Musings on a screen-free day

29 Sep, 2026

A fellow member of the tildes.net community posted a thread about taking a screen free day, and after trying one I wanted to comment with my thoughts on it. Rapidly I realised that the comment was becoming far longer than the average, so I took the opportunity to stick it onto my blog instead.

I took a screenless day on 12th September, and it was incredibly restorative. I decided that it was easier to have zero screens than to permit just one or a specific purpose, so there was no digital input for me at all. I came away eager for more time away from my phone, though not necessarily all screens all together.

One of the main takeaways from the day were how much more time I felt like I had. To be able to indulge in hobbies for long stretches and to cook a complex meal from scratch feels impossible on a normal day. But there was time to spare, and it felt so fulfilling to use it for things that made my brain work, rather than things that do the work for me. I wasn't filling every second with a glance at messages, or a quick refresh of the news, or getting stuck into a rabbit hole about something utterly inconsequential. Trips to the bathroom were far quicker as well (:

I was stunned by how easy the whole thing was as well, after gathering just a tiny bit of momentum. After a few moments in the morning when I was looking around for my phone for something to do while the coffee brewed, I found it easier and easier to go without my screens. This has me wondering if there's not some kind of rule I can set for myself about how long to give it before I pick up a screen on a normal day. Much like I cut myself off from caffeine at noon, I think there's a sensible argument to be made for codifying the window during which I can go on my phone. We don't allow our kids any screen time before 11am, so maybe I should simply do the same.

Speaking of the kids, a fairly big niggle with the day was that I wasn't able to field any of their requests for time on their screens. I wasn't about to force them all to take a screen free day, but I was being really firm with myself about having no usage whatsoever. This meant all the requests had to go to my wife, and while that's not a problem, I did feel a little guilt for abdicating that small bit of parental responsibility, and would hesitate to rely on her too much for such things.

It's really easy to fall into the trap of thinking "screen bad," without stopping to think about the purpose for each of them. Taking a day away from screens has me returning to a thought pattern that I've been mulling for years at this stage; how to balance the impulse to consume with the urge to create. During my day away from screens I found myself wanting to get my laptop out so I could work on a coding project, or write a blog post, or notate up some musical ideas I'd had. I didn't, but it struck me how strong my urge to create is. I didn't want to check my social media, watch YouTube, or scroll through endless slop. I wanted to express myself, create something that didn't exist before, channel ideas from inside to out. At least insofar as my life works at the moment, those creative endeavours necessitate the use of a screen¹.

So my conclusion, then, must be that screens cannot be a universal bad. It is how I use them which is the problem. "Guns don't kill, people do." Creation versus consumption. If I use my phone to while away hours of my day on content (I hate that word) that just sloughs off my brain the moment I scroll away from it, then that is surely bad. If I use my laptop to spend the same amount of time writing a piece of music or creating a little computer program, is that good? I don't know that I like assigning moral weight to either of those activities. If I neglect my children but write a great symphony, that is bad. If I choose to spend time of an evening when I am exhausted simply watching a sitcom on the TV, is that good?

I don't hate my phone. It is a marvel of technology, and manages to delight me frequently. I use it to get to places I don't know how to drive to, to listen to music and books, to keep in touch with my friends and family, to play chess, and do puzzles in competition with my wife. For such an expensive piece of equipment, it sure does a lot of very basic things. Does the expense of it trick my brain into wanting to use it more? I think what I hate is how easily I can get sucked into things other than what I want from it. It's simply too convenient to open up the phone and check the news, open Reddit, scroll through YouTube shorts, blah blah blah. It's all just... there, waiting to be passively consumed. You know all this already. It's in trend at the moment to hate on screens and screen time. We've done this dance before.

I came away from a day free from screens wanting the lesson to be easy. I wanted it to result in some crystallising realisation that I can just simply stop consuming and only ever create. I wanted to realise that I can absolutely do without these variously formed glowing rectangles, become a digital foreigner, and begin to live some transcendent life of creativity and artistic freedom. I want it to be black and white: screens are bad, consumption is bad, creativity is good, going screenless is good. But there are shades of grey to all of this, and adding moral weight in any direction helps nobody.

And now that I've pondered it for a couple of weeks, sat with it, and finally written it out, I realise that actually it is really simple: intentionality. Using screens, like any other technology, is not inherently bad. What matters is the intention behind it. The moment we no longer feel in control, when our higher intention is supplanted by baser chemical feedback loops that these devices and their software exploit, that's when it feels bad. Not a moral bad; a physical and mental sense of wrongness, restlessness, and shame. I am not a bad person for having and using a phone, laptop, tablet, video game console or TV. I have been made to feel bad for using these things mindlessly, and without intention. And that is what I want to change for myself.

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