The New Yorker ran a column last month on the extreme fatigue people are feeling from being online so much. Jonathan Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation maps out the mental health ramifications of screen addiction, noting how the advent of the smartphone was conjoined with “safety-ism,” with parents refusing to let their kids play or take risks out of fear of them getting hurt.

I’m an older member of Gen Z and was fortunate enough to be spared a smartphone until I was 17. (I was a rare bird. Most of my friends got smartphones when they were 14 or 15. Today the average is shockingly lower than that.) My case wasn’t, therefore, as serious as a lot of other kids my age, but getting a smartphone did change my life in some fundamental ways. I couldn’t concentrate as well anymore, experienced newfound temptations, and developed an anxiety over Instagram likes and followers. It made life both way more stressful and way easier. How? The text message. The awkward social maneuvers a twenty-year-old guy used to have to make to talk to a girl are funneled and packaged conveniently into the Instagram DM. Texting is conversation without stakes, without risk. Pornography is fantasy without love. Social media is an uploaded community without sacrifice or participation, the two qualities that define community in the first place. In short, I was hijacked. My whole generation was hijacked, Big Tech fueled the invasion, and the adults either joined in on the scrolling or turned aside, because the data took a good part of a decade to confirm the obvious: the “technopoly,” as pastor Nic Gibson of Highpoint Church has named it, is scarring our civilization in ways we can’t fully comprehend.

Gray Scale and Passcode Barrier: The Game Changers

Jordan Peterson said recently in an interview that no one “quits” an addiction. They simply chase after something better, attain a broader and more beautiful vision of the world. So the practical ways I turned my smartphone into a “dumbphone” should probably be paired with that approach. The goal is not to just spend less time on our phones. It’s to do something better with the time we’ve been given. However, I’ve recently discovered a few simple ways to reduce screentime.

1. Turn your phone, if possible, to gray scale. It’s surprising how alluring the phone is simply because its bright colors. Apparently, Instagram changed its app icon to its current color simply because it would better captivate the eye. Casinos do this to their interiors, too.
2. On the iPhone, there is a setting under the tab “content restrictions” that allow you to block certain sites and apps. You have to set a passcode to access the tab, which, obviously, can be easily bypassed. I had a relative set the passcode on mine so I couldn’t download Twitter and YouTube the second I got angsty.
3. Keep your phone out of your room at night. This is a big one, and I’m still terrible at obeying this advice. Studies have shown that having your phone nearby, even when you’re not using it, can still be a major distraction.
4. If you work a lot in front of a computer, turn off the phone while trying to finish complex tasks. This goes back to the study cited above. Even having the phone nearby can diminish our ability to focus and generate the cognitive activity needed to do our jobs.

Necessity or Convenience?

At the end of the day, I had to examine the real reasons I had an iPhone, and realized most of them were connected to distraction and entertainment. The smartphone wasn’t a communication tool but a little slot machine that gave me a dopamine kick every time I yanked its finely tuned levers. More seriously, this little device was causing me to neglect my relationships, was diminishing my capacity for creative and intellectual focus, and just overall seemed to be the main contributor to my sense of anxiety and dissatisfaction. As the Gen Z writer Freya India has written about, the screens are eroding our morals, too. We talk a lot about social media’s contribution to the mental health epidemic, but not so much about what it is doing to our character, to our spiritual wellbeing. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had it being a pawn of Big Tech and am ready to fight for meaning and real connection. Will you join?