I never used to believe the grown-ups when they’d turn down dessert on the claim that the delectable in question was “too sweet.” This made about as much sense to me as rejecting a book for being too interesting or a friend for being too kind, so I figured the statement must simply be a socially graceful alibi for wishing to watch one’s calories.
Now that I am a grown-up, though, I see they perhaps weren’t lying: my palate now agrees that some treats can, indeed, be too sweet. Of course, I can still put down a generous slice of homemade pie, and more often than not I end my meals with a handful of dark-chocolate chips; but the Halloween candy for which I used to beg my sisters to trade me no longer tempts me in the least, and I certainly don’t remember the last time I craved a soda. With each new silver hair that springs from my temples, my appetite for sugar seems to wane, even in some cases (e.g., as with those soft-baked, grocery-store sugar cookies with the thick spread of chalky, pastel icing—you know the ones) to the point of repulsion.
Lately I’ve noticed a similar phenomenon playing out in my appetite for spending time on my cell phone. Maybe, as with the sugar, it’s a product of getting older, or maybe it has more to do with what many have recognized as the increasing “sloppification” of the digital landscape. Whatever its cause, the practical effects of my growing repulsion are evident: Whereas I used to carry my phone in my pocket as I went about my days at home, now I typically keep it “hung up” in a kitchen drawer unless I’m actively using it. I write down upcoming family events on a paper calendar that hangs from our refrigerator, and I keep all my various notes and lists tucked away in a three-ring binder. I wake up to the beeps of a basic, single-function alarm clock, and I snap photos of family moments I wish to remember on a Pentax K1000 film camera that was manufactured in the 1960s.
Perhaps the above makes me sound like a Very Principled Person, but I promise that’s really not it. For better or (more typically) for worse, I’ve never excelled at sticking with habits for the sake of principle alone. No—my distancing is genuinely a matter of instinct. My body seems to have learned at a subconscious level that the closer its physical proximity to and functional reliance upon my phone, the more it will bend toward chaos. My mind will become overwhelmed by all the pieces of my life it has outsourced to apps to keep organized, and I’ll always feel behind. My hand will feel sore from navigating with my thumb while holding the device in my palm, and my eyes will tire from maintaining a single plane of vision. My attention and patience toward my children will grow thinner, and they’ll feel my distance and respond in discord. The sensation of using my phone now so often feels uncomfortably stimulating—“too sweet”—and thus my soul seems to have developed a sense of mental nausea to protect myself from tasting it.
This nausea, however, isn’t the only instinct I feel at play: Even as I feel little to no appetite for spending much time on my phone, I still feel the perennial urge to check it—to tap its shiny, black screen on the lookout for notifications. Repeatedly throughout the day I feel myself pulled back to it, often without thinking. When I’ve finished a task, returned from an errand, or seated myself on the couch with a cup of coffee, I pick up the phone by default, as though I were coming up for air. When I wake up in the morning, I tap the screen as soon as I walk into the kitchen, before starting my coffee; and at night, though I’ve tried to make a habit of putting it away for the final hour or so of my day, I still feel compelled to look at it just one, last time before heading off to bed.
Some would say I do this because my brain is craving a hit of dopamine, and others would say I do it because my soul is craving human connection. Perhaps there are other explanations too, and I’m sure most of them are onto something. As far as it concerns my own compulsion, though, I see another force at work.
I received my first cell phone in high school, and while even then I appreciated its usefulness for communicating with family and catching up with friends, its primary draw to me lay elsewhere. Sixteen-year-old Holly, you see, was a hopeless romantic—as perhaps were most representatives of my gender who underwent puberty at the same time Focus Features released its 2005 production of Pride & Prejudice. Therefore, in the evenings, when I perched my pink Motorola SLVR upon my desk while I scribbled away at my homework, I admittedly did so mainly in hopes that a “ping” might alert me to the incoming attention of a boy.
