It’s almost hard to imagine life without it now. The iPhone didn’t just change things — it changed everything.
Remember sitting on an airplane, totally disconnected from everything on the ground?
Remember using the bathroom without looking at your phone? Remember the joy of talking to your spouse or partner without competition from a cat video? Those, my friend, were the salad days.
Is it possible that we love the convenience but hate what we’ve become?
Like a smoker in the 1970s who loved to smoke but hated that their home, car, office, and wardrobe all smelled like an ashtray. According to the World Happiness Report, the U.S. was the 11th happiest among the 150 countries back in 2012.
At that time, we were still trying to figure out if the iPhone was worth the money. We didn’t have a clue what the man in the black turtleneck and jeans had in store for us. Today we are the 24th happiest country, our lowest-ever position. What happened?
We used to let ourselves get lost in hobbies without a rebound of guilt over what we’d left undone. Today, even leisure can feel like failure. What did we accomplish? What did we miss? Emails waiting, texts unanswered, a to-do list that seems to breed like titillated rabbits. Today I measure my heart rate, steps, blood pressure, weight, body fat, sleep and about 100 other metrics. All under the guise of improving my health. I think we both know that I’ll probably be the guy that just gets hit by a bus.
Yet in one of the great ironies of the 21st century, with all this measurement and productivity we waste far more time today than we did in 2012, before all this technology made us more “efficient and productive”. Somehow, that time spent doomscrolling doesn’t feel “wasted” to us.
US screen time has increased almost an hour since 2012. The average American adult spends between 7 and 10 hours per day on smartphones and other screens. There’s a strange irony here: for all our talk of improved productivity, most people feel perpetually behind. The more efficient our tools become, the more frantic our lives become.
The faster we go, the less we seem to accomplish. Somewhere deep down, we’ve lost the ability to pause-to be still. The ability to be quiet. We feel guilty for doing nothing, even when that nothing is exactly what we need. The reach for the phone has become second nature. Like reaching for a pack of smokes in a different era. Maybe that’s because true leisure requires trust — trust that our value doesn’t have to be earned or proven in every hour. Trust that value can exist without constant dopamine. But that trust is fragile when everything feels urgent.
Like the smoker, we ignore the very thing that is causing us so much trouble. Nobody notices the elephant in the room because everybody has an elephant on a leash. I wonder if someday when we slow down, we will start to notice what we’ve been missing. What’s been right in front of us all along. Things that we’ve been postponing or ignoring for years. Because whatever was on our iPhone was too urgent to ignore.
Perhaps that’s where joy lives: not in the texts, emails, app reminders and to-do lists, but in the unhurried moments when we stop treating life like a competition. I think most of us are yearning to reclaim that kind of time — the kind that isn’t measured, monitored or tracked. Because the truth is, joy doesn’t need to be earned. It only needs to be experienced. But, when you’ve been running at top-speed, slowing down even a little bit feels strange. Slowing down feels like failure. How ironic.
Maybe the real danger isn’t that we’re wasting time—it’s that we no longer see down time as a gift, something to savor, not optimize. Today, life is a digital scoreboard. We track every step, scroll, and minute. But the things that matter most—happen in the margins.
What do you think? Has the iPhone made our lives better or worse? I want to hear from you. Email me at [email protected] and I promise you’ll hear back from me.
Tom Greene is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and loyal wiener dog, Maggie. His writing can be found at www.tomgreene.com.
