in yourself; 4) you face a new challenge and use your confidence to knuckle through that one too. Rinse & repeat. By using ChatGPT to solve our writer’s block, we skip the incredibly critical step 2 of facing the challenge head on and overcoming it. Our resilience suffers as a result, making us that more doubtful of our own abilities and that much more tempted to turn to ChatGPT the next time we can’t think of an appropriate subject line for an email. Again, vicious cycle.

Cost #3: Everyone’s Privacy

After many glowing paragraphs about the rewards of using AI for fundraising, the “Balancing the Risks and Rewards of AI” article finally gets to the some of the risks. Notably, there’s no mention of slower brains and weakened resilience among people who rely on AI to draft their communications, but there is a discussion about privacy concerns:

“Public tools like ChatGPT and Notebook LM explicitly warn users that they will use any entered information to build their large language models (LLMs). What’s unclear is how and where those tools store the data that’s entered and whether the data will become public record.” (emphasis mine)

Comforting, right? Especially when you consider that people are now attending AI therapy sessions. But back to fundraising. In one of the article’s examples of the rewards of AI, fundraiser Dan Frezza talks about saving time by having AI write up his notes from a donor meeting:

“With the addition of AI to the process, Frezza says his notes come through much cleaner. Now, when he returns to his hotel each night, he’s editing his notes instead of rewriting them wholesale. ‘I’m spending 80 percent less time on this kind of work,’ he says. ‘With that extra time, maybe I can get six visits in a day when I travel—­and that ends up being more visits overall in a year.’”

Doubtlessly, the efficiencies have increased. But I have questions. Did the donor from the meeting consent to the use of AI for this purpose? If so, were they fully aware what the AI company might do with that data—i.e., that it might become public record? The article doesn’t say.

Going back to the whole slower brain thing for a moment, I also know that writing up one’s own notes from a meeting, while time consuming, is good for memory purposes. When we outsource that work to AI, our brains are not forging the connections they would if we did it ourselves. Maybe that’s a fair price to pay for being able to squeeze an extra donor meeting into the day—I don’t know. But it disturbs me that this potential downside is not even addressed.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block the Old Fashioned Way

As Robert Frost said, “the best way out is always through.” If we turn to AI to solve writer’s block, we are not going through—we are going around (and potentially compromising our own and other people’s privacy in the process). But the good news is going through usually isn’t as bad as we expect.

In Cal Newport’s book Deep Work, he talks about the benefits of “meditative walks.” The idea is that you go on a walk and focus your mind on a specific challenge you’re having in your work, such as writer’s block. Somehow, some way, Cal assures us, solutions will miraculously present themselves. But there’s a catch: for this to work, you need complete and utter solitude. That means you need to be physically alone on your walk and you also can’t be consuming media. So leave your phone at home or if you can’t do that, turn it on silent and resist the urge to look at it. No listening to music either.

I was skeptical, but I decided to give it a try—and it WORKS. Here’s how the experience tends to go for me. In the first couple of minutes, I experience a mild panic that it’s not going to work, and I am tempted to think about other things—anything at all other than the writer’s block that prompted me to take the meditative walk in the first place. But—remember the whole resilience thing? I remind myself how previous meditative walks actually helped, and it calms me down enough to start thinking about my current problem, and within ten or 15 minutes, I’m usually making progress on the block.

Now, I know we don’t all have time for long walks every day; our name is not Henry David Thoreau and we do not live on Walden Pond. Fortunately, I have found that “meditative showers,” “meditative dish washing,” “meditative laundry folding,” and “meditative snow shoveling” can yield similar results. Sometimes, even simply “meditatively walking into a different room and staring at the wall for a few minutes” can unlock something. Though, again, none of these things will work if you don’t have solitude.

So the next time you have writer’s block (or any type of communication block), before turning to AI, why not give the old fashioned way a try? Your neurons will thank you.

Through most of my 30s, including my first five years of parenthood, I averaged four or five hours a day on my phone (this was in addition to time spent in front of my computer, which I typically used a few hours each day for my freelance work). I am not an outlier; the average millennial—aka the generation raising most of today’s young kids—spends 4.6 hours a day on their phone.1 Sometimes I wonder how I would have reacted 15 years ago if someone told me that pretty soon I’d be spending over one quarter of my waking hours glued to a device that didn’t even exist yet. Yikes.

