Amidst the frenzy of advice, tips, strategies, and tools about screentime from talking heads, experts, tech enthusiasts, and even people like me, we’re losing sight of something simple but extremely important in the conversation about what’s best for children, families, schools, and our world: our relationships to one another.
Humans are social creatures. Loneliness literally kills us. The antidote to addiction isn’t sobriety, it’s connection. We need one another.
And though one of the technology industry’s biggest claims is that technology brings us closer together, both the data and the anecdotal evidence point to a very different reality. We are not closer, happier, more well-adjusted, or less anxious.
It’s the opposite.
I’ll offer my own disclaimer that technology and screentime are not solely responsible for this. But they are a big contributor to the problem and as an industry they are not incentivized to change it.
So we have to.
And– shockingly– the solution is not going to come in the form of an app or a platform or a program.
The solution is free.
The solution isn’t technological.
The solution is us.
—------
I left a slushy Seattle to arrive in a beautiful and snowy Helena, Montana. Flakes fell and the temperatures dropped (1 degree Fahrenheit was the high temperature).
As the plane taxied to our gate, I turned to my seatmate. We’d both been reading silently in our books most of the flight– he, Kurt Vonnegut; me, Douglas Rushkoff. He was young, friendly-looking, so I wondered if Helena was home and asked him if this snow was typical this time of year.
He said he was actually living in Sacramento, but was in Helena to work with state legislators. I shared I would be delivering a talk about screentime to the community. I remembered that I had an extra copy of my book in my bag– I pulled it out and said, “Here, pass this along to a lawmaker who is concerned about screens and kids!” He accepted it and said he would.
—-----
Lisa Cordingley, director of the Helena Education Foundation, texted me to say she’d be picking me up at the airport and taking me to my hotel to check in before we headed off to dinner with her colleague, Becca, and two high school students who are student representatives on the Board of Trustees for the Helena Public School District.
We gathered around a table in the cozy restaurant, snow still falling outside. The two high school students are seniors, in the process of deciding their future paths, juggling interests and commitment to their community and extracurricular activities. They are musicians and student government leaders and pages in the state government. They are intelligent, warm, and very bright. Though we talked about technology, their phones remained away for the duration of our meal.
As we left, I turned to Lisa and said, “These young people give me so much hope for the future.”
She said, “I agree.”
________
Helena is a small city, but everyone seems to know everyone. Everything is just “five minutes” away, and wherever we went, locals greeted Lisa and Becca, conversations swirled around people who’ve lived in Helena, who left Helena, who came back to Helena. Lisa drove me around the snowy city and pointed out history and art and homes, the beautiful Grandstreet Theatre (built in 1901) where I would be speaking, many structures over a hundred years old and looking much like they did in the year they were built. I noted this.
“Helenans value their history,” Lisa said.
________
For breakfast, we visited No Sweat Cafe, a local institution that hasn’t changed in the many years it has served locals. No credit cards; cash only. No cell phones, with framed pictures above the booths to show that those who use their devices will be asked to leave. Delicious food.
No Sweat Cafe knows: the good stuff comes through the conversations people can have in cafes over hashbrowns and coffee (drip only).
Montana Book Company, down the snowy street from the cafe, would be running book sales for the event at Grandstreet Theatre. Lisa, Becca, and I had already established that we all love to read, so a visit to the local indie bookstore was a must. The proprietor and I started talking about books and she guided me, through conversation about my interests and past book likes, to three new books– ones I never would have thought to pick up and read.
I don’t want an algorithm to tell me what to read. I want to hear from my fellow book-lover why these books resonated with her and how she thought they might connect with me.
I’ll read them thinking about her and the wonderful little bookshop in snowy Helena, Montana.
__________
The next morning, a message popped up in my LinkedIn account. It was from Will, my friend from the airplane. He had looked me up and sent me a message saying it was nice to meet and that he wanted to let me know he’d given my book to Helena Rep. Melissa Romano, Vice Chair of House Education Committee and former Montana Teacher of the Year.
