How limits set us free
Why boundarying your screen time is the beginning of a better life.
Disclaimer: I wrote this back in 2022 and am moving older pieces (that still hold up) from my now-deceased Squarespace site over to my Substack. Enjoy!
Paradoxes are cool, aren’t they? G.K. Chesterton describes them as, ‘Truth standing on her head to get attention’. Limits making us free is a paradox that I have experienced to be true.
To grapple with it, we have to know what kind of ‘free’ we’re aiming for, so let’s start by talking about the mainstream notion of freedom.
‘I can do whatever I want’
This more or less sums up the modern notion of freedom. French spiritual writer Fr Jacques Philippe describes it as, ‘less a recognition of an ethical law than a declaration of individualism — nobody can prevent me from doing what I feel like!’
Total freedom of choice is the Western idea of freedom, particularly in capitalist societies. This is taken to the extreme by Amazon, and the ability to summon anything for the next day.
And yet, this can be a dissatisfying experience. We have all had the confusing experience of browsing Netflix, Disney+ or YouTube’s seemingly endless options only to find nothing that we actually want to watch. In fact, I have limited the amount of time I will put up with my flatmates scrolling the options so that we actually have to pick something.
Overwhelming choice can leave you feeling flat, but why?
In theory, there would be nothing wrong with freedom being ‘I can do whatever I want, whenever I want’ if we always wanted good for ourselves and others. But of course, for dumb human condition reasons, that just isn’t the case.
‘Why are you the way that you are?’
This was proven to me when I got to university. The hype around uni was real — I was told that these would be ‘the best years of my life’, years of total freedom and exploration, a promised land of ideas and experiences.
I was 18, I had 8 hours of education a week and a student loan — I could do with this whatever I chose. It didn’t go so great.
Post the early social boom of freshers week it was easy to become isolated and for the bad habits that I had to be fully leaned into. The pornography addiction I already had could take me into the early hours, as could the binge-watching of ‘The Golden Age of TV’ and the endless rabbit holes of social media and YouTube. Looking back, I was isolated and my coping mechanisms kicked in, which unfortunately and obviously made me more isolated. I used my freedom to choose that, but I didn’t really want it.
This is the heart of addiction. Addiction is an overused word so here’s a definition I like from Dr Anna Lembke:
‘Addiction broadly defined is the continued and compulsive consumption of a substance or behaviour (gambling, gaming, sex) despite its harm to self and/or others.’
Before I identified with being an addict of any kind, I just resonated with these words from St Paul:
‘I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.’ Romans 7:15
Maybe something about your relationship to the virtual world makes Paul’s words there relatable for you, they are for me. It reminds me of Michael Scott’s oft memed great line from the ‘US Office’, ‘Why are you the way that you are?’
This is why the modern notion of freedom doesn’t satisfy. And yet, it’s central to our culture. In her book ‘Dopamine Nation’, Dr Anna Lembke describes it this way:
‘ … we’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, Tweeting … the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering.’
So, what kind of freedom do we want?
The idea of a deeper level of human freedom is a unifying thread of the great religions. Fundamentally, it comes down to freedom from attachment in order to better love ourselves, our creator and those around us. To find balance, to come into harmony, to be open-handed.
In short: interior freedom.
Fr Jacques Philippe wrote the book on this (literally called ‘Interior Freedom’ — highly recommend it) and he defines it this way.
‘True freedom … resides in the possibility of believing, hoping and loving in all circumstances’.
‘We gain possession of our interior freedom in exact proportion to our growth in faith, hope, and love.’
Freedom from attachment is part of the equation here. Our attachments are a part of why we choose to do what we do not want to. Fr Richard Rohr frames this helpfully in his meditation on the Twelve-Step Process.
‘Addiction is a modern name and honest description for what the biblical tradition called “sin,” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures, or practices, were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments’.
So where do we start?
A world within a world
In this context, the paradox of limits setting us free makes some sense. But in a hyper-stimulated world, what can we do? When I was just starting out on this journey, I remember thinking, ‘but what can I do about the internet?’ It seemed hopeless.
It turns out that you can do a lot.
Dr Anna Lembke believes that to maintain our sanity, we need to create a world within a world.
