The Debt Ceiling, Anxiety, and the Unbearable Lightness of Screen Time

Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash

Last week I stuck a post-it note to the front of my phone that said, “What are you looking for?” The idea came from a podcast I listen to called Offline, which is in large part about what the internet is doing to our brains and our politics. But the hosts are also currently in the midst of a series of challenges meant to interrupt their smartphone addictions. These challenges include using a flip phone for a week, some mindfulness exercises, and ludicrously large and absurdly designed phone cases among other things. The post-it idea wasn’t even part of the challenge, but it was a recommendation from a listener and I took it to heart. 

The post-it note can say anything, and I chose the question on mine because it gets at the heart of something I’ve been thinking about for a while. When I am at my deepest doom scroll, it’s because I’m looking for a tweet or a post that’s going to make me feel better. After these posts go out on Monday mornings, I spend a lot of the day on the Substack dashboard, watching the view count inch upwards. When something goes wrong at work, I’ll find myself half way through a 10,000 word fanfic before I realize it. What am I looking for when I pick up my phone? And is it something my phone can actually give me? 

The post-it note lasted for about three hours. 

Perhaps it wasn’t the smartest idea to start really delving into my smartphone addiction in the weeks of debt ceiling negotiations leading up to the U.S. possibly defaulting on our debt and thus crashing the global economy. Or rather, it probably was just the right time to address my smartphone addiction, but it was also a bit like starting the game on the hardest level. 

The past month or so the debt ceiling has been like a glitch in my programming - a hyperfixation loop I got stuck in. I’d read a series of tweets about it, and feel my mood bottoming out, at once deeply anxious about the debt ceiling itself and unfairly resentful that no one else around me shared my fear. That’s how my anxiety works - not only am I worried, but I’ve so rationalized my worry that I’m at best baffled and at worst furious that no one around me is worried too. 

It’s not like there was nothing to worry about. Defaulting on our debt would have been pretty bad. In fact it would have made the 2008 financial crisis look small by comparison. But more than that it seemed like the kind of crisis designed in a lab to make me feel crazy - one that is somehow totally manufactured, easily solvable, potentially catastrophic and completely outside my control. Not only could I have no influence on the process, but I had no way of preparing for the worst outcome. For most people side-eyeing my outbursts, that was a reason not to worry about it, but for me that just makes it worse. 

Over the course of the debt ceiling negotiations, I found ways to mitigate my anxiety. As the Democratic infighting and caustic commentary got worse, I identified what I found most triggering, and deleted the newsletters without reading them, stayed away from the Twitter lists I’d made that were primarily politics driven. I muted Jake Sherman, the journalist whose transcript style Twitter play by plays of negotiation debriefs it turns out were the most likely to turn me into an irritated, phone obsessed witch on the way to brunch. I went back to using my Forest app, where you can set timers to keep you off your phone while a little virtual tree grows. If you pick up your phone before the timer goes off, the tree dies. 

And yet, still my screen time went up. 

Most of the apps on your phone are designed to feed this addiction. Ex-Google executive Tristan Harris describes your phone as a slot machine, with bright colors and lots of noises and dings to trigger brain chemicals that make you happy. Sometimes you get a reward, in the form of likes or comments or retweets. Not every time, but enough that you want to keep coming back, to get the stimulation and the validation and the distraction. And the more time you spend on the apps, the more ads they can feed you, the more data they can mine from you, the more money they can make. 

I’m afraid to leave Twitter. The more of it Elon Musk destroys, the weaker my case gets for staying on there. It’s no longer a vehicle to share my writing - Substack links barely work. The more people leave it, the harder it is to find new-to-me, interesting voices sharing perspectives I hadn’t heard before. But where else am I going to share thoughts with my 630 followers that are too vulnerable to share with my friends? Where else can you put a thought out into the void and have a minutely plausible daydream about it changing your life? Many of you reading this now found me because of connections I made on Twitter. But the likes, the retweets, the replies are like cotton candy - delicious in the moment, incredibly fragile, and ultimately unsatisfying. At best it provides a momentary boost that quickly fades - at worst it leaves me feeling like a grubby kid begging for attention until someone gives me a piece of candy to go away. 

We’re not supposed to get this much feedback from people. Our brains are not designed to take on this much input. Not only are there now several websites where it seems like I can find out if I’m funny enough or kind enough or interesting enough, there are also several websites where you can see your worst fears play out. You’re worried about asking your friend to help you move? There’s a tweet for that. Turns out there are plenty of people in the world reacting just like your anxious brain tells you someone might. I don’t think we’re supposed to know what millions of people might do in any given situation, the absolutes that govern their lives that absolutely do not apply to ours. Every once in a while someone feels the need to tell the internet the weird thing they do in the shower and then we have to talk about it for the next four days. Stop telling the internet what you do in the shower! You’re allowed to be weird in the shower.

In the same episode of Offline where the post-it note approach to screen time came up, Max Fisher, one of the hosts of the screen time challenge portion, talked about smartphone addiction not just as something to address in and of itself, but also as a symptom of something else. A friend of his says “it sounds like you don’t need a new phone, you need a new personality.” Did I come to my smartphone with the kind of neediness that feeds addiction, or did the phone create that in me? 

From everything I’ve said up to now, you might think that the biggest screen time culprit on my phone would be Twitter. And you would be wrong, though not as wrong as my phone’s screen time app thinks you would be. I have Twitter up on my laptop a lot, which is cheating. But the number one reason I get to my phone each week is almost always Archive of Our Own. This is a fanfic website where, yes, I like to read about characters from my favorite TV shows getting themselves into various romantic situations that will never make it on screen. And while I believe that fanfic is an incredibly valuable and interesting artform, and while I have read some of the best writing in my life on that website, that’s not always why I go there. I go there because, even more than the rest of my phone, it's an easy place to go when I’m anxious or tired, and where I know there’s a pretty decent chance of getting what I want. 

Social media and fanfic both come to me bright with possibility, but the kind you don’t have to work too hard for. The right combination of likes and retweets and maybe you can get a new career. My favorite fanfics are always rich with the kind of coming of age story we don’t often find for women in their 30s, the kind of life building that feels too precarious in the real world. Do I want to find new voices and new stories? Or do I want someone to tell me I’m special? To disappear into a world with all its edges smoothed out? Smartphones and social media prey on this vulnerability in the same way capitalism does - exploiting our discomfort, our fear, our anxiety, our insecurity to keep us scrolling in a vicious feedback loop where we keep looking for the thing that will make us feel better in the place that is making us feel worse. 

Of course there is still good stuff on the internet. I am a part of some incredible online communities using these tools to do good in the world. I have made some really great connections on social media, and I am eternally grateful for all of the readers I’ve found there. I’ve also shared some cool resources and I hope made politics more accessible for some folks by asking for attention for the things I care about. And more than anywhere else in the wide world of stories, I’ve found fanfics that teach me about myself, that let me look closer at things that might have once scared me. But I also spend a lot of time looking for the tweet that will make me feel better, looking for clues in celebrity instastories, reading mediocre fic because it’s less scary than my work email. And according to my screen time app there are several hours a day when I could be finding an answer to those questions if I’d just take some of my own time back. 

Last week, I asked myself on a post-it note “What are you looking for?” But I didn’t give myself a lot of time to answer the question. Maybe this week I’ll try again.