Screens

We’re wrapping up the Time section this week. The outline is: Time vs. Money, Control of Your Time, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and Screens (this one).

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From the time I was young, up through my college years, I visited my Dad’s dad regularly. In my experience, Grandpa Marty had always been retired, had always lived in the same house in Norman, Oklahoma, and had always had a large console TV in his family room which was on all his waking hours.

I really disliked the constant distraction of that TV, and the effort of talking over it for any conversation. The same thing happens when we go to restaurants now that have TVs mounted high on the walls. It’s so hard to focus on conversation with the people around me over the distraction of the flickering screens in the background. My attention is magnetically drawn from where it should be, on living breathing people, to the ever present TV screen.

It was largely that experience with Grandpa Marty’s big ol’ TV that led a few years later to my decision with Sheila that we would raise our kids without TV. Not just carefully selecting what TV they watch. No TV. That was such a good decision.

Our first child was born in 1995, and the first iPhone came out in 2007. Sean got his first smart phone when he was a junior in high school. Coincidentally, that’s the age that Jonathan Haidt¹ recommends now for a child’s first access to social media. So, by a happy accident of timing, and not by any virtue or discipline on our parts, our children were protected from the worst effects of screen addiction while their young brains were forming.

A few years later, I pre-ordered the first iPad. I got the version with the cellular radio so that I could use it outside the house, and surprised myself by becoming a man who carries a purse so that I could have it with me everywhere. I had an iPhone, too. The gateway drug of smart phones took me from no TV in my house to carrying two little screens on my person everywhere I went. I flattered myself that I was researching and learning and writing with my iPad, developing my brain. Looking back, I think the truth is that I was morphing into a passive person spending all my time staring at those screens.

I began ‘rehab’ in 2022, by giving up my iPad. I told myself that I would see if I could go a year without replacing it. As I write this in 2026, I still haven’t replaced it, but I still yearn for it. I have continued to carry an iPhone, and I still spend too much time looking into screens. But in the last few years, I have added this line to my Rule of Life: “Become again a man who does things.” Which is short for: Start using my shop again to make and fix things. Get out in the world and talk to people face-to-face. Move my body more. Find ways to exercise that are social. Travel. Explore. Adventure. My struggle to withdraw myself from screens is ongoing, and I am happy to report some progress.

I recently underlined this sentence in Leif Enger’s novel I Cheerfully Refuse.

“And sure, of course Lark and I had media once -- internet, TV, the vivid suspect world delivered secondhand, ready always to predict our moods and sell us better ones -- but we were early abandoners.”

My wisdom for you, won through hard experience, is this: be an abandoner.

Prefer activity in the world to passivity in front of screens.

Use all the tricks in all the books to handicap your screen’s ability to suck you in.²

Maximize the time you spend playing outdoors with your children and your friends.

Do everything you can to delay and minimize your children’s use of screens.

1. Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, (Penguin Press, 2024).

2. There’s a list of 20 suggestions in the Slowing chapter of John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry that is solid gold. Some of them have to do with turning your smart phone into a dumb phone.