YOU look at your phone a perfectly reasonable number of times a day, and less than most. The screentime records it keeps are probably wrong, and anyway excusable:
8h 12m: You had to send a difficult work email
When facing a simple but daunting task, you deserve a phone break or seven. Perhaps three consecutive hours watching YouTube shorts of unrealistically jacked people making overnight oats was too many. But the email got sent and you still think about those oats, and their hot, shirtless makers, so time well spent.
9h 23m: Searching for the origins of a meme
Everyone was quoting the meme and you didn’t get it. A desperate need to stay relevant sent you spiralling into the deepest investigation of your life, onto obscure subreddits that should only be medically prescribed. Anyone scanning through nine months of tweets from a 14-year-old edgelord would take this long. You actually did it quite quickly.
10h 49m: Downloading a new game
Candy Crush might be passé these days, but this new game you bought was totally different and a real mind-enhancer. Except that somehow you looked up, after an incredible run where you kept getting time-limited bonuses, to find the working day was over some hours ago. You deleted the game. It was asking you for money anyway.
11h 33m: At your parents’ house
Tedious monologues about the habits of their neighbours are the conversational highlights you expect from your parents, so of course you were scrolling social media. What sane person can get through contact with two adults who love and cherish them without the reassuringly beautiful people and deserted, exotic locations of Instagram?
13h 14m: Organising anything on WhatsApp
Jane couldn’t make Saturday and Toby was only free on the penultimate Thursday of even-numbered months, so the group chat was pinging with messages every millisecond. Then a secondary chat sprung up to talk about the behaviour in the first chat. Then a third chat came into being to find out if there was a second chat. You were pivotal to all three.
16h 06m: You discovered TikTok after promising you wouldn’t
It’s just a stupid app for teenagers to dance badly on, but you were a little curious. Four days later, you’d watched socio-political analyses of everything from communism to Corn Flakes and no longer understood the concept of time. It was the greatest day of entertainment you’ve ever had and all for free, apart from the bladder infection.
