"Screen Sober"

Or, Why I Can't Put My Phone Down

Aug 19, 2024

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The irony of putting this in a format that can only be read on a screen does not escape me, but here we go anyway...

From January to June, Jonny and I ran this household experiment we coined “screen sober.” The ground rule? No watching screens for entertainment. Which was splicing it thin when it comes to screen use. Could we use our smartphones for any entertainment, like listening to podcasts or music? We settled on yes for both of those. Watching videos to complete a project—like fixing the dishwasher or cooking—was declared “not entertainment.” So what were we actually avoiding? Podcast streams, real-time strategy video games, Facebook videos of terrible dad jokes. Movie trailers, Instagram reels, sketch comedy shorts on Youtube. I could go on, but you already get it. We were avoiding the pretense of infinite variety offered by our tiny screens—the activities that mostly boil down to staring and tapping.

Going “screen sober” for those six months prompted the question: what is it, exactly, that we’ve been using these screens for?

And the short answer is… story.

Three days into the “Screen Sober” experiment, Jonny curled up on the brown couch in our living room, eyes closed and hands pressed to his temples, and declared: “I am craving narrative.”

This caught me off guard, because the main thing he was giving up by going screen sober was Age of Empires (or AOE). AOE is a real time strategy video game that riffs off history in some fun ways—each player is a real empire, and each empire has bonuses related to historical facts (e.g., the Huns don’t need houses, and Byzantines build great walls). I hadn’t made the connection between video games and narrative before—mostly because I’ve never really played them (does cheating in Zoo Tycoon to get infinite money and then getting bored enough to let lions loose in a mega zoo count?).

My perspective on video games has shifted a lot in the last nine years. I’ve moved from “what a waste of time” to “I’m not in charge of his screen time.” Without that particular change, something like “Screen Sober” would have been a lot less like a game and a lot more like torture. Also, video games now strike me as somewhat different from the “scroll n’ binge” because players must make time-sensitive decisions, ask questions, and explore.¹ But I didn’t understand the link between video games and story until I saw Jonny on the couch: of course video games are narrative experience for the player. The player is a character.

Narrative—the movement from beginning, to middle to end, the conflict/resolution pattern—is not just something we like, it’s something we need. I need stories for reassurance, especially when I can’t find the narrative threads in my own life—or when I can find them, but I really don’t like how the story is going. And screens immerse all of us in narrative in this engrossing and remarkably easy way.

So what’s the problem? If we need narrative, and it’s easy to find it on a screen…

It’s good to find refuge in narrative—in stories, songs, games, and the like. This is an act of hope. But if something is easy to access, it’s easy to overuse. Jonny and I were difficult subjects in the “screen sober” experiment. We tried this for six months. And it took a whole month for either of us to break into double-digit days of not using screens for entertainment. Just after Lent started, I remember flopping down on the couch with a bowl of chocolate chips and starting to flip through a series of Civil War trailers when it hit me: “This is probably what we were talking about when we said ‘screens for entertainment.’” So I re-set my count to “Day 0.” Jonny had a streak of 81 days in there. But avoiding screens was constantly a disciplined effort.

We’ve shelved that experiment (for now—I’m exploring my e-ink phone options, though), so the relevant question has become: how much is too much?

I’m going to let St. Francis de Sales take that one:

“Sports, balls, festivities, display, the drama, in themselves are not necessarily evil things, but rather indifferent, and capable of being used or abused. Nevertheless, there is always danger in these things, and to care for them is much more dangerous. Therefore I should say that although it is lawful to amuse yourself, to dance, dress, hear good plays, and join in society, yet to be attached to such things is contrary to devotion and extremely hurtful and dangerous. The evil lies not in doing the thing, but in caring for it.” (Introduction to the Devout Life)

Don’t hear me saying Francis de Sales would look at how we’re using smartphones and say, “This is fine.” I think it’s worth noting that everything he mentioned in that paragraph would have been done in a group rather than alone.² That said, “it is lawful to amuse yourself…” but what are the limits? Discerning that means contemplating the difference between “doing the thing” and “caring for it.” And a helpful question to me in that line of thought is: are the stories I’m watching getting in the way of the stories I want to live? In Jonny’s case, real-time-strategy resource management games are enthralling because… well, let me just show you a picture of the garage:

Part of getting married to him was accepting that I would never, ever park in a garage

He loves to build things. So video games that present the challenge of using resources in a creative way to win are appealing. And could a person do both? Build and play video games? Well, sure. But he can’t build a beehive WHILE playing AOE.

Top Bar beehives — Queens Lucy (foreground hive) and Buzz Buzz (background hive) have adjusted well to their palaces

In April, I was holding my sleeping baby and flicking through photos. Yes, when I’m trying not to watch videos on my phone, I flick through the library of photos instead because I am weak. I suddenly realized that I was holding my baby in one arm and looking at a picture of the same baby on the phone in my other hand—it wasn’t even an older picture. It was taken the day before. I think he was in the same clothes. I sat there for a minute, in “Real Baby/Phone Baby” dissonance, as the reality of my attachment surfaced: I’m asking this thing for something it can’t give me.

I do that with screens all the time.

I ask the group chat for something it can’t give me when I check it instead of interacting with the people nearby.

I ask YouTube for something it can’t give me when I watch sketch after sketch, staving off sadness that must, at some point, be felt.

I ask my email inbox for something it can’t give me when I refresh, and refresh, waiting for evidence that I’m a real writer now.

The danger is not in amusement or information or a grocery pickup order—the danger is in looking for more than that. It’s in the habit of logging on to find the story the screen can’t possibly give me.

1 For extra fun, check this out: Liel Leibovitz puts some super fascinating words to the difference between video games and other screen media in a (not recent, still good) First Things article: The Godliness of Gaming by Liel Leibovitz | Articles | First Things.

2 A roomful of people playing Super Smash Bros, family movie night, or even a scattered group of souls watching Dune 2 in the same auditorium are just plain different than the Lonely Scroll—at least, I think I think that.

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