Kicking the Screen Habit
We waste a lot of time staring at screens. We don’t get this time back. I hope this enrages you.
I spend a decent amount of time staring at screens. I’m doing it right now, in fact. I’m not alone; a lot of people these days spend a lot of time staring at screens. Admit it, you are one of them. (If you’re reading this, you’re staring at a screen. Gotcha.)
Screens of all kinds take up a lot of our time and attention, and it’s only increasing. Before, we needed to be sitting in a chair or on a couch or at a desk, or perhaps in its most extreme form, we’d have a big screen in a public place to stare at. And back then, in the early hours of the information age, we still managed to spend a lot of quality time with screens.
Nowadays, we all have tiny little portable screens that fit in our pockets, purses, and backpacks. And admit it: these screens get stared at a lot. Like, a lot. Maybe even more than the more traditional screens situated in our living rooms. I don’t have the exact numbers on it, but I’m willing to bet that the amount of time humans stare at screens has increased sharply with the arrival of the personal computer, laptop, smartphone, and tablet, and will continue to increase. To the point of ludicrous.
And when you step back — perhaps spend some time away from said screens — and think about it, it is already ludicrous. Sometimes I catch myself staring at a screen (usually of the tiny or large tiny variety), wondering what I should do to the screen in order to keep staring at it. It’s as if the screen is in charge of me, calling the shots, shaping my behavior. Richard Dawkins theorized that we individuals exist and work in the service of our genes and not the other way around; I get the feeling that the same is starting to hold true of our screens.
And it’s not just me. It’s you, and most of the people with whom you share a first-world existence. Try this: pick your head up and look around next time you’re out and about. You’ll see people staring at screens everywhere. On the train, in line at the grocery store, at the restaurant, waiting at a red light, while they’re relieving themselves, maybe even in the middle of a conversation you’re having.
Candy
Neurologically, our senses are primed to respond to screens. Our brain’s wiring hasn’t changed all that much since caveman days, when things like fire or moonlight were important things to pay attention to. We evolved to pay attention to such things: brief flashes of light in our visual field, sudden sounds, and the like.
Screens capitalize on this cro-magnon predilection. Something about the flicker of light draws the eye. Something about the novelty of sensory stimulus holds our attention. We’re hard-wired for screens, and screens are built with our sensory specifications in mind. Screens have us by the brain.
But here’s the rub: screens don’t necessarily have the same value as fire or moonlight to us. So, our evolutionarily programmed preferences often lead us down a path that isn’t ultimately adaptive. Regardless of the content contained on them, screens are to our eyes as candy is to our taste buds: it has all the sensory indicators of something good, but is usually completely devoid of the nutrients. Eye candy.
Advertisers and marketing agencies and studio execs love this. They use it to keep us watching. And unfortunately, too many of us keep watching regardless of what is on.
Where Does The Time Go?
Back-of-the-napkin calculation: if we spend 4 hours every work day staring at a screen from the time we’re 18 to the time we’re 75, and don’t do anything else involving screens besides that, it results in us spending about 16.8% of our waking lives staring at screens. That’s 9.5 years out of a 75 year life. And that’s not including any screen time outside of a half day of work at all. Which means that by the time we die, most of us will have logged well over 10 years of screen time.
And what are we getting for it? What is the return on our incredible investment in time and attention in the screens in our lives?
I’m not coming up with much.
No. This attachment to screens has to stop. This is a form of subservience I just can’t get behind and do not want for myself or anyone else.
Avoiding Ludicrous
It’s not realistic to cut screens out entirely, but I hope we can keep things from getting to the point of ludicrous.
My personal threshold for ludicrous is when things that happen on screens start to serve as suitable replacements for things that don’t happen on screens. And while it’s almost always easier to interact with a screen, it’s rarely better. So, let’s start by identifying and naming some moments when screen-based experience is replacing analog experience. Some offenders:
1. Gamers. You might have caught yourself strutting about because you beat your friend on-screen in a sports game. Or you have a new high score for dancing an avatar around a screen, or playing some screen version of a musical instrument.
2. TV and movie watchers. You might have caught yourself being quite concerned about the lives, relationships, troubles, and situations of screen people who don’t actually exist.
3. Social Networkers. You might have caught yourself checking in on friends, followers, contacts, comments, fans, likes, +1s, retweets, and the like as a way to measure the success and quality of your connections to other people (who do exist).
4. Emailers. You might have caught yourself substituting an email correspondence for a phone call, handwritten letter, or an in-person meeting when it was just as easy (or maybe even easier) to do one of the other things.
Mea Culpa
I’ve been all these offenders. I am still some of these offenders. Admit it: you are too. (Now we’re all in this together.)
Eat Your Veggies
I’ve made some extreme and socially unusual choices about certain types of screens, specifically the #1 and #2 offenders from above: games, TV, and movies.
I’m done with games altogether, I find myself in front of a TV about 5-10 times per year, and I will see a movie in full about 2-3 times per year. (Airplanes are my I-only-smoke-when-I-drink exception to screens: when i’m stuck in a chair in a metal tube filled with recycled air for hours on end, there’s usually a screen binge involved.) I explain it to myself and others like this:
I’m a screen vegetarian.
It’s exactly like people who choose to not eat meat when they otherwise could very easily do so. I’m making a life choice to not include something in my world experience that I know has value if it’s consumed in the right way, but I’m just choosing to cut it out entirely.
Vegetarians miss out on some delicious food; I miss out on some delicious programming and art. But we’re both willing to make our respective sacrifices. (And still, people who consider it rude to offer a cheeseburger to a vegetarian will still think it really strange that I won’t see that movie they really think I’ll like.) This renders me completely useless at entire significant segments of small talk and pop culture trivia, but alas. There are worse things.
No doubt about it: giving up TV and movies and games was hard. Changing any habit or routine is hard. But it was entirely doable. After a couple weeks of wondering what Mulder and Scully were up to, or what may or may not happen were I to warp to level 3-2 without the fox suit, I just stopped caring. It wasn’t important anymore. The void was filled with other things and I had more time for other analog stuff. I read more books. I played more music. I got outside more. I spent less time starting at a flashing piece of furniture, and reinvested that time in things that mattered.
Turning off the TV and putting down the game controller were two of the best choices I’ve ever made.
What’s Next.
Cutting out games, TV, and movies was a big and radical step towards de-emphasizing screens and reinvesting that time in other things, but still, many screens remain. And as of late, I’ve realized that the screens in my life — computers, smartphones, and tablets — are more insidious and permeate my everyday reality more than TV ever did. The portable Internet and the instant gratification it provides have a lot more utility and you’re definitely more active and thinking with computers than you are with TV, but they’re still screens. They still take time away from analog life, and that’s time you’re not getting back.
People are very engaged with screens for work. The ends necessitate the means; we all have to pay rent and eat. I get it. I spend the majority of my work day at a computer too. So I’m not expecting that we all go off the grid completely, ditch my smartphone, and hand write letters like it’s the 1880's. That’s not the world we live in anymore, and there are some really great things about the efficiency, processing power, and ease of communication that computers provide. So the #4 offenders above, the Emailers, are not a group I’m quite ready to take aim at yet.
I am saying, though, that there’s a lot of wasted time that we can attribute to screen time with computers. And much of that these days is with offender group #3: the Social Networkers. Now that games, TV, and movies are out, Social Networks are my next screen domain slotted for a serious downsizing.
I’m already working on it. Read about it here, if you’d like. Then turn your computer off and do something else. You’re not getting that time back.