I told Lisa about my airplane friend and the way my book was passed to Rep. Romano.
Lisa said, “I know Melissa. She is a friend.”
Connections.
____
My talk at Grandstreet Theatre brought in a crowd of about fifty people– community members interested in the topic and put on by the Helenda Education Foundation, whose mission is to “enrich and support” the experiences of public school students in Helena. HEF has been hosting a series of conversations called Face2Face: Smart Conversations about Kids and Screens, a series of events to engage the community in dialogue about phones, academics, mental health, safety, and childhood.
The local news covered my talk, the young reporter juggling his camera and a light and a notepad filled with handwritten questions. He’d done his homework, flipping through his slightly-crumpled notes, seeking to understand and report.
From the stage in this nearly 125-year-old theatre, I offered examples and empathy. I shared my own parenting challenges. I told parents: “You are not alone.” I invited school leaders to think differently about student phone use in school, and beyond that, EdTech.
I always look for the nodders in my audiences– the ones whose heads bounce up and down with my words, encouraging me, offering non verbal support. The head-bobbers tell me my words are resonating. One wrote to me afterwards to say she loved my focus on tech-intentionality and relationships. “It resonated,” she wrote.
I prepare my talks well in advance, and this time, I’d added a quote from the most recent “prescription” from the outgoing U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy:
“Today, we are faced with a profound choice: do we continue with the status quo, marked by pain, disconnection, and division? Or do we choose a different path—one of joy, health, and fulfillment, where we turn toward each other instead of away from each other; where we choose love over fear; where we recognize community as the irreplaceable foundation for our well-being? Choose community.”
-Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy
I always leave my talks feeling energized; this time, I left feeling connected. Lisa, the most generous host of Helena, told me that she, too, had loved this quote and had sent it to many people at the end of 2024 as a message of hope.
Kismet, that we both thought these words were pivotal, that they’d appeared in her emails and in my talk.
“It is about connection and relationships,” she agreed. “We just have to help people see that.” How fortunate Helena is to have a foundation like HEF that is so in alignment with this goal.
“Not everyone sees this yet. Technology claims to make us more connected, but it has the opposite effect. But you know,” I said, turning to Lisa. “We’re right. We just have to help others see this too.”
—---
On my final morning in Helena, I awoke to more snow, but the blue sky pushed through. I can see the mountain ranges surrounding the city. White-tailed deer skipped over the snow banks on the edge of the hilly driveway as Lisa navigated towards her house, where she had generously offered me a quiet spot and a WiFi connection to participate in a webinar before my flight home.
To step away from my routine and daily life, from kids and emails, carpools and cooking, and into the winter wonderland of Helena these past few days has reminded me that progress and change are not going to come overnight. And as resistant as Helenans might be to change, what I have learned this week is that maybe change doesn’t have to mean something new and different. Maybe it means honoring the old beauty of the buildings that have held up for over a century, or trusting in the optimism and hopefulness of our young people, or sharing a love of books and conversation.
Maybe, for our children and their future, for screentime and smartphones, just maybe the answer is less about finding ways to limit and control and restrict and to instead trust what we have always known to be true: being different is okay (No Sweat Cafe), solid construction and quality materials hold up over time (Grandstreet Theatre), and each opportunity we have to engage with others is in and of itself progress and change (yes, Helena, change, but on your terms.)
Following my talk, Lisa and I talked about Dr. Murthy’s prescription for America and realized we also both share a love of Rebecca Solnit’s lines:
“Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch… Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency… Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised… Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.” [Rebecca Solnit]
None of what I experienced in Helena could be replicated by AI, not because it couldn’t mimic social interactions or algorithmically recommend restaurants or books, but because what makes us different from machines is our humanity; our need for one another; our ability to work together to enact change, whether that is in our own homes, our schools, or our communities.
So here’s to talking to strangers on the airplane; engaging with young people about their hopes for the future; and finding allies in people like Lisa and HEF who know that making the world better will come through action and connection.
e
