Before the pandemic, my screen time report was respectable. At the gym, I wouldn’t listen to anything at all. Maybe I’m a psycho but it felt better, simpler, to just lift. I often left my phone in the apartment on short errands. No push notifications. I didn’t yet have Twitter.
Covid broke me. Well, covid, residency, and a looming career change. Uncertainty swelled and slowly, tediously, inevitably, I found solace in the dopamine trance of repeated Google searches of Oklahoma Sooners Football and Short-Squeeze Stocks. By 2021, I was in Twitter’s clutches. My screen time report went to the moon.
My mother recently gifted me The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. The book synthesizes what I experienced while working at child and adolescent psychiatry clinics into a sensical, petrifying narrative of how smartphones and social media have decimated Gen Z’s mental health (and what to do about it). As I flipped its pages, I couldn’t help but consider how much life and community we’ve sacrificed to arrive here. I grieved for 2010.
Last Friday, my wife and I walked to town for a beer. I felt inspired to leave my phone at home. Saturday morning, on our weekly pilgrimage for coffee, I left it again. No lie, just like that, it was 2010 again. Unfettered. Untempted. Engrossed in normalcy.
Come Sunday night, I didn’t pull up a podcast to accompany me as I cooked. Instead, I was called to pull down a cookbook from our cabinet. Why precisely, I don’t know, but that single act of searching through a cookbook for a venison recipe was enlivening beyond measure. It felt like my life used to: enough in itself.
Then, I just cooked.
To livin’ a life we love,
Ryan Fightmaster, MD