My phone sends a nightly report of that day's screen time. Usually I'm around two hours and change. But that's screen time on my phone. Like most other writers, the majority of my screen time is at my laptop. While it's easy to complain about all the time we spend staring at screens, much has changed in how we consume information. Unless you're involved in physical labor--the trades, cooking, gardening--how else would you work?
According to Demand Sage, worldwide, the average person spends 6 hours and 54 minutes on screen time. While the time for Americans is 7 hours, 2 minutes, we are digital sloths compared to much of the world. South Africa leads at 9 hours, 24 minutes; Brazil is second at 9 hours, 13 minutes; Philippines at 8 hours, 52 minutes. Measured behind countries such as Colombia, Russia, Egypt, Mexico, Bulgaria, and Saudi Arabia, we in the USA clock in at number 19.
Discounting work, even if we wanted to limit screen time, it becomes a challenge. We get most of our news from the web, though what gets delivered is often throttled by search engines and we have to dig deeper to get past click-bait. The phone is a portable TV, so it's a convenient way to watch programs, movies, and videos. Then there's social media. Add gaming. On-line banking. Hooking up. Checking the weather. Scrolling through photos. Seems every business and venue wants you to download their app.
Even before AI, the phone became a crutch. City maps have practically disappeared and we rely on Siri to tell us how to get to our destination. Rather than hunt for radio stations on the car dashboard, Spotify delivers tunes based on our algorithms.
What we consume through screen time affects our mood, deliberately since the harder our emotional buttons are pushed, the more likely we are to engage with what's online and be rewarded with dopamine hits.
AI studies our engagement on an unprecedented scale and not just by documenting what sites we've visited, but by eavesdropping, sifting through our email and social media, mapping our locations, cataloging our photos, cross-indexing biometrics gleaned from smart watches and fitness trackers, reading our eyeballs whenever we're close to a camera. The level of surveillance we've embraced would astonish and certainly dismay George Orwell.
We've become so reliant on AI to tell us where we are, to remind us what to do, to nudge us about healthy options, to validate who we are, so that in a not-too-distant future, AI via the phone will tell us how to feel. Which brings me to my writer friend Nick Arvin, who embarked on an ambitious project on Substack to write and publish 52 short stories, one for each week of 2026. The stories have an off-center Twilight Zone mood, a bit creepy, not quite horror but definitely unsettling and worth reading. In this week's offering, Arvin presents "A Device For Feeling Feelings", describing how reliant people will become on their devices, to the point they're uncomfortable trusting their emotions without getting affirmation from AI, even in matters of romance.
