Our Phones Are Making Us Miserable — So Why Can’t We Let Go?

Smartphones are overwhelming our lives. Is it time for some digital detox? / Illustration by Weston Wei

There are a few things I do in my daily life that aren’t particularly good for me but that I take great pleasure in. I keep a window open at home even in the winter, because I like the fresh air while I sleep. I’ve been known to partake in a little unwise online shopping. When I feel like I’ve earned it, I have a generous glass of wine and a few handfuls of whatever bright red artificially flavored chip I have in the cupboard for dinner.

And like any other mid-20s American, I spend hours on end blasting my neurotransmitters with some sort of screen, any sort of screen, held inches away from my face. First thing in the morning, last thing before bed, standing in lines, walking around, at parties, in the middle of conversations — I’m on my phone, looking at God knows what. It’s almost always meaningless. The endless stream of videos and pictures and text slips off my brain as quickly as I encounter it, never to be remembered. News, food, hyper-specific jokes, antique table restorations, arguments between people I don’t know — it doesn’t matter. The desire to fill the hours of my day digging to the bottom of the bottomless pit of “content” is simply stronger than my will.

In recent years, though, I began to notice that the pleasure I was supposed to be getting out of my daily scrolling didn’t flow so freely anymore. If anything, it had become agony. I’d pick up my phone, scroll for seconds, minutes, hours — I couldn’t tell; the time always got away from me — and put it down feeling exhausted. As with many addictions, my fun little habit was decidedly not much fun anymore.

But my dependence on it as a way to kill time, to learn about the world, to do anything and everything, didn’t waver. On my phone, I was frantic and disgusted by the constant doom and gloom of news of the world or numbed by the mindlessness of digital entertainment. Off it, I was bored, inattentive, and listless. I despised my phone and what it was doing to me, but I couldn’t put it down.

At first, I thought the dark cloud hanging over me was just the election. When I brought up my tech exhaustion to a colleague, she said she related, taking issue mainly with the onslaught of desperate campaign robotexts familiar to anyone living in a swing state. Researchers had found that election years can cause a kind of chronic stress, so I tried to limit my intake of political online content. It didn’t make a dent in my screen time or my sour moods.

Perhaps it was the notifications, then. Between texts, emails, Duolingo reminders, and breaking-news alerts from multiple publications, my phone was constantly dinging, and more often than not, it was to greet me with bad news. (One study found that smartphone users receive just over 60 notifications per day, though I can attest that on some days, it feels closer to 600. Another found that the constant interruptions can cause stress from our sense of obligation to respond, or fear if the notifications go unnoticed or ignored.) So I tried setting my phone to Do Not Disturb after a certain hour every single day and asked friends and family to start calling me rather than messaging. Still, my phone remained firmly in my hand at all times, and few people aside from my mom indulged my pleas to hear their actual voices.

I took issue with the apps themselves next, one by one. I assumed online dating was the source of my pain, so I deleted Hinge. Then I blamed the constant glamour and extravagance of Instagram, so I deleted that too. Then I thought it was the havoc that TikTok was wreaking on my attention span, so I set restrictions on my time there. Within a few weeks, I’d re-downloaded most of my banned list and begun completely ignoring the limits. My affair with my phone was like any toxic relationship — I hated it, and all I could talk about was hating it, but I just couldn’t break it off.

The connections between screen time and unhappiness are pretty undeniable. On the emotional end, a 2018 study by Penn psychologist and associate director of clinical training Melissa G. Hunt linked usage of major social media apps to increased depression and loneliness among students. On the physical side, many studies over the years have found that extended smartphone use can damage vision, posture, and quality of sleep.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 91 percent of American adults own a smartphone. Yet our focus often remains on children. Parents and educators have worried for years about what increasing screen time, and particularly social media usage, may be doing to the minds of the young. We all know the clichés of the iPad baby and the perpetually texting teenager. Adults like myself, though, are also living firmly under the spell of technology — and are miserably aware of it. Is there a way out?

