I unplugged my television, put it in a closet, and left it there for a decade. Friends called it technological suicide. They were concerned. How would I know what was happening in the world? How would I relax after work? What would I do with my evenings?
I wrote over 50 books. Built a ghostwriting business. Ghostwrote books for clients. Read thousands of books. Took 980,000 photographs. Built detailed model kits. Lived more in those ten years than in the previous twenty combined. The television wasn’t the problem, just the symptom. The problem was passive consumption disguised as living.
What Does Screen Time Cost You?
Hours every day. Most of it goes to news and feeds engineered to keep you scrolling, and almost none of it leaves you better informed.
The news industry doesn’t exist to inform you.Share on X
The numbers are simple and brutal. The average American watches four to five hours of television per day. Add two to three hours of smartphone scrolling, social media, and casual internet browsing. That’s six to eight hours daily spent consuming other people’s content, reacting to other people’s opinions, and watching other people do things.
Multiply that by a year. You get roughly 2,500 to 3,000 hours. That’s enough time to write three novels, learn a language, build a business, or master a craft. It’s not enough time to do any of those things and also watch four hours of television every night.
I’m not doing abstract math. I write 10,000 to 12,000 words a day. That output exists because those hours aren’t going somewhere else. When people ask how I produce so much, they expect to hear about talent or discipline, and the answer disappoints them: I don’t watch television, I don’t scroll social media feeds, and I don’t read news that has no impact on my actual life.
That doesn’t mean distraction leaves me alone. I’m fucking ADHD, and I fight it all the time. Butterfly, cool. Shiny object, cool. When it happens, I force myself back to the work, or I take a walk to chill out and then come back and do what I need to do.
The News Is Not Informing You
I stopped consuming news media over a decade ago. No cable news, no newspapers, no news magazines, no news websites. This decision horrified people more than the television. Nothing changed when I stopped. Every piece of news that affected my life reached me through normal human interaction: coworkers mentioned relevant events and friends shared important information. Anything I needed to know found its way to me without my spending hours absorbing coverage of events I couldn’t influence and that had no impact on my daily decisions.
What the news was doing was generating anxiety, outrage, and helplessness. It was training my brain to react emotionally to things I had no control over. That drained the mental energy I needed for creative work. The news industry doesn’t exist to inform you. It exists to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. Your anxiety is their product.
I check weather.gov when I need a forecast. That’s the extent of my news consumption. Everything else is noise.
Is social media designed to be addictive?
From Author Talks
Kim Groshek spent thirty-five years in tech, then deactivated social media for six months and her phone for a year to find out what living without them was like. She journaled the results and described them on Author Talks.
Teams of engineers and psychologists design social media platforms, and their explicit job is to maximize the time you spend on the platform. Every notification, every infinite scroll, every algorithmic recommendation exists to keep you engaged longer. Your attention is the product they’re selling.
In November 2017, Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, spoke at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and described the thinking behind the platform he helped build. The question, he said, was “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” The answer was to “give you a little dopamine hit every once in a while” through likes and comments.
He called it “a social-validation feedback loop” and said it was “exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” He said the people who built these platforms, Mark Zuckerberg included, understood this consciously. “And we did it anyway,” he told Axios.
I give Parker credit for saying it in public, and it’s still outrageous. One of the men who built the machine told everyone how it works and admitted they built it that way on purpose. Every time a notification drags you away from the work you meant to do, you’re getting the dopamine hit he described.
During my 20 years at Trader Joe’s managing computer operations for a $16 billion company, I watched social media transform from a communication tool into an attention extraction machine. The technology is optimized for engagement, and engagement means triggering emotional responses: outrage, envy, validation seeking, fear of missing out.
Keep your accounts, but understand what the platform is doing to your brain while you use it. Set fixed times for social media. Disable notifications. Treat it as a tool you use deliberately. The difference between using social media and letting it use you is whether you decided to open the app or the app decided to interrupt you.
Your Phone Is Not Your Friend
Smartphones create the illusion that being reachable at all times is normal and expected. For most of human history, people were unreachable most of the time and civilization continued functioning. I think the expectation of instant replies is one of the dumbest habits we’ve picked up, and the people who pay for it are the ones who never get two uninterrupted hours in a row.
Unless you’re an emergency responder or on call for a critical system, there’s no reason anyone needs to reach you within seconds. Disable notifications for everything except phone calls. Check messages at set intervals. Let people know that you respond to texts when you check your phone.
My phone doesn’t ring from 9 at night until 7 in the morning. I’m 65, and I don’t need to be answering the phone all the time. If it’s an emergency, they’ll call back, and a real emergency is what 911 is for.
This single change, moving from reactive phone use to scheduled phone use, will recover more productive hours than any productivity system, app, or technique you’ve ever tried.
A writers’ group asked what distracts people most when they’re supposed to be writing, and the answers read like an inventory of modern life. People named the phone, Facebook, YouTube, the urge to scroll TikTok and social media in general. Others named music with lyrics, household noise, the dog and the cat, a spouse, and the ice cream in the freezer. One writer works two jobs and said the exhaustion alone eats the evenings.
Two of the answers were more honest than the rest. One writer said “myself.” Another said everything and anything, because they’re always looking for an excuse.
One writer named a distraction most people wouldn’t count. He spends his writing time building backstory for nearly every character and location, and ninety percent of it never reaches the story. Research and world building turn into a distraction that feels like work.
Most of that list comes down to screens. The rest is life, and you can schedule around life.
What Happens When You Cut Out Screen Time?
When I eliminated passive screen consumption, I didn’t replace it with more work. I replaced it with doing things. Writing, yes. But also reading, building, creating, learning, and being present in my actual life instead of watching representations of other people’s lives on screens.
The first week was uncomfortable. The silence felt wrong.
My brain kept reaching for the dopamine hit of new content. By the second week, I started filling the space with projects I’d been putting off for years. By the third week, I couldn’t believe how much time I had always had and never noticed because screens were consuming it.
Creativity needs space far more than it needs inspiration. Cutting the distractions reveals time that was always there, buried under hours of content you won’t remember next week. I still resent how many of those hours I gave away before I figured that out.
The Books That Go Deeper
I wrote an entire book about this because the problem deserves more than an article. Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something covers how technology companies systematically capture human attention and convert it into profit, leaving users mentally exhausted, socially isolated, and creatively bankrupt. It provides the practical roadmap for digital detox without requiring you to reject technology entirely.
Turn Off the TV, Get Off Your Ass, and Do Something is the long version: how the platforms are built to take your attention, and the changes that get it back without blowing up your life.
The Death of Thinking examines how AI and algorithms are eroding critical thinking and independent judgment. Sins of the Internet is a brutal examination of how social media and digital platforms exploit fundamental human psychology for profit while destroying attention, relationships, and democratic society.
Together those three books cover what digital dependency costs you and how to take your life back. I’m proud of all three, and I think they say things the platforms would prefer nobody said out loud.
For writers, the AI-Enhanced Writer’s Productivity Handbook applies these principles directly to building sustainable writing habits and eliminating the chaos tax that kills creative output.
