“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.” Carl Jung
It established itself within me, over the course of a few years, I can’t claim to have immediately realised it, but somewhere along my timeline at the shores of adulthood the scope of the world hit me. The incredible potential and the immense grief that comes with being alive in the 21st Century. It was overwhelming.
What lies behind the incessant checking, the dissociated scrolling, the vacant absorption that characterise unconscious screen engagement?
Yes, there are significant addictive mechanisms, designed and personally optimised to keep you engaged. Yes, there are valid reasons for being online, not least professional, educational, familial and social. Yes, screens can be an emancipatory tool that opens doors and minds. Yes, there are many reasons.
But those reasons also camouflage something deeper.
I believe it is possible to live a meaningful and productive life in harmony with a positive relationship to the digital world when it is managed effectively by following an intentional strategy, deliberately and ruthlessly followed with discipline, kindness, and wisdom.
However, for all of us along this journey, it will involve dramatically reducing our screen time and fasting from technology.
Or put simply, living without screens.
Eventually, boredom arrives, moments of restlessness, not knowing what to do, sometimes uncomfortable or surprising thoughts begin to percolate. Feelings of loneliness, insecurity, and maybe even meaninglessness will emerge. Solitude is where you confront meaning, mortality, and purpose: BIG QUESTIONS.
The inner noise that we might have been quelling turns up, and if we’ve been tuning it out for a long time, boy, can it feel abrasive and disconcerting.
It’s this subtle monster that we will all have to face on our journey to screen liberation.The near constant availability of escape and distraction has interrupted the conversation that occurs in the unspeakable realm. The processing, practising, and nurturing part of ourselves that churns through so much of what life gives to us. That interruption can feel soothing, our inner worlds are messy, soaringly powerful and enjoyable, but also at times desolate and challenging.
Using screens to comfort existential dread is a potent combination. Screens can fulfill that need through a variety of modalities. But relying on this comfort can rob us of our capacity to learn how to manage.
First unbearable feelings, then challenging feelings, then discomfort, then boredom, then just any spare second that can be filled.
What’s the cost of never being alone?
Wrestling with discomfort is where we grow; without that tussle, emotional and spiritual growth gets stunted. Filling every gap starves our inner life; the self that we are can become blurred, ungrounded, disembodied, unaware, confused. We risk becoming a mirror to the people or the content we are surrounded by, as that blurry self struggles to define itself. It also stifles our creativity. The creative part of us needs space to breathe, space to unfurl. With constant input, there is sparse ground for original content to grow.
When you combine this with the other symptoms of screen addiction like fractured attention and loss of focus (amongst many others) it can disable a mind from thinking and feeling.
Yet being alone with ourselves is beautiful. It’s our humanity, our presence. In solitude, we meet the creative, boundaryless part of ourselves. It’s where we find consolation for our existential anxiety; it might be the only true place you can find it.
I’ve sat in silence after a long time away. It’s not as one would imagine.
There is an alchemising quality to it. The great Joanna Macy talks about ‘The Great Turning.’ Central to this is the idea that facing pain, grief, and challenge is not only necessary but transformative.
“The refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life… but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information.”Joanna Macy
When you're alone and undistracted, the buried emotions, doubts, fears, and even ancestral grief can surface. This can be earth-shatteringly painful and yet slowly, and sometimes quickly, if you give it enough time, it shifts itself dramatically.
The solitude we often avoid is where the raw material of life gets turned into gold.
I’ll never forget the incredible streams of exciting thoughts that emerged from me when I began to significantly reduce my screen time. I would be shaking with the power and profundity of the ideas. Not all of them made sense, and not all of them stood the test of time, but I realised there was a quality, a lucidity, that I had been missing, which had an undeniable value that I had lost for some time.
It was this slow, steady re-attunement to myself and to the quiet signals of my own path that helped me begin to regain control and become an active participant in the co-creation of my life.
I want to help people experience these moments and this process as they embark on the hard journey of screen liberation and rediscovery.
For anyone chronically online, does this resonate somewhere inside you?
Does it feel true to parts of you?
Are you prepared to re-encounter yourself?
Send me a quick message at info@screenliberation.com