Before we get anywhere in our war against the machines, we have to understand that the odds are stacked solidly against us, and not by accident. We’re not just fighting our human impulse to keep seeking bite-size hits of dopamine through likes, comments, and views. We’re also fighting tech conglomerates and the developers (and even psychologists!) they employ to figure out exactly how to game those impulses and keep us scrolling. ­Everything — from the shades of blue that apps use to the pull-to-refresh gesture to the algorithms that so quickly get to know you and your digital habits with incredible precision — plays a role in the goal of getting you to divert your attention to the nearest screen and never want to look away. Much like the demand for any other commodity, the demand for your attention is highly competitive. (In prehistoric times, it’s what allowed humans to track prey and avoid becoming it. In this age, though, researchers have found that our ability to pay sustained attention to screen-related tasks has shrunk over the past few decades, from two and a half minutes in 2004 to barely 47 seconds just a few years ago.) Almost every part of modern life is a bid for it, and the methods that have been developed for capturing yours are sophisticated and effective.

If you need something to compare this to, consider sports gambling. Over just the past year, the industry grew by an estimated 24 percent, with Americans betting some $150 billion, according to the American Gaming Association. Online sports gambling is also responsible for approximately $8 billion in annual debt collections, according to researchers at UCLA and USC. It’s almost hard to believe that for many years, any version of the practice was prohibited outside of Nevada. But in 2018, the federal law barring it was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, making sports betting perfectly legal in 38 states and D.C., with mobile betting also permitted in all but eight of those. Ads and commercials for companies like FanDuel and ­DraftKings — which have faced public scrutiny for targeting young men and some legal heat for ultimately manipulating exorbitant amounts of money out of users — are everywhere, with celebrities and pro athletes touting their products. It’s the same sort of greedy gimme universe that existed before the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement kneecapped cigarette sales: Money-grabbing tobacco companies had exceedingly effective marketing tactics at their disposal and near total dominion over the public conversation around an addictive practice, making the world a much hazier, dingier place with little to no escape.

The big difference, though, is that while information on the harms of smoking was famously stifled or outright denied back then by “Big Tobacco,” we’re all too aware of how our phones are harming us.

“It’s very hard not to get emotional or anxious when reading about everything these days. Even if I’m successful in using my phone to just do my work, I can run into discourse and dialogue,” says Heather Vaughan, an illustrator based in East Passyunk. Her average screen time, which she seeks to scale back, clocks in at 60 to 70 hours monthly, or about 1.5 to 2.5 hours a day. “A recurring issue I’ve had is wrestling with needing to utilize screen time for my job,” she says ruefully. “I know social media is distracting and a quagmire for my state of mind, but I can’t delete it all if I want to continue getting work.”

Many of my young-adult peers relate. As communications director for a local nonprofit, Diamante Ortiz similarly depends on her phone, most often social media, for work responsibilities. “My most recent daily screen-time average was six hours, and I don’t like it,” she says. “I know I have to use my phone to coordinate events and collaborations for projects, but I feel distracted by it. My ability to focus has been increasingly difficult. Even when I want to pursue more reading, I’m in a state of constantly checking my phone. I think the early pandemic exacerbated that.”

Vaughan’s and Ortiz’s struggles aren’t atypical. In fact, they ring true to what Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff calls the “foreclosure of alternatives.” Essentially, the tech companies have us right where they want us. Our devices have become so thoroughly embedded in our lives that many of us can’t work, get a parking spot, or look at the menu at a restaurant — let alone fill our leisure time in a meaningful way — without going through the internet first. And what really sticks in my craw: This is all occurring alongside increasing “enshittification” — author and journalist Cory Doctorow’s term for the degradation of the quality of online platforms and services in order to maximize shareholder profit, typically under the guise of “optimizing user experience.” The phenomenon can manifest in a variety of ways, but for tech and social media, it often takes the form of AI integration. If you’ve updated your iPhone’s operating system in recent months, you may have noticed a new feature that uses AI to summarize texts you receive, sometimes incorrectly or without sufficient detail. The hope is that the quality of the feature will improve, but whether it does or doesn’t, it will likely spread to more Apple users, whether they like it or not. And if you’ve Googled anything within the past few months, you may have encountered an “AI overview” above your normal search results — also sometimes inaccurately summarizing the information. Services like Instagram, Facebook, Ring, Amazon, and Zoom are following suit.