Anyway. During that time, I had a nagging feeling my life would be a lot better if I wasn’t spending such a significant part of it passively staring at a screen. Now that I’ve been without a smartphone for almost a year, I can attest that it is indeed better in many respects. So, in celebration of keeping a New Year’s resolution for pretty much the first time in my life, I want to share the top five things I’ve enjoyed since becoming what my husband affectionally calls a “smart woman with a dumb phone.”

1. Rediscovering the pleasure of reading whole books

In 2023, I think I read three books total. Maybe two and a half. In 2024, I set a goal to read 12 books, one for each month…and I ended up finishing 49!2 Admittedly, one of them was a 48-page novella, The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster, which I felt a bit sheepish about including. BUT, another was The Brothers Karamazov, which is over a thousand pages long, so I think that more than balances it.

I used to be an avid reader, but years of bouncing around the internet and social media all the time destroyed my attention span. I would try to read a book with my phone next to me, and the moment I got to a challenging passage that required brain power to decipher, I’d be reaching for the phone to distract myself from it. You can’t read like that. The good news is that after just a few weeks or so without a smartphone, my brain cells felt like they were coming back from the dead and I was able to read books again.

2. Thinking my own thinks

Whenever our kids complain of boredom, we quote Dr. Seuss at them: “You can think up some birds. That’s what you can do. You can think about yellow or think about blue.” They find it very annoying (sorry guys!), but I’ve never found better advice for dealing with boredom.

I used to pull out my phone whenever I’d feel the faintest prickle of boredom—in line at the store, at the playground with my kids, etc. But now I’ve gotten in the lovely habit of just allowing my mind to wander in those moments. This is how the idea popped into my head to write my alternate ending of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the first piece of creative writing I completed in a depressingly long time.3

Related: one of the things I lost during my era of smartphone distraction was the richness of solitude. True solitude isn’t just being by yourself; it’s being alone with your thoughts. You can’t experience solitude when you’re consuming media, and when you’re pulling out your phone a hundred-plus times a day, you’re almost always consuming media in some form or another. Now that solitude is back in my life, I’ve had more energy and inspiration than I’ve felt in years, which I’m pretty sure is no coincidence.

3. Socializing like a normal (kind of) human being

Several months into my dumbphone life, I came home from an evening out with some girlfriends and told my husband that I felt different during this outing than I normally did in these situations. I sat at the table with these friends for several hours and didn’t feel twitchy or bored the entire time. As the evening wound down, I felt satiated, not spent.

This was a marked contrast to the fidgety mood that would frequently overtake me in recent years when socializing outside of my immediate family, as well as the depletion I’d feel afterward. I’d usually make an excuse to end an IRL conversation after ten or 15 minutes and would go find a quiet space to check my phone for a bit before steeling myself for the next interaction. After about an hour and a half of most social gatherings, I was itching to go home and sit by myself in a dark room. (Clearly, I was a lot of fun at parties!)

But I rarely feel like that now. More and more often, I feel calm and present during social gatherings. Often, several hours will pass at a social event with my barely realizing it. If there’s awkwardness—as there almost always is in the beginning of any gathering when people are getting acclimated to the space and the company—I no longer feel like I need to escape it. I just notice it and wait for the energy to shift into comfortable camaraderie, as it almost always does after a short while.

I always chalked up my discomfort with socializing to being an introvert, but I’m no longer sure I’d even use that label for myself. I think what I am is a person who needs a healthy balance of rich social connection and true solitude to feel fulfilled. My phone was getting in the way of both of those things, and it’s been wonderful to finally break free of that.

4. Shedding the burden of photographing my kids constantly

One of my biggest hang-ups about ditching my smartphone has surprisingly turned out to be one of my favorite things about it: not being able to take photos of my kids all the time. I was discussing this with a fellow dumbphone-owning parent a few months ago, who told me about a trip to the zoo she took with her kids shortly after getting rid of her smartphone. She said she initially felt regretful when her kids did something super cute and she couldn’t take a picture of it, but then something clicked. She thought to herself, “I’m missing it!” And then, “Wait…no I’m not.” That’s exactly how I’ve felt too.

