If you want to find something mean on the internet, you’re going to find it.
—Judd Apatow
There’s a great term floating out there in the culture that describes what happens when we spend too much time on our phone. Whether it’s an adult doomscrolling or a kid going down a YouTube unboxing rabbit hole, when you spend too much time staring at a device, you get screensick.
You know, that insane reaction your kids have when you suddenly turn off the TV. Their catatonic state when they’re locked into some video game, when the walls could be falling down around them and they wouldn’t even blink. The fantasy world your teenager comes to mistake for reality after too many hours on the computer in their room. And you? You know the symptoms: You’re grouchy and hate humanity after seeing too much of its underbelly on social media. You can’t pay attention to anything but your email. The phantom vibrations of the phone haunt you like a ghost.
The good news is it seems like a pretty easy illness to cure. A phone-free day can cure it. Going outside for a couple hours can refocus your mind and reset your spirit. The bad news is, the people who made your phone and everything that goes on it know there’s an easy fix too. Which is why they’ve spent so much time and energy and money engineering ways to keep you connected to it, addicted to it, beholden to it. You have to fight that.
You can’t let the technology use you; you always have to be the one using the technology. It’s the only way to have a healthy relationship with your phone and to avoid the screensickness that infects us.