The New Yorker:

Rather than establishing a set of rigorous habits, we may need to rethink our approach to life in general.

By Jia Tolentino
April 22, 2019

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” the philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, in 1654. According to Screen Time, a recent addition to the iPhone’s operating system that purports to help users deal with the addiction to screens which the iPhone is designed to foster, my typical daily phone activity includes ninety minutes of texting, one hour of reading, another hour of e-mail, yet another hour of social media, and about seventy “pickups,” meaning that I check my phone about four times per hour. I carry my phone around with me as if it were an oxygen tank. I stare at it while I make breakfast and take out the recycling, ruining what I prize most about working from home—the sense of control, the relative peace. I have tried all sorts of things to look at screens less often: I don’t get push notifications or use Facebook or watch Instagram stories; on my home computer, I have installed a browser plug-in called StayFocusd, which turns off Twitter after forty-five minutes of daily use. On my phone, I use an app called Freedom to block social media for much of the workday. If any of my digital chastity belts malfunction, I start scrolling like a junkie, pulling myself away just long enough to send frantic e-mails to the apps’ customer service with subject lines like “Freedom not working!”

For journalists, Twitter, in particular, functions as an increasingly familiar form of contemporary labor: paid in exposure, pitched as fun. Some of us also write about the online world, making the use of social media a professional necessity. Every week, it seems, a journalist will proclaim, on Twitter, that he is leaving Twitter, or will write an op-ed about how he’s stepping away from social media—a style of essay so common that it was parodied, last month, in the Wall Street Journal. “Fifteen minutes ago, I stopped using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter,” the writer Jason Gay began. “Within seconds, I noticed I am happier, less irritable, more contemplative and balanced. I’m kinder to neighbors and pets. I’m spending more time on activities that matter.” It’s true that, after months or years of gazing at pixels and transcribing the minutiae of life, a writer contemplating a single unshared sunset can become a smug transcendentalist, high on an ephemeral taste of analog Nirvana. But it is not only journalists who are struggling to escape from the endless loop of flattery, anxiety, and distraction that social media provides. Nearly three-quarters of Americans have taken steps to distance themselves from Facebook. Entire families try to observe a “digital Sabbath.” Parents seek screen-time alternatives to the Jungian horrorscape that is children’s YouTube. And yet a mood of fidgety powerlessness continues to accumulate, like an acid snowfall on our collective mind.

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