This Screentime Experiment Is Not Working Out
“An egg became more famous than the Pope. A highly contagious virus raged through West Africa. A billionaire poured a bucket of ice on his head. A fashion brand exploited East Asian sweatshop workers. A young woman recorded all the times she was catcalled. Two African Americans were killed by the police. A man went around filming first kisses. A plane vanished en route to Beijing. A woman was beautiful. An apartment full of plants was beautiful. A vegan quiche was beautiful. A child needed money for chemo. Time disappeared.” - Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection
If our lives had a "Spotify Wrapped" at the end, the numbers would be astonishing. My current screentime average is seven hours daily. Starting from year zero (for simple math) with Cocomelon, that adds up to 23 years of lifetime screen time. Imagine getting a one-minute explanation of your life, plus a data-driven breakdown of how you spent it. The verdict? "You spent roughly a third of your life on Instagram." Shame.
But if one cut out just an hour of screentime daily, you would have three extra years with which to do something with. You would write a book. Two books. You would live out stories you could put into two books.
It would be okay, even excusable, if this time were spent on enriching pursuits on a screen, such as watching the Cliburn piano finals, reading Dante, learning French on Duolingo, or even chatting on the family WhatsApp. But no, that attention is sacrificed to the gods of “a hodgepodge of random entertainment created by other people.”
And I think this is our biggest problem. We know that our phones can make people depressed, young and old alike, as reflected both in research and anecdotal evidence. But their use also comes at an opportunity cost. In Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that a key limiting factor to said abundance is the fact that we are grappling with problems caused by the last generation’s solutions to their problems (see OECA). The onus is on us young folks to come up with new solutions, but for whatever reason, we’ve been gridlocked. Too busy posting our vacations on Instagram Stories perhaps? More focused on our pet conspiracy theories than preventing inclement weather. As a man once said, “Sad.”
The phones have contributed to our economic growth, you say? But the trade-off is they’ve stunted our personal and collective growth. And I would argue that they are a reason we’ve been in a perpetual state of cultural stagnation, too busy fighting performative wars online to move forward on any of our biggest challenges, such as changing weather patterns, declining fertility rates, political polarization, and loneliness - that old chestnut. In many cases, they have only exacerbated those challenges. And, at least in the short term, pervasive AI won’t help.
Meanwhile, a few people have become very wealthy by pocketing your time. Attention robber barons, getting fat off the Internet, are in the nation’s highest seats and more.
I am not moralizing here. I’m not your nanny or mother. Do what you want with your hours on earth. In fact, I am an investor in some social media companies. Please spend your time on those if you must. But I can tell you what has stopped me personally from playing the doomscroll slot machine, and it’s actually the same thing that stopped writer Michael Easter.
In a recent Andrew Huberman episode where he hosted Easter, Easter described a sort of test casino where anyone from gambling companies to an unnamed tech company can test out the Pavlovian response of product gamification. I’m still shocked and not entirely sure that this place exists; But is that what you want from your wild and precious life — to fall for variable rewards?
Like yourself, I have goals. I have a job and would also like to write a book. And although I may not be your mother, I am someone’s. I use Clearspace to block my Internet addiction and set up peer pressure systems in order to prevent me from wasting my life on TikTok. Clearspace turns gamification on its head and uses it to reduce the time you spend in the app casino. Using the tools of addiction against themselves. The reason I pay for it instead of the many competitors is that it actually worked for me. It worked so well I ended up investing in the company through my fund Dream Machine.
The founders, Royce Branning and Oliver Hill, like to describe Clearspace as the "Ozempic for screen time," and it is an apt comparison, for anyone who has experienced it; food noise and phone noise are almost indistinguishable. Just like the American diet is obesogenic, the American information diet is ADHDogenic. However, I think Clearspace is more like Anduril for screen time, attention defense tech in the war for your attention. It’s hard to fight dopamine.
The company is generating revenue and has tens of thousands of users, including Diplo, harbinger of a broader cultural shift in this direction. They recently launched a Screentime Social Network that allows users to compete in heats for who has the least amount of screentime in a day. This is a no-brainer for me: spend an hour less on Twitter/X and spend an hour more with your kid.
Clearspace has already started tackling one of the biggest challenges of our time, “terraforming the digital landscape,” in the founders’ words, turning the online environment into a place that benefits rather than harms us. The rest of us should follow suit, and maybe if we use Clearspace, we can recoup the hours to. Whatever you want to see in your “Life Wrapped,” I bet you could choose better than an algorithm. What would you do with three extra years?