Choosing Reality Over the Phone

I don’t like being on my phone. It doesn’t feel healthy or fulfilling, and it pulls me away from the life I actually want to live.

Lately I’ve been practicing a simple shift: less screen, more reality.

What I value is pretty basic:

• reality over fantasy
• vulnerability and intimacy over performance
• movement and physical presence over sedentary scrolling
• building real things over consuming endless information

And when those things aren’t available—when connection is limited or life feels constrained—I’d rather have the strength to be alone in reality than to escape into my phone.

Phones are often the only practical way to communicate. That’s true. But it’s also true that our circumstances include choices and rules we live by. Sometimes “this is the only way” is genuinely the only way. Sometimes it’s just the way we’ve arranged things.

Right now, I’m sitting in a chair in my front yard. The sun is out. Birds and squirrels move through the background. The garden is right there.

This is what’s real. And still—my attention drifts back to the phone.

So the practice is small and repeated: notice, put it down, return.

For now, I’m reading in the spring afternoon after yoga—science fiction, ironically—and feeling quite fine. ☀️