This is not to say we should never take photos of our kids—but doing it multiple times a day every day was not entirely healthy in my case. I think my obsession with documenting every moment that seemed even a little bit cute or special was actually diminishing some of those moments, and I’m not sure it was sending a great message to my kids either.

5. Living life instead of performing it

On a family vacation to Madrid last March, my husband and I dropped the kids off with their grandparents for a couple hours one day so we could visit the Prado museum, unencumbered. As we walked through the beautiful Retiro neighborhood on our way to the museum, I was thinking about how fabulous it was that we were spending the afternoon this way—walking leisurely miles through one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, on our way to see one of the most famous museums in the world. I was thinking this is what the good life looks like. And I was thinking about where we should take our selfie for my obligatory Instagram post, and what the caption should say. What I wasn’t doing was immersing myself in the actual moment—because I couldn’t. My preoccupation with documenting this moment for a virtual audience prevented me from actively living it.

I deleted my Instagram account shortly after that trip, and my only regret is not doing it sooner. As Katherine Johnson Martinko writes, “We treat the non-digital world merely as a source of raw material, a place where we gather content for use in the more real, more vital, digital space.”4 I lived like that for about a decade, and it’s such a relief to be done. No doubt there are some people who can maintain an active social media presence without it diminishing the vitality of their non-digital lives—but I was not one of them.

A wish for 2025

I employ “quiet eye” to crystallize both my worries and my hopes for the reader of the 21st century—whose eye increasingly will not stay still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose “quality of attention” is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.—Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

Smartphones have become deeply entangled with almost every aspect of modern life, and not everyone has a realistic option to get rid of theirs. I was discussing this recently with a friend who is an emergency room doctor, and he told me there are three separate apps on his phone that he is required to use to communicate with nurses and other healthcare workers at the hospital. This friend has always been a bit of a Luddite—he was a late adopter of the smartphone and is one of the few people I know who has never had a single social media account—but he told me, regretfully, that he’s felt his own “quality of attention” slipping away in recent years because of his (employer-mandated) use of technology. This is not what one wants to hear from anyone, let alone an ER doctor!

With that in mind, one wish I have for 2025 is a societal-level normalization of technological “unbundling.” Instead of requiring people to have one device that does everything (while also stealing their attention), let’s go back to using technology as a tool, even if it means we need to carry a few different tools with us rather than a single smartphone. Let’s at least give people the option. Just as no student should be required to use addictive technology for school purposes, I think no adult should be required to have a smartphone for work if they don’t want to.

In the meantime, if you’d like to be more intentional about your technology usage but a complete divorce from your smartphone isn’t feasible now, there are still things you can do. You can leave your phone in the glove compartment when you go to a restaurant and see how that feels. You can download the Freedom app and use it to block distracting apps or even the entire internet from your phone when you want to experience solitude or uninterrupted social time but don’t trust your own self control. Instead of texting with friends on and off throughout the day, consider being more intentional about those connections by scheduling a standing phone call or meeting in person. If you have other ideas, please share in the comments!

And Happy New Year!

Reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas to my young daughters a few nights ago, something struck me. In 2024, stealing Christmas would be much easier for the Grinch. He wouldn’t need to dress up as Santa, go down the chimney of each Who’s house, take all their Christmas presents, and then haul the massive load 3,000 feet back up Mt. Crumpit to dump it. He could just buy them all smartphones and the result would be pretty much the same: no more of that Christmas “noise, noise, noise, noise!” that he hated so much.

This bleak revelation inspired me to draft an alternate ending1 to How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Enjoy!

THE GRINCH GOT A WONDERFUL, AWFUL IDEA…

“I know how to quiet Who girls and Who boys
I know how to silence their terrible noise!”
He whipped out his phone and he tapped a few keys
It wasn’t a challenge; he did it with ease…
One thousand smartphones, delivered next day
One for each Who—hip hip hooray!
He could picture the Whos with their phones at their feast
Their heads pointed down, their camaraderie ceased.
Their faces a-glow, not with joy from this scene
Not from anything else but the light of their screen.
No more noise, no more clamor, no hullaballoo,
Just a dull Christmas dinner for every last Who.
What a brilliant scheme, what a glorious thought!
The Whos having Christmas, together, but not.

