The Real Reason We Struggle With Screen Time

DEA / A. DAGLI ORTI/De Agostini/Getty Images Does anyone have a truly healthy relationship with their phone? I don’t see much evidence of it out there. Personally, the phone is undeniably useful but still feels like a foreign object in my hand — a feeling that was brought into stark relief the second my kids were old enough to pick up a screen. To them, a tablet or phone offers an enticing, comforting, and even productive space. Not healthy, exactly, but familiar. For me, it’s alien — and ground zero for a cultural battle against brain rot, attention loss, and reality itself. Phones stress me out. I ran into a much needed perspective on this dilemma in a long, thoughtful essay by Karl Ove Knausgaard , the brilliant Norwegian writer with an uncanny ability to see the world as it is, in meticulous detail. My struggle, as he helped me to see, comes from those most influential years in my life — the years before the smartphone. “To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty, Napoleon is supposed to have said,” writes Knausgaard in Harper’s Magazine . “The quotation is probably apocryphal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.” My Napoleonic prime was in the 2000s — shortly after the advent of Facebook, but right before the iPhone was in everyone’s hands. For Knausgaard, who is 56 years old, the internet barely existed in his twenties. He admits that he has been ignoring the fundamental influences of such technological advances since. “Not…