Edit Desk: Are we all rats stuck in a maze?

When I opened my phone in early December and the right three-quarters of the screen wouldn’t register my touch, I felt my chest tighten. 

After all the abuse my phone had suffered — from slipping into a sink full of water while I was hand-washing a vintage dress to bouncing down the stairs at Fairchild-Martindale Library — it had finally had enough. 

The first couple days without my phone, I found myself reaching for it and panicking when it wasn’t there. When I saw an acquaintance on the bus I didn’t feel up to speaking to or during the 10 frightening minutes before an interview or after receiving a grade on a homework assignment I didn’t like, my hand still went to my pocket out of habit. 

Eventually I realized I was using my phone to comfort myself whenever I felt a negative emotion, whether that was stress, boredom or anxiety. I used it to fill the empty space in my brain, the same way a baby uses a pacifier. 

The app I always gravitated toward was TikTok. Or, if I was getting desperate, I’d go to Instagram to scroll through Reels. 

The advent of the never-ending scroll Instagram and TikTok have adapted means users can get lost in a barrage of non-stop content. The “infinite scroll” creates a variable reward system, which intermittently gives users hits of dopamine in the form of entertaining videos. 

In a study on variable rewards, B.F. Skinner presented rats with two levers — one which dispensed the same amount of food every time and one which varied the amount, from nothing to a large chunk of food. He discovered the rats with the variable level were more persistent than those that got the reward every time. 

Realizing I was no better than rats smashing a lever made me want to change the way that I looked at the world — even after my forced digital detox was over. 

I thought about life before my phone, before I even had a Kindle Fire, on which I was allowed to read and have three parent-approved games. What I remember most about my phoneless childhood was spending long hours bored out of my mind.

But that boredom wasn’t a bad thing. In fact, for every hour I spent tallying the seconds until my friend showed up for a playdate, I also spent an hour scribbling out, illustrating and stapling together “books,” reading to my younger brother, or crafting elaborate make-believe scenarios for us to act out. 

Boredom turned into action. Into art. Into my best, most creative ideas. 

Before my phone broke, I rarely let myself be bored. Anytime the feeling crept in, I’d turn on my phone, which supplied me with an overstimulating amount of entertainment. 

Since 2015, screen time has been steadily increasing. In 2024, teenagers spent 43% of their waking hours staring at a screen — an average of seven hours and 22 minutes a day. 

My screen time was only slightly less than that. When I realized how much of my life I was spending on my phone and that I couldn’t recall three of the videos or posts I saw in a given day, I panicked. 

The week before Christmas, and two weeks into my foray as a Luddite, I wrote about feeling like I had so little time on this Earth in my journal. Even without the hours spent on my phone, I could never read every book, every article or watch every movie. Engaging with short clips of “content” rather than carefully crafted art made me feel less like a person.

I didn’t just want to spend more time engaging with art now that I didn’t have a phone. I wanted to hear the recommendations of people in my life rather than those of a faceless algorithm. 

I felt as though this would be my first step toward developing taste and, more than that, a personality. 

I started asking my friends, a friend of a friend at birthday parties and even cashiers at record shops and bookstores about their favorite albums and books. This meant I was able to talk to them about it. People shared Google Docs with me that contained their “to read” lists, asked for my Spotify username and even leant me their favorite books so we could talk about them when I finished. 

I didn’t just strengthen my pre-existing friendships. I made new ones. 

I have spent the last 10 years of my life as a “girl online” — someone who reblogged pictures of alternative pop artist Lana Del Rey in front of a billowing American flag on Tumblr in 2015 and whose life was changed by The 1975’s “Robbers” music video. 

I thought no longer having access to the cultural cachet of being “in the know” would be something I would miss, especially as I wrote editorials for The Brown and White about online ideas, like “girl” trends or the rise of Sonny Angels. 

But I realized the social capital I believed I was gaining from understanding niche internetisms, like “she just turned 19 in Poland,” never actually existed. 

Even more, I realized just how little those things matter in the real world. 

That doesn’t mean I gave up internet connection completely. Now, I connect to it while  drinking a Dalai Latte at Deja Brew, reading my favorite Substacks or catching up on emails and texts at The Grind before starting my homework. 

I finally got a new phone on March 23. While many of my friends rejoiced because I was reachable again, I worried that all of the progress I made would immediately fall apart and, once again, my rat brain would win out. 

Since getting my new phone, my screen time has hovered around an hour a day, rarely soaring above three hours. The things I used to do on my phone, like scrolling through Instagram Reels, seem boring and pointless now.  

Instead, when I feel the urge to reach for my phone, I can sit in comfortable silence — people-watching through the windows of the Packard Express or looking up at the newly bloomed cherry blossoms as I walk toward Coppee Hall. 

Thinking of my phone as a tool for connection — for calling my friend who’s studying abroad or texting my boyfriend a picture of a deer I saw on campus — rather than something there to entertain me was the moment that I stopped hitting that lever.