It’s leading to some bitterness.

Anti-tech sentiment, while still fairly niche, seems to be growing among consumers. Products like phone lockboxes and the Brick — a $59 cube that temporarily disables unproductive uses for your phone — are easily accessible. More and more Gen Z workers are keeping their ringers on Do Not Disturb and their emails on Out of Office, 24/7. A group of “Luddite teens” in New York City who reject not only social media but smartphones entirely earned New York Times coverage in 2022. Following the 2023 relaunch of its 2660 model, Nokia saw flip-phone sales double. And during the TikTok fiasco of this past January, some of the app’s faithful welcomed having the platform forcefully stripped from them so they could have a chance to reestablish their attention spans and non-digital interests — though the budding moment of clarity fell spectacularly flat once the ban was rescinded.

The winds of change are blowing, but how fiercely? Some experts suggest that we need to think more critically about the nature of screen time before swearing off it entirely. According to Rinanda Shaleha, a Fulbright Scholar and human development and family studies PhD candidate at Penn State, not all screen time is created equal. “Instead of asking how much screen time is too much, I want to explore more meaningful questions,” she says. “What are people actually doing on their screens? How does that impact their mental health?”

As Shaleha explains it, context is the game changer. Different digital activities relate to stress, anxiety, and cognitive function in more complicated ways than are often discussed or researched (i.e., crawling through headlines on the latest buck-wild administration updates will likely leave you feeling a bit more troubled than playing sudoku or video-chatting with a friend). And sometimes, she notes, the relationship can be cyclical: “It’s not necessarily that screen time gives you anxiety or stress, but that stress can cause more excessive screen time.” Simple mindfulness strategies, she adds, like avoiding screens during meals, turning off non-essential notifications, and curating your digital spaces, can make all the difference. “Intentional screen use is better than limiting your time,” she advises. “We don’t have to limit our screen time, but when we have intention and we have awareness of it, it’s better.”

In my social circle, many young people use one strategy or another to curb their mindless scrolling, with varying success. Ortiz and I have both tried avoiding screen time early in the morning. Vaughan employs parental controls on certain apps. And my friend Azaria tells me, “The only one I’ve implemented is the time-limit jawn, and honestly, it’s a poor strategy.”

For some of us, the slope is just too slippery.

August Lamm, an artist based in New York and London and the author of the aptly named pamphlet “You Don’t Need a Smartphone,” doesn’t own a smartphone. She barely owns a smart computer — her laptop is an older model that she uses only in her studio and doesn’t bring to her home, where she doesn’t have wi-fi. This spring, she’ll take her disengagement project even further by selling the laptop and relying only on her flip phone and libraries for computer and internet access.

Before her venture into anti-tech activism, Lamm, like many artists, used social media heavily to promote her work and find an audience. But her disillusionment (and screen time) hit a boiling point in recent years, prompting her to go cold turkey. Part of the reasoning behind her all-or-nothing approach is her view of smartphones as an all-or-nothing problem. “When you try to work around and moderate the problem but still keep the problem in your life, you actually end up elevating the importance of it and sort of enshrining it,” she explains. “If you had an alcohol issue and you put a bottle of whiskey in the center of your living room on a platform with a spotlight on it and a little cage around it that said, ‘Don’t drink this’ — that’s the equivalent of what you’re doing instead of just not having alcohol in your house.”

Another driver for her advanced degree of screenlessness is serving as an example. Sure, Lamm could simply practice mindfulness while remaining in the loop of constantly checking and replying and posting with the rest of us. Modern life, which is increasingly difficult for smartphone abstainers (as she details in her pamphlet), would probably be easier. But if she pushes her efforts to the limit, she tells me, it might demonstrate that even you and I can take the smaller steps of downgrading our phones — and that a life not under the thumb of tech conglomerates is possible.