On Christmas the Grinch awoke feeling fraught,
Until he remembered his sinister plot.
By now Mother Amazon would have come through,
And delivered a smartphone to every last Who.
The Grinch opened his window, grinning cruelly,
Picturing Whos on their phones, subdued, not unruly.
But as he looked down on Who-ville, he felt himself flinch,
For something had shocked this old, jaded Grinch.
Far from the scene of dull quiet he’d wanted,
He heard Whos singing loudly and merrily, undaunted!
Come to think of it—wait!—where had those phones gone?
They should have arrived at a quarter past dawn!
The Grinch grabbed his binoculars and he searched and he searched,
Then he saw such a sight that his too-small heart lurched.
One thousand smartphones in a heap, discarded!
What in the world? Had the Grinch been outsmarted?

He hemmed and he hawed about what to do.
Until at last he sighed, “Oh fooey foo foo.”
He picked up his phone and he stormed out the door.
And he said to himself, “I’m done being a bore!”
He marched all the way up to the top of Mt. Crumpit
Then he held up his phone and proceeded to dump it!
Back down the mountain he raced, feeling lighter.
He walked straight into Who-ville, his mood now much brighter.
The Whos welcomed him warmly in their Who-ish way
(One more at the table always made a Who’s day).
The Grinch felt happy at the feast with the Whos
Where no one was texting or checking the news.
Where Who after Who did something quite rare;
They paid attention to the Whos who were there.

It’s been about four months since I took the drastic step of replacing my iPhone with a $49.99 dumbphone, so I thought I’d share an update on how this is going. I’ll also offer some reflections on why I was so addicted to my smartphone in the first place and what I’m doing with the time I used to spend scrolling.

Overall, getting a dumbphone has been an incredibly positive lifestyle change that I haven’t regretted for an instant. The inconveniences, such as onerous T9 text messaging and not having GPS, are a small price to pay for the benefit of no longer being a slave to my phone. I feel so much relief since making this change, like I’m free from a heavy burden.

That being said, the journey has not been completely linear. There have been days where I spend way too much time on my laptop, using it the same way I used to use my smartphone. Mindless scrolling, jittery checking of social media and email, just wasting time that would frankly be better spent staring at a wall. On those days, I struggle with something like imposter syndrome. I have thoughts like, “Yes, I have a dumbphone, but I’m still racking up hours of screen time, probably more than that of many smartphone users. I am a fraud.”

But then I try to give myself grace. Even on those screentime-heavy days, the situation is still so much better than it was before. Thanks to the dumbphone, I’m never looking at a screen when I’m away from home anymore, or at the dinner table, or outside in the yard with my kids. That is a HUGE win.

But why was I so addicted to my smartphone, and why do I still go on my computer too often?

The Discomfort of “What Now?”

Allow me to take a quick tangent. Every day—often multiple times a day—our five year old daughter asks us in a desperate tone: “what now?” She is expressing her discomfort with not knowing what to do when there’s no specific activity or structured event happening. I have noticed though that if I let her sit with that discomfort for a bit rather than swooping in to entertain her somehow, she almost always figures out something to do, whether it’s calling her grandparents on our landline, playing with her “kids” (a collection of nail polish containers that she pretends are children going on various adventures), or tackling a new art project.

I don’t like the “what now?” feeling either, and my smartphone was very good at helping me dull that discomfort. I no longer have a smartphone, but my laptop can still scratch that same itch. Instead of figuring out something interesting, meaningful, and/or productive to do, I can just open my computer and start scrolling. Which is not what I want to be doing!

Part of the problem is that the downtime I do have as a stay at home parent to two young kids tends to be very unpredictable. Will the nap last two hours or ten minutes? How long will they play with those Magna-tiles before the structure collapses and the screams begin (if you know, you know)?

When you don’t know for sure when you’ll have downtime or how long it will last, it’s hard to commit to a productive activity. Much easier to just zone out on your device. And when you add in the fact that being a stay at home parent can be very isolating, and that social media offers an illusion of meaningful human connection, it’s easy to see how alluring this technology can be.

