Ryan P. C. Trimble

Kate Berlant says getting off her phone made her feel intimate with her own life again. “I was doing days with no phone, and suddenly it’s 1904 and I’m a novelist.” She says going without scrolling brought back forgotten memories. “When you go off your phone, you start having childhood memories. I’m driving, and suddenly I’m back in the kitchen, I’m 10 years old, and my father comes in. It’s unbelievable. My brain is like, ‘Thank you.’ It’s opening up and flooding me with images.” She says constant scrolling makes you lose touch with yourself. “You just start to think again. You become more intimate with your life. We can talk about the horror machine of this, but on a personal, psychological level, you’ve lost all intimacy with yourself. That’s the crisis.” “Once you get a little bit of that intimacy back, you’re like, ‘Alright, now this is really medicinal.’”