I hadn’t seen my family in five months, so I flew from San Diego to Newark for Christmas. The trip, which should have ended in a mid-afternoon landing, was delayed for eight hours and dragged on until well after midnight. My parents pulled up in my mother’s new SUV, their faces tired but brightening when they saw me. We drove the hour south to the house by the beach, the roads empty, the world quiet.
The next morning, after breakfast at a local diner, we sat in their living room, letting the comfort of being together settle in. They are both 70 years old. They brought up three kids — I am the 39-year-old middle child. My father still works remotely as an attorney and has talked about retirement for years but continues to work. My mother retired a decade ago after 30 years of teaching high school home economics. They have worked hard and certainly earned this time to relax. Most of the time, however, they seem busier than I am. They travel all over the world. They go to concerts. They take weekend trips with friends. They model what active retirement (or semi-retirement) should look like.
And so we settled in, with my mother in her recliner, my father on one couch, and me on another. Almost by instinct, my parents reached for their iPads. I caught myself scrolling through my phone without any real purpose. In that silence, I had a moment of clarity: This was supposed to be the time for conversation — for catching up in person. And here we were, on our devices. Even their 3-year-old Kooikerhondje, appropriately named Jersey, seemed bored.
A couple of days later, we drove four hours to my sister’s house in Maryland. I played with my niece and nephew, and my parents drifted back to their screens. I felt a surge of nostalgia for a kind of closeness that didn’t need to be scheduled or prompted. I thought of growing up and the holidays spent at my grandparents’ house when my grandfather would play Christmas music on vinyl, and we would sit around their dining room table for three or four hours.
On Christmas Eve, I boarded another plane to San Francisco to spend Christmas with my fiancée and her family in the Bay Area. Sixteen people gathered in a small living room off the kitchen for 11 hours. Voices crashed through the room. Parents, siblings, nieces, aunts, uncles. It was so loud, I took Advil twice. The only screen in sight was a digital fireplace burning on the TV. In the last couple of hours, we projected the game Codenames on the wall — a word game that demands conversation and debate, which brought even louder shouts and chaos.
That whole day, people talked — really talked. Stories of travel and little successes unfolded. Laughter rolled through the room. Debates flared up over nothing. Gifts were exchanged and opened one at a time. Plates of food went around. My future sister-in-law’s new baby changed hands.
The contrast between my time in New Jersey and California was glaring. One was marked by screen-induced quiet distance, while the other was charged with the noisy messiness of presence (and presents). I don’t blame my parents. They’re doing what most of us do. The contrast revealed how easily our devices reduce the quality of our connections. This was a point highlighted by one of my first-year writing student’s essays I read the week prior that described how ‘phubbing’ (snubbing someone for a phone) leads to unsatisfying conversations and weaker relationships. It made me realize, more emphatically than in the past, that our time together is often silently drained by our devices. Maybe it’s because my parents are getting older. Maybe it’s because I now live 2,500 miles away from my family. Maybe it’s because I can no longer deny my own addiction to screens.
My aim isn’t to criticize anyone for using screens. Instead, I’m trying to understand and address the patterns I see in myself — because recognizing the problem (and I do have a problem) is the first step to reclaiming real connection in my life.
I work as a senior proposal writer for an IT contractor serving the federal government. The job keeps me at a computer for eight to 10 hours a day. I also teach college writing courses, adding more screen time for grading and preparation. Between work and bed, I spend time scrolling through news. I research stocks. I check emails and answer texts. At night, my fiancée and I stream shows before bed (right now it’s “Stranger Things”). When I total it all up, the numbers are startling: over 80 hours a week spent in front of a screen. That’s like driving from my home in California to my parents’ home in New Jersey, not once, but twice, every single week.
That number unsettles me because I worry about how little control I seem to have over it. I’ll put my phone away. Minutes later, it’s back in my hand. Anna Lembke, chief of Addiction Medicine at Stanford, calls this a compulsive habit loop. We check without thinking. When we don’t, we feel a kind of withdrawal.
After just three days without a smartphone, researchers in Germany noticed something striking: the brain starts to look like it’s in withdrawal from something even stronger. The concept of “variable reward” is fundamental here. This behavioral science notion says the irregularity of social media alerts and messages keeps us hooked. We chase the next dopamine hit, almost like a gambling addiction.
