Screen use has been a compulsion I’ve battled against for as long as I can remember being an adult and probably even a little before that. A lucky American kid growing up surrounded by tech and fueled by a natural inclination towards escapism, I learned from an early age that nothing soothed the soul quite like a long session of The Sims or an Internet binge. I would lose sleep, stay up all night, and ruin myself for the next day all to stay up and click “one more link”. I missed out on social events to watch strangers live their lives online.

It wasn’t exciting and I didn’t want to keep doing it. But something that I couldn’t even access, buried deep within my brain, compelled me to keep going. It told me lies like, “just one more video”, “I’ll play just for a bit”, “tonight won’t be another wasted night”. I knew these statements were lies but I indulged the gremlin in my brain and I would give into the lie more often than not. It was part of the dance – I would tell myself my life would change and then this lie would give me permission to piss away another night of my existence interfacing with the world behind the safety of a screen.

I did try to fight the compulsion over the years. While it was futile at first, I was able to slowly chip away at my bad digital habits over the last decade. It’s a battle and one I don’t always win. I’ve had moments these past couple of months where I would sit down to look at something on my laptop for five minutes, only to emerge over five hours later bleary eyed and feeling empty and disappointed in myself. But despite these bad days, I’ve genuinely seen an overall reduction in my compulsive screen use over the past year. I used to have a lot of days that I spent scrolling in bed. The only thing indicating the passage of time was the sun slowly setting from behind my blinds.

But slowly (and this process was excruciatingly slow) I noticed a change in my habits. Where I would previously spend hours a day reading the laments of strangers on Reddit, suddenly I was spending less than an hour a day on the platform. And then, eventually, I had a day where I didn’t use the site at all. Then I had more days without logging in, and on some of those days, I wasn’t even fighting the compulsion.

I have been in this struggle for so long and I don’t think it will ever fully leave me. After all, if anything, the distractions I have available to me are getting increasingly sophisticated and appealing. But I now look at the process of “beating it” differently. I now see my life as something I need to continually decide that I want to show up for. Distraction, sloth, indulgence will always be on the sidelines calling out their siren songs, but life – with all its pain and uncertainty – will always have more to offer me.