From Scrolling to Stargazing

In a world built to keep us wired, I’m breaking the scroll cycle - for my daughters, and for myself.

My dedication to side parts and leggings marks me as a millennial, a generation that straddles the divide between a pre-internet childhood and a fully wired adulthood. While I remember life before Wi-Fi, I’ve never known a workplace without it. When I entered the workforce in my 20s, my iPhone became an extension of my office. It was a secondary screen I could continue to stare at long after I had shut my laptop. And oh did I stare. I stared while on the tube, queuing at the coffee shop, standing in front of the microwave. At every moment I could be productive. At every moment I could be accessed.

This is a precarious situation when, like so many people my age, I grew up being told I could do anything - as long as I worked hard. And the internet meant working hard was easy. Every moment of my day could be filled with ‘productive’ activities - with my phone in my hand.

When I founded a non-profit in 2016, at the height of the girlboss and #hustlehard zeitgeist, my phone was the key to success. It allowed me to stay forever tethered to my work, always switched on (quite literally). Notifications pinged through:

Ding! An Instagram DM.

Ding! A Slack message.

Ding! An email.

I could be reached by anyone instantly in multiple ways. I was communicating with co-workers and colleagues, family and friends alike with equal urgency. The line between work and personal time was inextricably blurred. When the pandemic hit and my phone became the only window to the world outside my flat, that line dissolved entirely.

Slowly but surely, centring my phone at the heart of my life started to feel gross. The constant buzz of notifications, the endless scrolling, the mindless swapping between apps began to leave a lingering fatigue, a lethargic sense of over-consumption. The dopamine hit from social media in particular felt like high fructose corn syrup, an artificial saccharine void.

I could feel my physiology being hacked in real time. The way notifications are designed to grab attention meant even the most trivial communication felt urgent and important. The constant hormonal reward of engaging with people in a digital format, combined with a foolish “hustle hard” mindset, caused me to stay anxiously available to anyone for years. A message from my mom held the same weight in my physiological reward centre as a stranger’s comment on my latest Instagram post.

I understood precisely what was happening. I was an adult, with a fully formed rational brain. But it was like astral projection, watching in a helpless daze as my phone became the key to every aspect of my life. A functional dissociation, with how it was shortening my attention span, and zapping my energy. I could feel the pull of it, the way I was being trained to reach for it reflexively during any lull in my day.

I tried to make changes. I set screen time limits, deleted apps, and put my phone in black and white. But nothing made any long term difference in the amount of time I spent on my phone. Will power wasn’t nearly enough. I was trapped in a system designed to keep me there.

Then slowly, we all started to leave our homes again. And not long after lockdown, I had my first daughter. It took becoming a parent to finally shift the dial on my relationship with my phone, at first organically and then more intentionally. When my first daughter was young, I could easily get away with staring at my phone whilst breastfeeding or rocking her to sleep. But as she grew and became more aware of her surroundings, she took to looking me right in the eyes, seeking connection in one of the only ways she could: stargazing at her mother. And yet there I was, distracted, looking slightly past her line of sight at my phone in an attempt to get to inbox zero. It broke my heart. My beautiful, magical baby only wanted to look at me, and I only wanted to look at my phone. I was horrified with myself.

Suddenly time on my phone wasn’t just a bad habit for myself, it was normalising an unhealthy behaviour for my daughter to see. Abandoning my smartphone entirely wasn’t possible, given the way society is now built around app usage, but I decided that through sheer willpower I would to build a healthy habit, my daughter would only see me on my phone when I was using it for a specific purpose, like following a dinner recipe or picking out a Spotify playlist for us to listen to. I don’t want her to develop the same screen addiction I have, which means I can’t normalise my phone dependency for her. As an adult I find it impossible to resist mindless scrolling or the temptation to check an unread message. No matter how many times I delete Tiktok, I download it again. I have a fully formed adult brain with strong rational thinking skills and a clear understanding of exactly how screen time impacts my physical and mental health. How can I expect my daughter, with her developing brain and limited impulse control, to navigate this as she grows up if I don’t model it for her?

The internet is a new frontier, and we are the guinea pigs of an unregulated, profit-driven tech industry where financial success trumps all else. I grew up in Silicon Valley and met my fair share of tech bros who waxed lyrical about how their app was going to change the world and help people. But the truth is, helping people rarely is the true goal. The ultimate aim is financial success, and the fastest way to get there is to exploit our attention and physiology, by keeping us hooked and online.

Despite my best efforts, I’m still on my phone far more than I’d like to be. I wrote part of this article on my phone whilst nap-trapped with my newborn second daughter, afraid to move and wake her from her snooze on my shoulder. (The urge to be productive even during downtime is a whole different battle.) But some things have changed for good. I turned off all notifications on my phone, which has been permanently on silent for years anyway, setting only my husband’s number and my daughter’s nursery to ring through. I work within business hours and take days - sometimes weeks - to respond to non-work emails and messages. And it hasn’t impacted my career, or relationships one bit. The people who matter understand.

Everything else must wait. I’m too busy stargazing back at my daughters.