It’s no secret that many Americans use the phone for the dopamine to combat despair, but like any unhealthy drug, the joy becomes more and more elusive, and suddenly you may find yourself scrolling through awful news because somehow that now feels satisfying. Emotional Sobriety and the Internet was a series in which we asked writers about their problematic phone and internet use; now, we’re bringing it back. First up: The Cut’s Kathryn Jezer-Morton, who writes the fantastic Brooding column. Many of her stories explore how aware she is of, or how obsessed she becomes with, her (and her family’s) attachment to phones, to the scroll, and to the burdens of being a real-live human in a world that seems to deprioritize that less and less. She was the perfect person to relaunch this series.

“I feel like a fucking idiot if I’ve spent more than like ten consecutive minutes on Instagram. I would say that my own self-loathing is at least as bad as the effect of the app itself. The content I’m looking at doesn’t make me feel bad, it’s the fact of looking, the fact of being defenseless against it.”

Read more of her insights below. We’re all in this together. —AJD

KJM: At the start of February when the latest Epstein files were released, I had a couple of really bad days. For whatever reason I had been able to numb out my visceral emotional response to Epstein for the most part up until that point, and all of a sudden I just couldn’t anymore. I actually cried about it, which is unusual for me. I had been in the middle of writing a Brooding and I had to bail on it and write about Epstein instead which ended up being unsurprisingly quite difficult, and led to me spending more time reading about it, and feeling worse. 

KJM: Instagram is the only app I really struggle with. I used to be addicted to Twitter but since it’s become X it’s way less interesting to me which I guess for my purposes is good, even though I miss the old Twitter sometimes. I delete Instagram from my phone during most weekdays, but I’ll still look at it on my desktop while I’m taking breaks from working. It feels less evil when you’re looking at it on your desktop, somehow.

KJM: I am very hard on myself about this and I experience a lot of shame over wasting my time. I feel like a fucking idiot if I’ve spent more than like ten consecutive minutes on Instagram. I would say that my own self-loathing is at least as bad as the effect of the app itself. The content I’m looking at doesn’t make me feel bad, it’s the fact of looking, the fact of being defenseless against it. It just makes me feel like a loser. I am pretty ambitious, but like many people, my ambition doesn’t always translate into hard work. And I think the feeling I have after looking at my phone for a while is that I’m failing to beat back a part of myself that’s self-indulgent and delusional and wants pleasure and renown without actually making any real effort. Maybe, as my son would say, “it’s not that deep,” but it feels that deep to me, unfortunately.

KJM: Apart from when I’m asleep at night? Probably like three or four hours. I ski with my family a lot on the weekends, and iPhone batteries tend to die in the cold so I don’t check my phone while I’m skiing basically at all. I keep it in my pocket in case my son needs to reach me, and the story I tell myself is that if I check my phone and then it dies, and then my son can’t reach me, I am a true moron deserving of whatever frustration and suffering befalls me. This is a pretty effective strat for keeping me off my phone on the chairlift. During warmer months I spend a lot of time on the weekends in my garden, with dirt all over my hands. This is also effective at keeping me off my phone. Also, my husband is really not a phone guy, or a social media guy, and this makes phone-checking a lot more conspicuous when we’re together. Like if we go out for lunch together or even if we’re just hanging out at home, I really try to keep my phone away because it’s rude when one person is on their phone and the other person is just sitting there. I am really grateful for that influence. If he were a phone guy, I’d be fucked because I’d always have tacit permission to be on my phone and believe me, I’d take it. 

KJM: I’m pretty sure the friction-maxxing piece was the most popular thing I’ve ever written. I got a ton of feedback. It went viral on LinkedIn of all places. I mean, it was fun to hear nice things from so many people. It was a big surprise to me. But there is an experience of diminishing returns, when something you write gets a lot of attention. At first it’s such a good feeling, obviously. But if, like me, you get pulled into the feedback loop of checking your notifications, it can become draining and ultimately kind of a day-killer within just a couple of hours. 

I’ve found that it’s important for me to be doing something phoneless when something I’ve written is getting talked about online, if only just to preserve the enjoyment of having something be published and taken seriously at all. Like, that’s the whole point, right? All the attendant attention is basically bullshit and of course it’s what ends up being at the forefront of my awareness when I’m checking my notifications. Writing my column every two weeks has been good practice for me to learn how to keep my ego contained after having published something. I’ve been doing it for almost four years and I’m only just getting better at this — at holding off on engaging with feedback, at thinking about and doing things that have nothing to do with the piece of writing that is currently radiating meaning at the center of my stupid universe. This cartoon that Edith posted a while back basically says it all!!

KJM: I actually experienced this recently and it was so nice. My family went to Nicaragua over the holidays and on the boat to the island where we were staying, our bags got wet and it fried our phone chargers. It took like 3 days for them to dry off and work again and in that interim our phones all died. Deus ex machina! I would do it all again: Be outside, go swimming in the ocean, hang out with my family, read a book, play cards, eat and drink, take a long walk, take a nap.

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