Even at times when I didn’t have a particular crush on a particular boy, still my growing attachment to my phone betrayed an unspoken hope that someone, somewhere, loved me and wanted to tell me so. I wanted to believe that despite the lonely and mundane appearance of my immediate context—holed up in my bedroom, labeling diagrams of organic molecules or thumbing through pages of Guns, Germs, and Steel—perhaps a bigger story, that is, a love story, was currently playing out with me, yet unknowing, at its center. I had by then read enough Jane Austen and Francine Rivers that I’m sure this longing would have found a foothold in my heart whether or not I had owned a cell phone at the time. But because I did own a cell phone, I quickly adopted it as a tool in my quest for affection—or, perhaps more accurately, as a portal into the narrative I wished so deeply to be true of me.
Eventually, several years later, I did find a boy who loved me and wanted to tell me so and in fact even wanted to marry me, to which I gladly agreed. And while it’s true a little butterfly in my heart still beats her wings when I see his name appear on my phone screen, long (and thankfully) passed are the anxious days of looking incessantly to said phone for a hint toward the resolution of a romance, picking off the petals of “he loves me... he loves me not.” I found my love story; I found my place within it; and no longer do I require notifications from my phone to convince me of any of the above.
You might think, therefore, that my attachment to my phone naturally would have waned in correspondence with the obsoletion of the attachment’s primary purpose. However, the true, core purpose—that is, to connect me to a bigger (better) narrative than the one I could see around me—never actually dissolved; rather, its content only shifted. I was no longer searching specifically for a love story, but I still wanted, and still want, a story—one that transcends the trappings of everyday life and connects all the rogue points of sensory input into a constellation with greater sense, direction, and purpose.
Let’s call this story “iTime.” According to iTime, I’m a central character in a narrative that comes from somewhere and is going somewhere. My phone, again, is my portal into iTime, as it synthesizes all the various plot points of the narrative—my personal communications, the world news, my Kroger list, and the photos that now serve as my “memories”—into a singular interface, or “text,” if you will. The narrative of iTime both conforms to and informs my desires: A shipping notification for my latest online purchase confirms that I’m inching closer to my aspirational lifestyle (which was given to me in the first place by Pinterest), and a Substack notification confirms my progress toward becoming a “real writer” (that is, a writer whose name and work will appear with authority on the newsfeeds of strangers).
When happenings in my immediate, embodied life feel confusing or disjointed, I can open my phone’s search engine to request easily digestible answers and instructions for next steps to follow, and the media it feeds me instruct the motivations that shape my thoughts and actions. My “Home” screen has become my mind’s Home indeed—a compact building with doors to rooms filled with everything I might wish to think about. When my embodied self feels bored, confused, lonely, overwhelmed, or tired, I can simply open my phone and go Home—a place of comfort where everything, at least on the surface, makes sense as part of an organized and purposeful whole.
Furthermore, iTime isn’t merely an individual experience; rather, it has become the platform where families, friends, institutions, and eventually the whole world meets. Our phones give us insight into how the many characters in iTime relate to one another and to our selves—for example, to determine what Aunt Mary thinks about Senator Tom so we know how to converse with her over Christmas dinner. We long to be omniscient readers of our lives, our relationships, and our world, and our phones comfort us that through use of the appropriate apps and prompts, we can be.
For all the reasons described above—since it’s where all the moving pieces of our lives and of the world give the clearest semblance of unity and direction—iTime can start to feel more “real” than our embodied experiences of time and space. Not only are we drawn by desire into iTime—we start to feel obligated to it as well. The expectation has arisen that other characters should be able to reach us and receive a response from us no matter where we are or what time it is, and we’re expected both to be informed of and to have an opinion about world events immediately as they unfold. I check my phone one, last time before bed only partially because I want to and perhaps more accurately because I feel like I should—for you never know who or what might be demanding my urgent attention. Social media has set the expectation among many, particularly in younger generations, that events in embodied life only matter to the extent they can be documented online in a manner that garners a large and favorable response. (Substack, love it though I do, sets the same expectation for its users’ ideas and opinions.) Submitting the direction of our embodied lives to the narrative of iTime can at times feel like a thrill and at other times feel like a duty, but either way it becomes our second nature.