When my peers and I talk about our relationships with technology, much of the conversation revolves around how much we hate our phones and the patterns we fall into when they’re in our hands. But we talk about the things we want as well — meaningful hobbies, better conversations, and our number one grievance, more focus. Lamm has all that in spades, because she has no other options.

I did have to wonder, though, considering how inescapably dismaying the world has (and continues to) become: Has my need for escapism through nostalgia hit such heights that I would make my own daily life more difficult? I hate to be the 25-year-old wishing for the good old days, but I can vaguely recall the days of my family’s landline phone, and I look back on them fondly. Of course, these are also memories from a time when I didn’t have a fraction of the responsibilities I have now. But as Lamm puts it, what I’m feeling isn’t quite nostalgia for any single bygone period of time. It’s more a general sense of indignation: Every previous generation had a chance to live a life in which stressors didn’t have a way to reach them anywhere, at any time, all the time.

“In young adults, I see this challenge, this pressure to always be available,” Shaleha says. “Young adults face a unique challenge, because we’ve grown up in a hyper-­connected world where screens are deeply embedded in our social life, education, and work.”

And young adults want out. More than a few of my peers have flirted with the idea of reintroducing landlines and flip phones into their lives. Lamm’s work as an anti-tech activist has resulted in wild popularity (online, ironically). As I’ve taken my routine walks around my neighborhood, talking loudly about this subject over the phone, more than one stranger has approached to tell me they agree. Another life is possible, and people seem to be reaching for it.

In fact, on one Thursday afternoon in February, I found myself in Logan Circle after a work event, deeply behind in writing this very article. I couldn’t find the right setting to give me the laser focus I needed to finish my first draft — not at my desk at home or at any of my usual coffee shops. So I went for a classic: a public library — the Parkway Central Library, to be exact. When I got to the second floor to search for a nice, secluded nook in which to settle, I heard an unmistakable clacking sound coming from the Literature section. Sitting at a table there with a few friends was a girl, probably only a few years younger than I am, no smartphone in sight, tapping away at a typewriter.

I approached the huddle and asked whether they were some sort of typewriter-­enthusiast club. The girl said no, but she could recommend a great typewriter shop in South Philly if I was interested. I told her I wasn’t, thank you, but I was writing a piece on technology and downgrading in the age of the smartphone. The group perked right up at that, and one member even whipped out his flip phone and deftly flicked it open to show me the ’90s-esque keypad. Another, Robyn Moore, a Northeast Philly resident and sociology PhD candidate at the University of Maryland, gave me her email in case I wanted to learn more.

When I got her on the phone that weekend, she told me the group I’d seen was, indeed, not a typewriter-enthusiast group. They weren’t even all that organized. “That was our first meeting,” she confessed. Most of the attendees had met at a recent protest at City Hall and bonded over their frustrations with online community-building, among other technological gripes. Between misinformation, fears of surveillance, and the online arguments that I love observing so much, the former promise of the internet as a place for connection and knowledge seems to be fading, the group agrees, or maybe morphing into something much less promising. “We talked about ways we can diminish that sort of culture by building in-person communities and learning to rely on each other,” Moore said. “How can we work together to make sure that we’re taking care of each other and get away from the divides and battles that a lot of us are forced to reckon with online?”

In Moore’s own life, though, completely disconnecting isn’t the answer. While she has quit most online platforms out of disinterest and once even went on a long-term full social media blackout, she does currently own a smartphone. As she explains it, there are some uses for the digital world that shouldn’t be cast away — ­fostering our thirst for information and our human need for connection, or just looking at silly stuff — despite that world’s many, many flaws. Then again, Moore seems to have an inherent sense of restraint and discernment that not everyone possesses. It’s true that the tech titans are profit-driven, nearly omnipresent, and adept at reaffirming their inescapable role in our lives, but they also still operate at the mercy of the consumer. Perhaps tech needs to change, but we may not see that day come unless we change first. In the end, David managed to defeat Goliath, right?

In the meantime, I’ll keep scouring eBay for a particularly cute frog-shaped vintage landline phone I’ve had my eye on.

Published as “Is There Life After Smartphones?” in the April 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.