My name is Scarlett and I’m a phone addict. You might be thinking, ‘You’re 27 years old, of course you’re addicted to your phone.’ But my case is pretty bad. We’re talking screen time that tops six hours a day – significantly more than the national average of three hours and 21 minutes – and TikTok binges in which I mindlessly flick through nearly 400 videos.
It doesn’t end there. I text my mum on average 20 times a day; my boyfriend more than double that. I use my phone to pay for everything from Tube journeys to Lululemon hauls. I track my runs on Strava, log films on Letterboxd and record books I read on Fable. The only eight hours a day I’m not tethered to the tiny glowing rectangle are when I sleep, when it lies next to me on my pillow.
It’s not that I love my phone. It’s that I don’t know how to exist without it. How would I pay, navigate, communicate, exercise, be entertained or, crucially, prove I was doing any of that by posting about it on Instagram? See More/Details…