A Decade's Worth

The price I paid for ten years of smartphone use, and why I'm not despairing over it.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to be a writer. As a child, I used to fill journals with stories, which began as badly written mashups of books I loved, with myself and my friends inserted as characters. It was, all and all, jolly good fun. As time went by, I began to create my own characters and worlds inside those journals and notebooks. Maps were drawn and backstories imagined. I spent hours inside the worlds I created (RIP to the fairy tale retellings I started and never finished).

Just over a decade ago, when I turned eighteen, my birthday present was permission to get an iPhone. Not an actual iPhone itself, but permission to get one. I knew this had been coming, and I’d saved up the funds to get the phone itself. My dad got his first smartphone when I did, and we shared a phone plan for some time.

I’d be lying if I said the hours of writing I’d spent as a child and adolescent disappeared overnight with the advent of my iPhone. The truth was, those hours had slowly been fading away from me for a few years already. I got Facebook when I was fifteen, and I spent plenty of time chatting with my friends via Facebook messages.

But the door that had previously been closing slowly now shut with a loud thud the minute I got my iPhone. My free time was consumed by the vivid, incessant worlds of Snapchat and Instagram. I put aside writing, thinking my story ideas were childish and my dream of being a writer couldn’t fit inside the persona and career trajectory I’d been designing for myself.

Instead of being consumed by creativity—as I’d been for years of my life—I was consumed by anxiety. Snapchat did a number on my mental health, primarily because of the ability to see when someone had opened a message and hadn’t responded. I was constantly posting and checking my notifications on Instagram, addicted to the thrill of getting thirty likes on a post. I don’t know what my screen time was like back then, but I imagine it was somewhere in the 7-8 hour range on a daily basis. Things were bleak, but I couldn’t fathom not being connected to everyone I knew on such a constant basis.

And yet something had to change, and soon.

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Rock Bottom

I reclaimed a sliver of my life when I deleted the Snapchat app off my phone. At this point, I’d been at college for a bit, and I’d made friends—friends with whom I realized I would much rather spend time with face-to-face than worrying about whether or not my friends from high school would respond to my Snapchat. My anxiety dramatically decreased almost overnight. And yet I still spent probably between 4-6 hours a day on my phone, texting my friends and still hooked on Instagram.

During my junior year of college, I wound up with a serious case of carpal tunnel syndrome. This actually helped me detox from my phone significantly: if I texted too much, or even held my phone for too long, my wrist hurt like the dickens, sending what felt like shooting sparks through my hand and down my arm, all the way into my shoulder. Carpal tunnel also messed with my mental health because it messed with my career plans of playing flute in a professional orchestra.

By the time I went home for the summer, I was a shell of myself. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, and I didn’t know who I was apart from music. Other events in my personal life transpired that also shook me deeply during that year, and I sunk deep into depression.

essentially me when I went home that summer, except I was 21 and I don’t think I was a burden on my family lol

That summer, I spent the first few weeks moping. In all fairness, I had a year left of a flute performance degree that felt almost useless with an injury like carpal tunnel, and while I wasn’t facing mounds of college debt, I was still facing several thousand dollars’ worth of it. It was enough to make anyone question all their life choices up to that point.

And yet something deeper was wrong. I didn’t know who I was anymore. Worse yet, I didn’t know where to look for her.

My mom knew, though.

I was sitting at our kitchen table, (probably) scrolling on Instagram, when my mom came in carrying a pile of loose papers and notebooks. She plopped them down in front of me.

“Look what I found,” she said.

I began looking through them. These were all my old stories, stories I’d forgotten about almost entirely.

My mom sat down next to me and took my hands in hers.

“You need to write again.”

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The Slow Incline

By the middle of my senior year of college, I’d reached a place where I felt, personally, that I was in a reasonably healthy place with my phone. Sure, I still spent about 4 hours a day on it, but it wasn’t killing my mental health like it was before. And besides, I was creating again. After my mom had encouraged me to start writing again, I’d taken her seriously. I was working on one of my abandoned stories, mostly during my shifts at the campus library, and it felt so good to create in this way again.

