They say most Irish people under 40 will remember where they were when they heard about Leo Varadkar’s resignation: either in their parents’ box room or in Australia, if they were lucky. There is probably a lot of truth in that, but I won’t lie: I’m just trying to distract you.
I’m only including that internet joke here to make you think that this is a piece about Varadkar. Hopefully you’ll think “oh no, not more Leo” and jog on to the sports section. Then you’ll miss the real point of all this, the awful point, where I bury bad news on a big news day.
So, the news, the really bad news: my phone told me last week that my screen time is starting to average seven and a half hours a day. I spend almost eight hours a day staring at my screen. That’s more than I sleep. I spend more time scrolling than rolling. What new hell is this?
• The Sunday Times View: Smartphones are causing us to think a lot less intelligently
How many DIY hacks or “brilliant bits from films” have I watched? How many “amazing natural disasters caught on film” and “dashcam tragedies”? How many “make better use of that under stair space” or “guitar made easy” videos have I ingested?
This is not a good look for me. I am one of two people at home tasked with barking screen-use warnings at other people. Things like “on your screen again” or “you’ll turn into a screen” are my stock-in-trade. Where is my credibility now?
As for the phone itself, well, well. I knew it was monitoring personal details, voting choices and intimate conversations — I can hack that — but this is going too far. It’s like a friend at a stag party counting your drinks. “My word,” it says, “22 units and we haven’t had the starter yet. Wait till I tell.” You think you know somebody.
• One in four teenagers ‘face mental health risk’ from phone addiction
As luck would have it, I have a very clear memory of the day I got my first smartphone: it was the day we lost the great Gerry Ryan. I got the news as I was standing outside Dun Laoghaire shopping centre waiting for my wife. We were devastated.
But thereafter the new phone came into play. People were texting me asking me to call them, but I couldn’t figure the phone out. “How do you even make a call on this thing?” I asked my Nokia-carrying partner. There was no sympathy. “I told you nothing good would come of it,” she said. How true those words look now. How prescient. How wise.
A solid hour followed as I sent text after text saying “Yes, awful news, such a shock”, followed by the increasingly desperate: “And BTW who is this? I’ve changed phones. I don’t have my contacts. Sorry.”
“And these are called smartphones?” my wife asked, unhelpfully.
The devil’s greatest trick, they say, was convincing us he doesn’t exist. The smartphone’s greatest trick was convincing us that it’s our clever friend. It isn’t. It is a destroyer of worlds, of mental health and free time, and a spy to boot.
• Put down the phone, US teenagers tell addicted parents
It convinces you that it’s in your interest to have easy access to your work emails, or stories related to your work that you want to stay on top of, or a group of friends you worked with two decades ago who want to fill you in all that’s happened in the last 20 years.
Mostly though it blurs lines, between work and play, time off and time on, business and pleasure. A day on a beach in Connemara can be ruined by a communication that should never have been able to find you on a beach in Connemara. That surely was the point of the beach in Connemara.
The sad reality of my seven and a half hours of daily screen time will be — I know if I dig down — that it is mostly work-related. Getting the chance to scroll through “101 great wardrobe malfunctions” would be a fine thing.
We once discovered our then six-year-old had spent a morning on the internet without permission. “What were you doing?” we asked fearfully. “I learnt how to skin and debone a salmon,” she told us. We tested her; she had.
I still rank that as the most useful thing anyone has ever done on the internet. Smartphones are dumb. It’s a trick — turn back.
