Diary of a Gen Z Student: It feels a bit pathetic that less time on my phone should be a resolution

Jane Cowan is a student in Trinity College Dublin, where she is in her second year, studying English.

My dad always tells me this story about when he first started secondary school. He describes how he had expected the lads to take up smoking in first year.

To his surprise, by the age of 12 or 13, a few of them made it a new year’s resolution to quit.

It was 1979. Some of them had been smoking since they were seven.

As I was relaying this story to one of my friends a few weeks ago, we moved onto our own resolutions for 2024.

She pointed out to me that if you spend two hours on your phone every day for a year, you will spend an entire month of that year on your phone.

And if I’m honest, I often spend a lot more than two hours on my phone in a day.

So, there it was: my resolution for 2024. I would spend less time on my phone.

I remember a phone was the height of cool when I was 10. I wanted one so badly. I begged my parents. I thought I was the only 10-year-old without a phone. How embarrassing.

And after a few years of wearing them down, my parents relented. I got the phone.

But after a little while, the phone lost its shine. The novelty dulled. And I’ve sort of grown to despise it over the past few years.

I spend too much time on my phone. I think most of us probably do. We all know it.

I make jokes about iPad kids in restaurants, but I’m a bit of an iPad kid myself.

I never sit on a bus without taking out my phone. I never leave my house without the bloody thing. It’s like an extension of my right arm.

It feels a bit pathetic, that less time on my phone should be a resolution. It shouldn’t feel so difficult not to waste my life scrolling through curated feeds of people’s lives on Instagram.

I mean, social media is a bit bizarre. How do we manage to be so invested in the lives of people we hardly know? Or don’t know at all, for that matter.

I often wonder about this modern phenomenon. We certainly didn’t have the time or facilities to have so much interest in the lives of so many people, back in the Stone Age.

I don’t think people are built to have so many things to compare ourselves to. Sure, comparison is the thief of all joy and all that.

And of course, if you’re comparing your life to someone else’s, and using Instagram as the metric, it’s not going to work out in your favour.

But Jesus, we spend so much time thinking about the lives of others, we’re forgetting that we have a life of our own to be living too.

I know I’m 19, and at risk of sounding about 50 years my senior, but we don’t have much time on this pale blue dot.

I seriously just spent over a month of 2023 on my phone? When I’m 90, I know I won’t regret the amount of time I spent on the dancefloor of a nightclub. But I’ll wish I spent less time glued to a light-up brick.

It’s not like I even enjoy scrolling through Instagram. Most of the time, I’m doing it out of habit.

And I could list at least 50 things I would rather do with that time.

Read a book, go for a walk, make a cup of tea, learn German, ask my Grandad about the golf.

If there was a big, red button I could press that would turn off social media, I know what I’d be doing. No hesitation.

So long, TikTok. Death to doom scrolling. iPad kids (and adults) would cease to exist.

But I would probably feel a bit jarred that I couldn’t celebrate the accomplishment with an Instagram story, in all honesty.

But in the absence of that big, red button, a new year’s resolution will have to do.

We’re not long into 2024, but so far, I’ve impressed myself.

It’s actually kind of nice to spend less time invested in the lives of people online, more time looking at what to do with the very short time I’ve been given.

If my discipline wavers, I’ll think of those 12-year-olds trying to get off the smokes in 1979.

Who knows, maybe I’ll be communicating via carrier pigeon in 2025.