The average American checks their phone 186 times a day — about once every five minutes. Nearly half of us say we feel addicted, and more than half want to cut back but don’t know how. I see myself in these numbers. Even now, as I write, I can remember dozens of times I’ve turned to my phone without thinking — whether I’m working, stopped at a red light, or sitting in a room full of people I care about. The habit slips in everywhere, even during the occasions that should matter most.
A year ago, I started hiking daily at Lake Calavera. It’s a 260-acre nature preserve near my home. It’s the largest remaining natural area in coastal north San Diego County. The lake is ringed by wetlands and sage scrub. Egrets stand in the shallows. Herons fish from the rocks. Coyotes meander without bother. Trails thread through the hills.
I often silence my phone and set out, usually for four miles, sometimes more, sometimes less. At first, I listened to podcasts or music, but lately I’ve left my ears open to the world. I just walk. Sometimes I watch the birds. Sometimes I turn over the problems I’m trying to solve. Other times, I let my mind go blank and just fall into the rhythm of step, breath, step. If I’m lucky, I get myself into a state of gratitude.
At first, these hikes were just a way to manage stress. I was burned out from work, from the constant ping of messages, from feeling like I was always on call. The walking helped, but it also unveiled something I hadn’t expected.
I’m in long-term recovery from alcohol, and I struggled for nearly a decade to get there. I know what addiction looks like from the inside. I know how it convinces you that you’re in control when you’re not. I know how it rationalizes itself, hides in plain sight, and tells you that everyone else does it too, so what’s the problem? Both alcohol and phone cravings share a similar driver: the pursuit of dopamine, which can make both addictions insidious. What’s dangerous about screen addiction is that the consequences are not seen immediately, kind of like smoking cigarettes: It takes months and years to see the damage.
One afternoon, standing by the lake, taking a break to drink some water, it hit me: I was repeating the same patterns I’d known from drinking. I instinctively grabbed my phone without thinking, found it difficult to sit still, and turned to screens instead of letting myself create or even just think.
I wasn’t writing for myself anymore. I kept telling myself it was work, or a lack of inspiration, but the truth was simpler: I was overstimulated, distracted and quietly unhappy about it.
Lembke calls the smartphone the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine around the clock. She explains that overstimulating our dopamine reward pathways shifts our hedonic setpoint. These constant digital hits reset our pleasure baseline lower, making us crave regular stimulation just to feel normal. We’re no longer seeking pleasure. We’re seeking normalcy. We need the stimulation just to feel OK.
The research on how this affects families is sobering (pun intended). Studies show that when devices are present during conversations, people rate the conversations significantly lower. Parents distracted by phones miss opportunities to help children learn and socialize. I remember questions going unanswered because someone was engrossed in a screen — and I’ve been on both sides of that silence.
Researchers have found that children now spend more time with their parents than previous generations did, yet they report feeling alone during that time. They’re in the same room, but they’re not connected. The phrase researchers use is “alone together.”
A University of Pennsylvania study found that limiting social media to 30 minutes a day significantly reduced anxiety, depression and loneliness. Another study published in PNAS Nexus, which had people block mobile internet access for two weeks, found that 71% of participants reported improved mental health. The reduction in depressive symptoms exceeded what some antidepressant trials achieve.
This dilemma — unable to quit screens but longing for true connection — drives my search for ways to live more deliberately with technology and protect what matters most.
To address this, I’m experimenting with small changes: no phones at dinner, no screens in the bedroom and powering down by a set hour. By treating these as experiments, my fiancée and I are exploring what truly supports our aim — real connection over digital distraction.
These are small things. They’re harder than they sound. The pull is real. But I know change is possible.
I keep thinking about my parents on their iPads. I keep thinking about my fiancée’s family passing plates and telling stories. The next time I visit New Jersey, I want to sit in that living room and talk to my parents without competing with a screen. I want to hear about their lives, their days, what they’re thinking about as they get older. I want to tell them about mine.
That means starting with myself first. It’s time to have that conversation.
Geoff Watkinson is a writer based in Carlsbad, California. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Guernica, storySouth, Atticus Review, The Humanist, The San Diego Union-Tribune, and elsewhere. He works as a senior proposal writer for a federal IT contractor and teaches writing at California State University San Marcos and MiraCosta College. He holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Old Dominion University. More at geoffwatkinson.blog.
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