I’ve tried almost everything to cut my screen time down. Time management apps, a strict nighttime limit, an analog alarm clock – nothing did the trick. I’d always end up slipping back into bad habits. At my wits end, I decided to make one last ditch effort to save my soul from the blue light last month, and by Jove, it worked. Here’s how I finally cut down my screen time by getting really into God.
Listen, I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t exactly have faith this would work. I’ve never really had faith to begin with, but I was desperate to take my life back from Big Tech, even if it meant giving it to the Big Guy.
First, I had to choose which religion to get into. I considered Protestantism, but that felt passé, kind of “done,” you know? I tried Buddhism for a bit, but it didn’t really stick, considering I could bend the tenets to fit a phone-forward lifestyle. I needed to find the perfect religion to shame me out of being on my phone all day. Then it hit me: Catholicism.
The best part about becoming a devout Catholic overnight is that it requires a lot of reading, so I couldn’t have been on my phone even if I’d wanted to! The Bible is much longer than the SparkNotes suggested it would be, and as soon as I looked up from Philippians 4:13 (“I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me” – isn’t that so cute?) I realized it had been a full two hours since I’d picked up my phone. The last time that happened was when I was four!
Catholicism as a system was immediately legible to me: The Pope is kind of like a Twitter microcelebrity, and the world is his dominion. God is angry, we are bad, and everything kind of falls into place from there. I also love that the songs are pretty vanilla. Did someone say, “instant earworm”?
I couldn’t ever hold myself accountable to my screentime goals before because I wasn’t experiencing any real fear, you know? Luckily, that’s what Catholicism is all about! It’s a lot easier to resist the pull of Instagram when you’re concerned about the fate of your soul considering you’re about to be damned to eternal agony in hell.
I can confidently say this is the best way to finally kick a bad phone habit. Either this or internal discipline. Up to you!
