Not All Screens Are Created Equal

Now, let me say: I'm the biggest hater.

Of screentime.

But I wanna clarify something:

For a while, I believed that all screentime was negative.

Until one day, my screentime was several hours more than what I expected it to be. Turns out, most of it was Google Maps because I had been driving a lot that day.

That’s when I realized that what you’re using your screentime for is far more important than what the duration is. (What a concept!)

However, even if you’re spending 8 hours learning something, the blue light and (probably) poor posture are still gonna do a number on you.

It’s also helpful to keep in mind that tech companies are making it harder to resist getting sucked into random tasks—A LOT of their budget goes into hijacking human psychology so they can learn how to steal your attention in the best way possible.

Excessive screentime is absolutely detrimental, but not all screentime is created equal.

4 hours of education or reading is very different from 4 hours of social media scrolling.

Using a screen to get quick answers is very different from using a screen to get quick, meaningless entertainment.

Using Google Maps to assist you with a long trip or using Zoom to talk to your friends or family is arguably a very positive way to rack up screentime.

However, even the productive uses of screentime can be negative due to the harmful effects of the screen’s blue light and the degradation of posture, so keep that in mind.

Despite me seeming like one most of the time, I wanna dissuade you from being a Screentime Nazi.

• If you view all screentime as bad, you’ll feel unnecessary guilt when you’re actually being productive.

• This guilt could prevent you from bettering yourself, which means you’d be restricting your own growth.

• If you were really anal about it, you’d also be missing out on communicating with faraway friends and family just because you don’t want to use a screen for more than 20 minutes.

But what if you’re stupid? I mean, what if you’re one of those screentime addicts? Have you ever heard yourself think these silly things?:

• If it’s enjoyable for me, any amount of screentime is fine. (No, that’s dumb.)

• We all need some entertainment. (Possibly true, but it doesn’t need to be served to you by tech companies who want to enslave you.)

But honestly, why should you care? It’s your life.

If you wanna genocide all screens from your life, it’s your call (although you’re a huge hypocrite if you’re reading this).

But a more balanced approach could make your life can be better, you silly fuck!

• You’ll have a more sensible mindset regarding screentime, understanding that spending a bunch of time using a device isn’t necessarily bad if you’re using it as a means to an end, like reading.

• You can also become more discerning of how you use your devices. Having the self-awareness to acknowledge the positive or negative usage of a device lets you prioritize the positive and reduce the negative.

To summarize, screentime can be good if it’s used well, but it’s still bad if it’s too much, and it’s also mostly bad because tech companies are assholes.

So, where does that leave us?

Well, it leaves you with some work to do!

If you do these things, I guarantee you won’t regret it:

• Set up timers (or at least some kind of time-tracking) on your phone and your computer’s browser.

• Once you become aware of how your screentime is spent, you’ll be able to decide if you have any issues with your current usage.

• If you truly care, you can set up some timers to limit you based on what your screentime goals are.

• Eventually, you won’t need many timers, if any (depending on how good these tech companies get at hijacking your brain).