Should I Enforce That?

The kids aren’t allowed to have phones at school. So when they have free time, they draw on notecards, write in journals, play hangman on the board. They tell stories from Cotillion and build tiny fishing rods out of broken pencils. They draw caricatures and write poems and throw erasers, put tape on their noses, make little paper hats. They are loud and annoying, wonderful and creative, they are living.  

But the field trip to New Orleans, or the three-day fair weekend, I see the kids huddled into the same groups I see at school, eyes glued to phones, drama spreading virally on Snapchat. 

My students are just teenagers – messy, emotional, wild and silly, lacking self-control and confidence, still genuinely sweet and funny.

Of course we’re worried about them. Their emotions. Their attention spans. Those insidious computers in their pockets, the traitorous mind-wiring devices we call iPhones, that we clutch like external pacemakers and non-oral benzos, that we pretend are essential devices we need to operate in a modern world: cameras, flashlights, calendars.  

One of my most precious students, who is kind to everyone and creative and hardworking, who is funny and gentle, wrote in her journal about her mom. She wrote that her mom is her best friend, and also that she is left out and has no friends at dance because her mom won’t let her have Snapchat.

There is an Ugly Good to all parts of life. I don’t have children, but I see a little slice, eight hours a day, of how hard it is to teach them how to live. How hard it is to balance affection and discipline, and how often kids confuse love and leniency.  

It must be hard to tell your child they can’t have something everyone else seems to have. It must feel villainous when they say that your rules prevent them from having friends, that your decisions have made them an outcast.  

I had a parent conference this year, where I told a mom that her son was a natural leader, who is outgoing and well-spoken and personable, confident and empathetic. But of course, he’s a fourteen-year-old boy. He’s a total goofball, a constant instigator. 

“We don’t know how much pressure to put on him,” she said. It’s a completely reasonable concern; half these kids are hiding injuries so they can keep playing sports. But she said, “We don’t let him bring the phone upstairs, but he does it anyway. Should I enforce that?”

I tried to keep my face neutral. Of course you have to enforce that! I wanted to say. If you set a boundary you have to hold the line! I know this myself, because I have 30 of them at once. And while it may seem easy to sigh and let your one teenage child break the rules, it’s a problem when they come to my class of thirty and think I don’t mean it when I say, “You can’t use your Chromebook right now. Stop stealing things off other people’s desks. You can’t throw stuff in here. Don’t try to blame someone else. The only answer I need is yes ma’am.”

I told her, instead, that phones are bad. More eloquently than that. And she seemed genuinely surprised as I explained about dopamine addiction. She admitted that she uses her phone a lot, but she has to because all of her work is on her phone. She wore blue scrubs, embroidered with a logo I didn’t recognize.

We act like it’s just young people with the problems. The fourteen-year-olds. But for eight hours, they’re prohibited from their phones. Not us, we’re grown. As if unlike the middle schoolers, we’re capable of regulating our screen addictions. As if humans have a handle on pocket technology at all. In Makari Espe’s How I Cut My Screentime by 80%, she does a three-week phone detox with her dad. At the start of the project, her average daily screen time is four hours. Her dad’s is eight.  

Eight hours gambling – gambling with his time and attention on an infinite roulette wheel of content, that spins and spins and never ponies up. 

He's retired, and unstructured time is the enemy. All of your addictions are waiting for those moments in between, when you sit back and sigh and realize how much you want a cigarette, or a slice of cake, or a few Instagram Reels. 

Permit me to use my teacher voice: Let’s check our screen time. Are you spending hours on Google Maps? Email? Or is that four-hour screen time clock spent on TikTok and Snapchat and YouTube and Instagram and maybe even still Facebook? On Twitter-now-called-X? 

Do you need that? Does it help you? Is it a benzo or is it on the payroll of your anxiety and depression? 

Many people think teaching middle school is unbearable. It’s hard and annoying and exhausting, but the kids are alright. We’re still kind of watching them, making sure they’re on the right track.  

But these eighteen, nineteen, twenty year olds? Freed into the world with unlimited egos and internet access? They’re the ones I’m really worried about. They have access to all information and think that makes them experts.  

They’ve watched a TikTok about racism and think they know what it feels like to experience. They think they can speak for anyone. They think, that because the abyss of the internet wants to listen to them, everyone in real life does, too. 

All of us, not just Gen Z, need our phones taken away for eight hours, so we can all go back to reading and writing. But since we no longer have parents or teachers looking over our shoulders at our screen time widgets, we must enforce restrictions on ourselves, and that is an exercise in self-love that few are equipped to complete. 