‘We can establish, essentially, barriers between ourselves and the world that we live in to create a world within a world … we need to insulate ourselves from intoxicants and avoid pleasure and intentionally seek out a more ascetic life. That means we have to intentionally make life harder for ourselves in the short term, to make it better in the long term.’ (Lembke on ‘Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard’)
In essence, this is what I have been doing, with particular focus since I turned 25 a year ago and had a quarter-life moment (not crisis).
When I was 22 I installed anti-pornography software for the first time. There are many, I used to use Covenant Eyes and am now using Canopy. This totally changed the game. If you do not want pornography to be a part of your life, I highly recommend software solutions and accountability, it changed my life.
For me, pornography was clearly both obviously wrong and addictive but it took me longer to reckon with my massive screen time hours on social media. It was in watching ‘The Social Dilemma’ that I felt deep regret for the many wasted hours I had spent scrolling from my teen years into my twenties.
The major truth of that documentary is that social media companies are designing their platforms to be addictive, even though they know the human cost and the connection to the spiralling mental health of young people. Justin Rosenstein, creator of Facebook’s like button, delivers these devastating lines.
‘We are more profitable to a corporation if we’re spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we’re spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so we’re seeing the results of that, we’re seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention for the things they want us to look at rather than things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.’
Work phone
After that film, I got a work phone and got rid of everything I could scroll on my personal phone (which didn’t mean deleting my social media accounts).
Screen Time
I also got my flatmate to create a Screen Time passcode on my iPhone and got rid of every app I didn’t need. Then browsers. Then the App Store. Now if I need to update my banking app or something, I just ask my flatmate. Thanks to this, my phone can still do all the things I need it to do and the ability to mindlessly scroll is gone.
Freedom
For work and creativity, I downloaded another software (one that Harvard University and others use), literally called ‘Freedom’. It allows you to block specific blocklists for hours and once you have set a block session running, you cannot undo it. I use this every day — I love it. Over the years, I have blocked more and more things, as I became more self-aware of how they made me feel. For example, Twitter only ever made me angry about things I could not affect. Another example, 1% of my YouTube viewing was in any way educational. Over time, it became easy for me to choose to just block those too.
What’s the harm?
This is all a bit extreme no? What’s the harm in scrolling? A few years ago, I would have asked the same thing.
But now I know that it all the time adds up and the older I get, the less I feel I can excuse that. I want to use the gift of this one life for all it’s worth and our time is our life.
The danger is that we may scroll our lives away. A friend recently asked me to create their Screen Time passcode. They were watching 13 hours of TikTok a week (those numbers are normal by the way and I’ve been there too).
In the meantime, my reading time has exploded. I pray way more than I used to. I have no idea what is trending on Twitter ever and I love that. It has been a gradual movement towards a daily experience of greater and deeper freedom.
It has been completely worth it.
Writer Sohrab Ahmari sums up the spirit of this really well.
‘When I soberly examine the West as it really is, I find much wanting in its worldview and way of life. More than that, I have come to believe that the very modes of life and thinking that strike most people in the West as antiquated of “limiting” can liberate us, while the Western dream of autonomy and choice without limits is, in fact, a prison: that the quest to define ourselves on our own is a kind of El Dorado, driving to madness the many who seek after it; that for our best, highest selves to soar, other parts of us must be tied down, enclosed, limited, bound.’
Beyond limits
My experiences of addiction and compulsive behaviour have made me completely comfortable with creating limits for myself. They taught me that I could be incredibly self-destructive and actively work against myself and my efforts to become a better person. Limits are an admission that something is harmful for you and most now agree that sustained smartphone and social media use is.
Limits set us free, I have lived this paradox, it is a personal favourite.
They are also not a trade-out for self-control, they are a form of accountability which should lead to a greater level of self-control.
Importantly: limits are not everything, they are a starting point.
There is deeper work to do and more meaningful questions to explore, such as:
Why do I have these coping mechanisms? What is being coped with?
Is there deeper healing that needs to take place? (Probably)
What is this interior freedom for?
All of these are pieces for another day. For now, starting to ask yourself about some reasonable limits that you could create for yourself could be a really good place to start.
Most importantly: there is hope.
If I may sneak in at the end, God is real and he loves you and he wants you to be free. You can find this for yourself by praying. I recommend that most of all.
Thanks for reading.
Isaac