But, as Cal Newport explains so well in Digital Minimalism,

“You cannot expect an app dreamed up in a dorm room, or among the Ping-Pong tables of a Silicon Valley incubator, to successfully replace the types of rich interactions to which we’ve painstakingly adapted over millennia. Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.”

He goes on to describe social media as the “fast food” of human sociality. Considering the blah-ness I usually feel after hours scrolling social media platforms, I cannot overstate how strongly this analogy resonated with me. And so I’ve been making a real effort in the last few months to create more opportunities for “rich interactions”—i.e., the type that happen in person.

Here are a few of the ways I’ve been trying to achieve that this summer:

• I deleted my Instagram account several months ago (have not missed it at all!)

• I started a neighborhood playgroup that involves a playground/splashpad situation for the kids and a box of coffee for the adults. Win win.

• I’ve organized regular meetups with friends, old and new, at lakes, nature preserves, beer gardens, and other outdoor hangout spots around town.

• I’ve been rallying parents at my daughter’s elementary school to sign the Wait Until 8th pledge, promising to delay smartphones until at least the end of 8th grade—and have already gotten 25 pledges signed at her school just in the last month!

• Craving some kid-free socialization, I proposed a last minute happy hour with friends the other night and an hour later, we were splitting a bottle of wine and having delightful wide-ranging conversations about everything from parenthood to what the heck is our identity OUTSIDE of parenthood anymore? If I hadn’t done that, this conversation probably would have happened on Facebook messenger—if it happened at all—and wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying.

• I’ve been making a concerted effort to spend more time in the front yard than the back, where we are likely to have pleasant interactions with neighbors we’d otherwise rarely see.

As an introvert, initiating all these social events and activities has not been easy, but I’m growing more confident each time I force myself to do it. And I always end up so glad that I did!

And when I have unpredictable downtime in my daily life, I’m trying to train myself to sit with the discomfort of “what now?”—just as I encourage my daughter to do—instead of immediately opening my laptop. It usually only takes a minute or two before I’m reaching for a garden tool or a book instead of a device.

Speaking of books, here are a few I’ve read recently that have given me inspiration and motivation to continue owning the smartphone-free life:

• Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport

• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt

• The Courage to Be Disliked by Fumitake Kaga

• Technopoly by Neil Postman

For years now, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I was addicted to my smartphone, and that the addiction was kind of ruining my life. The ever-present urge to scroll was taking me away from my children, my husband, and, perhaps most importantly, myself.

Every Sunday morning, I’d feel a mix of dread and shame when the screen time “Weekly Report Available” notification flashed across my iPhone. Rather than participating in real life, another week had gone by in which I spent a heinous amount of my time scrolling content that I barely remembered afterward. Why wasn’t I able to exercise even a modicum of self control here?

The parental guilt spiral would follow. I’d relive the multiple occasions over the past week that I’d responded with irritation to my kids when they’d tried to get my attention while I was looking at my phone. These moments happened at home, at the park, on walks around the neighborhood, at the library, on play dates, at school drop-off and pick-up, and even in the car at red lights.

I knew my phone was making me a worse parent and a worse human, and I felt pathetic that I couldn’t get a handle on this addiction. I’d then run from those feelings of guilt and shame by dissociating on my phone some more. It was a vicious cycle.

Failed Attempts to Get a Grip

I’ve tried to set limits with my phone use many times over the years, but nothing ever worked for long. “Just turn it off or leave it on the other side of the house,” Google recommends. Sounds simple enough, but what if there’s an emergency and someone needs to reach me? With a child in school, a spouse who frequently travels for work, and aging parents out of state, I didn’t feel like disconnecting from my phone was an option.

Deleting addictive apps like Facebook and Instagram didn’t work for me either. I’d just use the browser instead, and when that got too tedious, I’d re-download the app, disgusted with myself and also resigned to my disgustingness. I also tried downloading apps that blocked my access to other apps (the irony is not lost on me). Sometimes I even paid for them. This might work for a few days, but eventually I’d find a way around the block, or as soon as the block ended, I’d be binging again. I felt like I was just trying the same things over and over again expecting a different result. I was behaving insanely and I knew it and I couldn’t stop.