So then, are we hopeless? How can we enforce dopamine detox, screen-time restrictions, radical self-love?  

We are simply lacking the necessary equipment, and that is not a hopeless problem. For although I cannot squat 185 pounds today, science and experience tell me that with four months of effort, I can improve my quads to achieve that goal. And I say our inability to set down our phones for long periods is a problem of concentration, a weakness in our tattered attention spans. Okay, you may think, I need to improve my brain. No. You need to improve your heart.  

In The Inner Game of Tennis, Timothy Gallwey asks, “How do you increase your ability to maintain concentration on the ball for long periods of time?” 

And, as everything always does, the answer comes back to love. 

“Indian yogis in particular,” Gallwey writes, “have recognized the power of love in overcoming distraction of mind.” 

When do you put your phone down for hours? What makes you leave your phone unattended in the other room? Or are the best things in your life, the unwavering objects of your attention, really just Instagram and TikTok? 

Unfortunately, some people’s lives truly are that dark. Especially for young adults who may not have the financial or physical freedom to escape their daily sufferings and misfortunes. And if there were no phone and no computer, maybe things would be worse for them, maybe they would have nothing at all, just undiluted anxiety and depression. I don’t mean to say I don’t understand; of course I see the balm of digital dopamine on a lonely mind and the desperation of a young adult in a tiny town on the edge of Texas.

But once they have survived, they deserve more than a phone addiction.

Gallwey continues, “Bhakti yoga teaches that love of the object of concentration makes it possible to focus one's attention without wavering, and eventually to become one with that object.” Do we really want to become one with the heat-forged aluminum unibody of the iPhone 17? Apple Intelligence can’t love you back. 

The more hours we spend glued to our tiny Ceramic Shield screens, the more we love them. Because love is a choice. The TikToks you watch become who you are. One of my students, age fourteen, recently and loudly said, “White is right!” when choosing sides in chess. 

“Don’t ever say that again,” I snapped at him, and he stared, wide-eyed in shock, at my disgusted expression. He didn’t know what it meant! I’ve always considered him a good kid. But apparently, for three hours every night, he’s watching TikToks made by white supremacists. 

How can we possibly trust algorithms to give our children media? How can we trust their moral development to an unmitigated minefield of extremism? 

New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka’s book Filterworld describes algorithms:

Designed and maintained by the engineers of monopolistic tech companies, and running on data that we users continuously provide by logging in each day, the technology is both constructed by us and dominates us, manipulating our perceptions and attention. The algorithm always wins.

“How long do you spend on TikTok each day?” I asked a few of my students.  

“Three hours,” said a mouthy motocross racer. 

“Five hours,” said a football player with a 3.9 GPA.  

“My screentime is nine hours,” said a pitcher whose parents are in a custody battle. 

Nine hours. And she’s at school for eight hours a day with no phone. The algorithm dominates, manipulates, and it always wins. 

Chayka provides the radical solution to The Age of Enshittification in his column Infinite Scroll: “One underrated exit strategy for those weary of enshittification is opting out: we users can bail on platforms that commodify our passive participation and give us little in return.” 

It may not be easy, but it is simple: delete the apps. 

I believe Chayka’s solution – mass exodus – is the only one. There is no halfway with addiction.

Cause it’s never “just a little” when you’re an alcoholic. My brother could never have a six pack in his fridge without finishing it, and I can’t have Instagram on my phone without scrolling it. I’ll say it’s just to check my DMs. Just to post my monthly photo dump. Just to watch my best friend’s stories. Then, I’m tired and stressed, don’t want to start dinner, and sixty minutes deep in Instagram Reels. 

The problem, maybe, is that I remember a better time. When there was no infinite scroll, and my Instagram feed was just ten heavily filtered photos of my friends’ horses. I am not the only one with lingering nostalgia; in Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore, Chayka writes, “I have been trying to recall the times I’ve had fun online unencumbered by anonymous trolling, automated recommendations, or runaway monetization schemes.” 

But, like Altoids Sours and mixtapes, that app is gone. We’re in the third act of enshittification – when “the company turns the user experience into ‘a giant pile of shit,’ making the platform worse for users and businesses alike in order to further enrich the company’s owners and executives” (Chayka) – and the only solution is to pull out before the shit’s in your lungs.  

