From the August 2025 issue of Toronto Life
Save Me From My Screen
Despite the do-not-disturb settings, time-spent reminders and ritual purging of apps, we’re hopelessly addicted to our smartphones—and it’s ruining our lives
In the spring of 2024, I walked into a Telus store in Liberty Village and requested a flip phone. The clerk stared. “Why would you want that?” he asked. It was a reasonable question. The short of it was that I was sick of my iPhone. I was tired of feeling chained to my many inboxes and alarmed that any time life lagged—if I was standing in an elevator, riding the TTC or sitting on the toilet—I’d default to opening Instagram or a news app. My time was being stolen from things that mattered more: my wife, sleep, exercise, all those books I’d convinced myself I didn’t have the bandwidth to read. I wanted to see whether I’d get more out of life if I used my phone less. And I wondered if the world wouldn’t be better off if we all did a digital detox.
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