There is a particular quality to the light in our living room at around nine in the evening. The overheads are off; a single floor lamp throws a warm circle across the arm of the sofa; outside, the streetlights are beginning to take over from the sky. On the side table, the phone lies face down and does not buzz. My partner is reading a novel printed on paper so old-fashioned it crackles when she turns the page. I am writing, slowly, in a notebook. The television is in the room but not on; we have come to think of it, in these hours, as a piece of furniture rather than a piece of technology.
This is not the screen time our devices are designed to produce. The dashboards and the settings menus and the wellness reports all imagine screen time as a quantity — minutes, hours, a number to be reduced or, more rarely, to be increased. They imagine a user who is on the screen, in the same way one is on a treadmill, and they imagine the project of wellness as the project of stepping off the treadmill for a few hours a day. The implicit metaphor is athletic: a workout, a recovery, a discipline.
But the question we have started to ask ourselves is not how much screen time we have, but what kind. There is a difference between an hour of scrolling and an hour of writing a long letter to a friend. There is a difference between an evening of streaming and an evening of one carefully chosen film. There is a difference between reading the news and reading a book about the news. The minutes look identical on a dashboard, but they feel nothing like each other in the body, and they do not produce the same kind of person on the other end.
The Arithmetic We Were Given
The conventional wisdom about screens, which has been with us now for nearly a decade, treats them as a kind of macronutrient. Too many minutes, like too many calories, will, we are told, slowly unmake us. Sleep will suffer. Attention will fray. Children will fail to develop whatever it is children are supposed to develop. The advice that follows is, accordingly, nutritional: count the minutes, restrict the portions, take a screen break every hour, do not eat (i.e., scroll) after dinner.
This framing is not wrong, exactly, but it has the peculiar flatness of all nutritional advice. It cannot tell the difference between a sad vending-machine lunch eaten standing up and a slow meal cooked with friends. It cannot tell the difference between reading a difficult novel on a Kindle at midnight and refreshing an inbox. It treats the medium as the message, when in fact the use of the medium has been the message all along.
A more honest accounting of screen time, we have come to think, would ask not how many minutes but what kind of attention was being asked of me, by whom, and in service of what. An hour of reading a serious essay on a phone is not the same hour as an hour of being read by an algorithmic feed. The first is an act of will; the second is a kind of slow consent to be shaped.
The distinction matters, we think, more than the counting. The well-being industry has largely reduced the question of screens to a question of dosage, and the dosage framing flatters the industries that benefit from us being on screens. If the problem is too many minutes, then the solution is a slightly more virtuous version of the same behavior — a better app, a stricter timer, a cleverer lockout. If the problem is what kind of attention, then the solution is harder, slower, less commodifiable. It has to do with the kinds of days we are willing to live, and the kinds of evenings we are willing to have, and the kinds of people we are willing to be on the other side of those evenings.
The Soft Turn-Off
What we have been trying, in our own small way, is something we have come to call the soft turn-off. It is not a digital sunset, not a moment at which the phone is ceremonially placed in a drawer. It is more like the gradual dimming of a room. Around eight, the work email closes for the night. Around nine, the social apps go into a folder so deep they require two swipes to find. Around ten, the phone itself moves to a shelf in the hallway, where it can still ring if a child needs us but cannot be idly reached for. The television, if it is on at all, is on for one thing, and one thing only, and we know what that thing is before we press play.
None of this requires any particular discipline, and that, we think, is the secret. The hard turn-offs — the digital detox weekends, the apps that lock you out, the kitchen timers in which one keeps the phone for an hour — tend to fail because they are built on willpower, and willpower, as every dieter knows, is a finite resource in a long day. The soft turn-off works by design rather than by resolve. The phone is not in the room because there is nowhere nice to put it. The inbox is closed because the laptop is closed. The evening is not a screen-free evening; it is simply an evening in which the screens have less to say.
The literature on rituals, from the historian Catherine Bell to the essayist Pico Iyer, suggests that it is the small repeated gestures, not the grand resolutions, that reorganize a life. A cup of tea at the same time each evening. A walk after dinner. A book that lives on the same cushion. The technology, in this framing, is not being conquered; it is being repositioned inside a life that has, gradually, larger rooms in it.
What surprises us, in retrospect, is how little we miss the things we have turned off. We had assumed, before we began, that the social apps were central to our friendships; it turned out that the friendships were central to the friendships, and the apps were a thin overlay that obscured more than it connected. We had assumed, similarly, that the always-on inbox was a kind of professional responsibility; it turned out that the projects we cared about were done, in the main, during the working hours, and that the after-hours inbox was a habit more than an obligation. The things one turns off, in this domain, do not, on the whole, insist on being turned back on. They go, gently, into a quiet retirement.
The Hour After the Hour
There is an hour after the hour in which one has put the phone down in which something subtle happens to the mind. The mind, having lost its feed, begins to feed itself. Small thoughts surface — a name one hadn't thought of in years, a half-finished sentence from a conversation last week, the quiet anxiety one had been scrolling past. The mind does not enjoy this, at first. It reaches, the way a tongue reaches for a missing tooth. But after a few evenings it begins, tentatively, to enjoy the quiet. It begins to remember what it is for.
We are not, in any of this, trying to argue that screens are bad. They are extraordinary instruments, and we use them all day. The argument is much smaller and, we hope, more useful. The screens we live with were designed, on the whole, to be used without limit. The question of how to use them, and when, and in what state of mind, has been left to us. That question is older than any of this technology, and it is not going to be settled by an app.
What we have learned, in our small apartment, in our lamp-lit evenings, is that the best screen time is the screen time one has chosen carefully, and ended carefully, and put down before it puts you down. The rest is just weather. There are evenings, now, in which we notice that we have not looked at a screen for three hours, and the noticing is itself a small pleasure — the pleasure of discovering, against the ambient assumption of the century, that the hours of a day can still belong, quietly and without negotiation, to the person living them.