At the same time, another branch was growing—an offshoot of my love for writing, growth I never expected to find. After taking a life-changing class on moral theology, I’d decided to minor in theology, bitterly regretting that I hadn’t discovered my love for it sooner so I could have double majored in it. I took classes on Mariology through history, marriage and family life, and American Catholic history. All these classes required significant amounts of writing. Much to my surprise, I began to love this kind of writing. I loved writing about theology, about the faith, about God. And I honestly wanted to do more of it.

Then Covid hit, and I found myself going to grad school for music, and my days of taking theology classes were over. But God placed a new avenue for writing about the faith: Instagram. I won’t write up all that happened there here, because I already wrote about that in my series on Catholic influencer culture. But I will add to it here: I’m grateful to have been able to write about my love for the faith, even in short, pithy captions, and have had so many people come across it. Catholic influencers can be helpful or harmful, but often times both in spite of best efforts, for reasons that can only be summed up by the word humanity. I hope that I have been more helpful than harmful.

This year, I finally began taking my dreams of writing far more seriously, spurred by the radically clarifying nature of motherhood. If I only have so much time, what is worth doing with it?

So here we are, and I’ve been writing a book. You can read more about that here and here. In doing so, I’ve kept social media apps largely off my phone for the vast majority of this calendar year. Why? Because as much as I want to say I’ve got self control, the truth of the matter is that these apps are highly addictive, and in most cases, I would go so far to say as they are brutally effective at destroying creativity (a piece about that is coming soon).

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Time Lost & Found

When I look back at the past ten years of having an iPhone, I find myself filled with a lot of regret, and a lot of desperate hope that God can somehow redeem the time lost. There are no guarantees with life, and I’m just grateful that the Lord gave me the chance to see that the creative life is worth fighting addiction for.

I wish I could go back and tell my eighteen year old self that her stories weren’t stupid and that continuing to write would make her a better, more well-rounded, increasingly fulfilled person. But I can’t, and I can’t let myself taste the regret or else I will inevitably wallow in it. And then what good does that do? I’d rather give the regret over to God and keep striving to live a creative life, than to continue to not create because I’m wallowing in how I wasted time and didn’t create.

Yet at the same time, I can look at the decade’s worth of snapping, scrolling, and fretting as a blessing for the here and now. I can see that the regret I choose not to carry can become fuel for the future. I feel more motivated because of the time lost: I did not create the way I should have back then, but I can do it now.

Recently I’ve been reading (ahem, devouring) a book called The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, by Jason M. Baxter.¹ The medieval conception of time is addressed at one point in this book, and when I read it, I actually felt more hopeful about the time I’ve wasted scrolling over the last ten years (2.1 years, to be exact—I did the rough math).

“Time, as it were, is almost a “parody” of eternity, a “hopeless attempt to compensate for the transitoriness of its ‘presents’ by infinitely multiplying them. God, of course, is not perpetual, but eternal. And so, what, in time, is spread out over an infinite number of moments, can be found gathered into a full and simultaneous perfection in God.”²

In the end, time—no matter how it was spent—will be redeemed. This by no means is license for us to do whatever we please with our time, without regard for the short or long term consequences our actions have on our hearts, minds, souls, bodies, and neighbors. Our actions carry weight, and there is no escaping that reality. However, the medieval view of time lends a sense of hope—a hope that God can and will redeem all of time in His infinite perfection.

Please, please, please. Don’t spend your one, beautiful, precious life scrolling away, living vicariously through other people’s content. Look up: Behold, God is doing a new thing.³ Don’t miss what He’s doing in your life right now—don’t miss what He wants to do in your life—because you’re too busy watching other things through a screen.

You and I were made for so much more than the grayness of life on screens.

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This is the first essay in a series of essays I plan to write on social media, modern life, and creativity. Next up & coming soon: what are today’s enemies of creativity, and how do we effectively combat them?

1. I don’t think I could recommend this book enough, it’s so good. It sheds so much light on how C.S. Lewis thought. His medieval scholarliness directly impacted the way he wrote theology and fiction, and I feel like now I can approach his works with a better understanding of him as an author.

2. Jason M. Baxter, The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis, 28.

3. Isaiah 43:19: “Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.”