Hanging Up

Newsletter

If decreasing dependance on our phones feels unacceptable, we might benefit from considering what we’d want to fill the space that they occupy.

By Melissa Kirsch

In 1996, my colleague Pam Belluck wrote about a 17-year-old so addicted to the internet that he spent “more than six hours a day online and more than an hour reading his email.” More than an hour on email! It seems quaint now. Pam documented the phenomenon of “netaholism” and the support groups that were emerging to help people resist the whine of their dial-up modems.

Here in 2026, our efforts at remediation of our own screen dependence are meeting with mixed results. Most states now have laws to keep phones out of classrooms, but students are destroying the lockable pouches where their devices are stowed. A Wirecutter writer tried to downgrade to a BlackBerry, only to find that life without maps and banking apps was unrealistic.

But! There’s hope! Even if that hope comes via methods that seem extreme. “What used to be innocent enough — checking social media to see what our friends were up to — has escalated into a battle of wills in which there can emerge only one victor: man or phone,” my colleague Madison Malone Kircher wrote recently. She reported on Brick, a device that locks down your phone and requires you to tap it against a plastic square in order to reinstate access to certain apps. Desperate times, desperate measures.

People are repairing to the woods, building full-scale replicas of Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond — no plumbing, no electricity, definitely no Wi-Fi. One modern transcendentalist’s dwelling has just a kerosene lamp, a desk and research materials to keep him from using Google. “It naturally makes me not want to check email impulsively,” he told The Times.

Sometimes it feels as if our phones are our captors, and we’re in perpetual search for a device or a detox that will release us. We’re constantly negotiating: I’ll keep my devices out of the bedroom. I’ll wait 15 minutes after waking before checking social media.

No matter how reasonable our efforts to decrease dependency, however, there’s frequently an element of deprivation involved. More effective, perhaps, are solutions that fill the empty space. I have a friend who reads in the morning before checking her phone, another who meditates. Replacing checking your phone with something else seems like a step in the right direction. You can’t have your phone for this period of time, but you can have this other very satisfying activity. It sounds like the way you’d bargain with a child, but for many of us, our relationship with our phones is not so different from a child’s with a blankie.

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