Lightbulb Moment #1

Then, a couple months ago, buzz began to spread about ’s new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Fully aware of how unhealthy my own relationship with my phone was, Haidt’s argument about the damaging effects of these devices on the mental health of young kids felt almost like stating the obvious. And yet, 53% of American children have a smartphone by the age of 11. At five and two, my children were too young for this to be a pressing issue yet, but I knew the day was not far off. It seemed clear that prohibiting them from getting a smartphone and social media accounts until their late teens was the right choice.

Of course, there was one minor problem with my plan. It doesn’t take a genius to anticipate how a broody teen or preteen would react not being allowed to own a smartphone, when she saw her own mother constantly glued to her smartphone. I knew that unless I made a real change in my own behavior, I wouldn’t have a leg to stand on with this “ban.”

Lightbulb Moment #2

A short while later, I was at a playdate at the park, when I saw a friend of mine holding a “dumbphone,” i.e., an old-school flip phone. Intrigued, I asked her about it. She told me a story I knew quite well: how she’d been hopelessly addicted to her smartphone and guilt-ridden about how it was taking her away from her children. How she’d tried to set healthy limits around her smartphone use, but it never worked, until finally she decided to take drastic action and get the dumbphone. It had been a full year since she’d ditched her smartphone, and while there’d been a few obstacles to overcome, she’d never once regretted it.

My mind was buzzing. I thought about how the crux of my issue with my smartphone was my inability to ignore it if I had it on me, and how I felt like I always had to have it on me in case a loved one needed to reach me. A dumbphone would solve that. I could keep the dumbphone on me 24/7, but thanks to its dumbness, it wouldn’t hold my attention the way the smartphone did.

I’d actually half joked to my husband in the past that I should get a flip phone, but I’d never been too serious about it because, well…what about GPS? What about being able to Google random things on the fly? What about portrait mode? 

Hold up. Was I really going to let something like portrait mode stand in the way of overcoming my addiction? Surely standalone cameras are still a thing.

And GPS…had I not started driving at age 16 with nothing more than a printout from Mapquest to guide me around town? Had my brain rotted so severely since then that I couldn’t cope without GPS now at age 38? And even if irreparable brain rot had set in, couldn’t I just purchase an old school GPS machine on Amazon as a backup?

I made a mental list of all the features of my smartphone that I’d come to depend upon, and I began thinking about workarounds for each of those. It actually wasn’t too hard to do, in most cases.

Pulling the Trigger on the Dumbphone

I went home and bought a dumbphone. As I went through the process of transferring my cellular service from the smartphone to the dumbphone, I literally started sweating. Was I making a huge mistake? It almost felt like I was about to sever a limb. But what kind of limb? A limb that was rotted with gangrene and threatening to poison the rest of the body! Yes, it had to be done. Steeling myself, I clicked the final button to complete the transfer. 

I’ve had this dumbphone for about a month now and, like my friend at the park, haven’t had a single moment of regret. This is not to say things are perfect and I’m completely cured. The underlying compulsion to be plugged in is still there, and my husband will be the first one to tell you that I’m spending more time on my laptop now that I’ve given up my smartphone. But the trend is in the right direction, which is something I haven’t been able to say since 2010 or so when I got my first iPhone. After all, you can’t really take your laptop to the park with your kids, the library, or even the doctor’s office. You can take a book, and in fact I’ve finished three books since I broke up with my smartphone!

Another positive development: I spoke to a dear friend on the phone for the first time in years (because texting, our usual mode of contact, is way too onerous on the dumbphone). Also, I am finally learning my way around the city I’ve lived in for almost eight years now that I’m no longer robotically following commands from Apple Maps.

Since ditching my smartphone, I feel unburdened. I also feel a little bit smarter, like my attention span is starting to recover from years of abuse. That feeling of jittery emptiness I used to get after a lengthy scrolling session is gone, replaced by a weird sensation that feels almost like calmness. And when my kids ask me to play with them, I find myself saying “sure!” a lot more often than “in a little bit.” 

Ditching the smartphone is a drastic move that feels almost absurd in 2024, but for me it was necessary. Rather than continuing to beat myself up for being addicted to a device that was specifically designed to be addictive, I realized I needed to just break up with the device. 

When I saw my friend with her dumbphone, it gave me the final push I needed. I thought if she could do it, so can I. And I’m here to tell you that if I could do it, so can you! (If you want to, that is.)