My heart breaks for a 20 year old girl I’ll call Ashleigh, who posted on Reddit, Severe Phone Addiction, Help me save my life: 

I can’t even spend my free time to watch even a movie or play a video game, or cook for myself, all I want is to mindlessly scroll. It’s affected my family life, my social life, and my work. I feel like the ideal Guinea pig for the future of the meta verse, and that’d soon I’d be okay with wearing a headset and eating bugs. I want to cut my phone out of my life, and live like i used to, before it’s too late. 

Ashleigh was probably handed a phone before the age of formal operation; her brain was literally incapable of abstract, systematic, and reflective thinking until she turned 11. And now, after years of scrolling without the ability to reason out possible consequences, she can’t live. Save my life, she writes, screaming back into the void of the internet in the desperate hope that an antidote will emerge from the endless poison. 

The more we consume the brain-melting slop, the number we become to the parts of life we are supposed to care about. Chayka explains this degradation of our brains in Filterworld: 

The dopamine rushes become inadequate, and the noise and speed of the feeds overwhelming. Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces nothingness, that blankets and soothes rather than challenges and surprises, as powerful artwork is meant to do. Our capacity to be moved, or even to be interested or curious, is depleted. 

Do you understand how desperate the situation is? Not only are these enshittified social media algorithms teaching children to be racist and homophobic, they are blinding, deafening, and numbing us, destroying our ability to enjoy anything. When we’re so deeply enshitted that we can’t watching movies, play games, or cook for ourselves – like Ashleigh – and we can’t even take the antidote! Once our curiosity and attention are disabled, we are indisposed to consuming art. The infinite regurgitation of data-driven content that taught my student to repeat hate speech and destroyed a young girl’s life — its antidote is art. Art made by humans. Books, especially: the antithesis of dopamine overdose, words printed on a monochrome page. 

I’m not saying it’s easy. I can’t squat 185 pounds. But maybe today, when you want to scroll, you take a nap. Tomorrow you take out the trash. And in a few weeks, you take that copy of Fahrenheit 451 off the shelf and tackle the list of 100 great books you’ve always wanted to read.

I am no misanthrope, not even a pessimist; I believe if humans could grasp this terror — that screens are destroying our ability to consume art — we wouldn’t just be deleting the apps. There would be campaigns outshining anti-vaping. There would be acronyms like S.A.R.E. and M.A.S.M., classes like The Care and Keeping of You(r Phone). 

But we’re not there, and that’s understandable given the novelty of this threat. So we’re back to radical rejection. Delete the apps. 

And then, when they’re gone, there will be a gaping hole in your life. Depending on the severity of your screen addiction, that hole may be five hours wide; it may be the size of the language you’ve wanted to learn for years, or all the books on your TBR list, the guitar you haven’t touched since high school, or the 8-hour sleep that has long become fantasy. 

If you’re going to resist that cloud-shaped redownload button, you need to fill the void. With something you love. 

Even after deleting all the apps off his phone, the addict will still find himself picking up its contoured aluminum body and staring into its glowing Super Retina display. To look at what? The Home Screen, the Photos app, emails. Anything he can gamble his attention on, betting on that next dopamine hit. Because it now, then, always, comes back to love. 

You must love something more than the phone.  

After he talks about yoga in The Inner Game of Tennis, Gallwey gets back to the ball. The instructions are radical: 

Forget for a moment that it is a tennis ball and look freshly at its shape, its texture, its feel. . . . Make friends: do anything to start a relationship with it. . . .When there is love present, the mind is drawn irresistibly toward the object of love. It is effortless and relaxed, not tense and purposeful. 

The tennis ball, in its absurd mundanity, is the perfect object of love. It will not dominate or manipulate you. Do not think it impossible to love such a boring object; Gallwey could not write about the ball so tenderly if he did not love it. “…notice the fine patterns made by the nap,” he urges. “Consider the inside of the ball…” The tennis ball is hollow inside; no lithium-ion batteries, no algorithm, no corporation-enriching shit-heap. 

The greatest, most radical act of self-love you can commit in this modern life is boredom. If you’re bored, like the students stuck in my classroom at 3:15 on a late bus day, you can invent a new type of baseball. Drain an entire ink pen blacking out a sheet of loose leaf. Cut open a stress ball, staple your fingers together, stick lead in a charging port and start a fire, make soap angels on the bathroom floor. 

Do something, anything — loud and annoying or wonderful and creative — that’s more like being alive. 

When Ashleigh asked for help on Reddit, she said she wanted to “live like i used to.” I wonder if she ever played wall ball as a child. Throw, catch, mad scramble, try to peg a kid in the back. All she needs to relive those hours of gritty entertainment are a tennis ball, a wall, and a few more pairs of hands.