It’s probably clear by now that I’m wary of many pitfalls consequent to persons or societies orienting their lives around an attachment to iTime, and many of these pitfalls (regarding damage to families and other relationships, attention spans and memory, personal emotional resilience, the environment, and so on) have been documented elsewhere. However, my main objective here actually is not to pronounce a verdict on iTime or demand that readers detach themselves from it entirely. (To do so would make me quite the hypocrite, given my so-far failure to abandon my pathological phone-checking habit.)
Instead, I’d like to close by affirming the human longing to understand our lives within a coherent narrative context as a good and God-given desire. We were created to be inhabitants of a story and to look to this story for our sense of identity and purpose.
This story, of course, is the story of the gospel—of a good and loving God who has created the cosmos with the telos of participating in his eternal glory. This God has made himself known to us through Scripture as a merciful Father and as a faithful brother in the Incarnate person of Jesus Christ, and he invites us into fellowship with himself through the power of the Holy Spirit.
God’s thoughts and ways are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). To him “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” (2 Peter 3:7), and he is able to do “immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine” (Ephesians 3:20). The story he is writing for his creation—and for us as his creatures—is far greater than anything our limited minds could fathom, and therefore we will at times (maybe even usually) feel uncertain or confused about why the events in our lives happen the way they happen or for what purpose they play out they way they do.
However, rather than defaulting to the narrative of iTime for comfort in the direction of our lives, our Lord calls us to trust that “in all things [he] works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28; emphasis added). And what is this purpose? It’s that we should love him with our whole selves, that we should love our neighbor, and that we should flourish in the law of his grace. This is the story that will matter for and continue in eternity.
As I work to moderate my own habit of picking up my phone every time I encounter liminal space, I’m encouraged to remember that the task at hand is not solely to remove my attention from the narrative it offers. To the contrary, my task is to turn my attention—and then my whole self, body and soul—toward a story far better indeed. And the story is this: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Matters of Late
A couple weeks ago I was given the privilege of joining Molly Flinkman and Adrienne Garrison to record the February episode of the Exhale Creativity podcast. (I couldn’t have asked for more gracious and engaging hosts; the whole process was genuinely a delight.) The podcast is only available to members of the Exhale community, but throughout the interview we discussed many topics about which I’ve written here on Substack.
Having this chance to speak about my personal story as both a mother and an artist, however, reminded me just how important it is both to listen to other people’s stories and to interpret of our own stories in the context of community. The longer I keep at this habit of publicizing my art and writing, the more my online footprint will expand to accumulate “highlights” and “successes,” presenting the illusion of uninterrupted progress and order. But all those who know me well know that my heart—the one from which all my efforts as a mother and an artist flow—has been significantly formed by seasons, past and present, of pain, chaos, and failure. The joy that shines from my artwork is a joy that has known darkness, and it’s a joy that stems from redemption, not preservation.
I mention all this certainly not to invoke pity, but only to inspire hope. During my own dark or barren seasons, it has been the stories of others that have most effectively redirected my gaze from my navel toward grace, and I hope the stories I tell might someday do the same for others. I have no doubt that yours will too.
This month I have also enjoyed reading Grace Hamman’s 2025 release, Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life. Given my background in archaeology, I’m always excited to see writers engaging with history to speak into contemporary, Christian life, and Hamman’s work did not disappoint. Each chapter brought so much light to the vice and corresponding virtue it described, but it was the light of a candle—warm and inviting—not cold and sterile, as some might expect based on previous exposures to the topic of virtue. Hamman writes with clarity, humor, and humility, and I’m grateful to her for sharing her wisdom in such an approachable and applicable form.
Giveaway
This month, in the spirit of reclaiming our mental lives from our smart phones, I’m giving away a hand-printed mini Moleskine, in your choice of pink or white, where you can jot down your own notes and ideas!
Click the button below and fill out the form by Sunday, January 25, if you’d like to be entered in the drawing! Note that this giveaway is only open to subscribers, so if you haven’t yet subscribed, make sure to do so first (subscribing comes with a couple other perks too!).
Thanks for reading! Until next time—
Holly
I resonated so much with this! I think much of changing our appetites has to do with feasting on better things (no one wants a chalky store sugar cookie when you’ve had a gourmet cake). Your article made me think about how I can better train my appetite to desire what is good, beautiful, and true.