2025-08-13 – News – www.theguardian.com
I was looking for liberation from the apps, but quitting them only made my life harder and turned me into a man obsessed
I unlocked my iPhone screen at the precise moment that my weekly screen time notification appeared – accidentally dismissing it before I could take a screenshot – and promptly erupted into a rage. I had spent an excruciating week resolutely not looking at my phone, part of a month-long effort to whittle my daily screen time down from more than four hours a day to less than an hour, with the hope of improving my mental wellbeing (and possibly carving out a career as an inspirational speaker). But my efforts felt futile without being able to post evidence online about how offline I had become. I frantically Googled how to retrieve notifications (you cannot) and – briefly – considered re-creating my screen time report in Photoshop.
Over the past decade or two, my efforts at self-improvement have taken various forms: the year where I read 105 books; the period…
