it’s all screen time now

Once a week, my phone alerts me to the amount of time that week I’ve spent staring at its little screen. 

How quaint. It’s all screen time now. What else is there for me to turn to? At home, I constantly put on Twitch streamers playing video games. Watching them play games is less lonely than playing games myself. I let their voices keep me company for hours and hours a day. I find it hard to turn them off, because when I do, then my loneliness is inescapable. It leaps out to swallow me at the first opportunity. My father used to listen all the time to Michael Jackson (the talk radio host, not the pop star) and Dennis Prager (yes, that Dennis Prager) as, I think, a way of keeping his formidable demons at bay. I use Twitch streamers as a kind of magic spell to ward off my loneliness, but they emphasize my loneliness, too. I feel the screen between me and them. They remind me that for months and months now, I have gone without face-to-face contact in the physical world with anyone I know and trust. The screen is no substitute for what I need. There’s something harsh and draining about it. I feel it burning into my eyes, leaving some part of me exhausted, a part that can only be nourished through contact with others. I wish I could shatter the screen, crawl through, and find myself in the same space as other people.

Of course I look away from the screen at times, though it requires a force of will. I read books. I go for walks. I turn my eyes on the vibrant greens of nature and imagine that I’m draining the life force from those trees and blades of grass to keep me going in this solitude for a little longer. I imagine that all this loneliness and screen time has turned me into a kind of vampire, flowers withering when I walk past them as my soul hungrily absorbs their essence.

I know that screens can nourish us, too, and I try sometimes to commit a decent portion of my screen time to the rich and varied humanity of cinema, though I think even watching movies here in my apartment is providing diminishing returns as the months of isolation drag on. But no, when I think of nourishing screens, I think not of the screens in my apartment which I have almost always watched alone, quarantine or no. Instead I think of the screens at movie theaters, one of my few communal experiences with other people these past few years in this lonely city which most of my friends have left. I think of how I can step out of a great film at a theater, into the light of day, feeling energized, and knowing that the energy I feel comes not just from having seen a great film, but from having shared the act of seeing it with others. 

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I want a return to that kind of screen time, the shared kind, the nourishing kind, and I want a life filled with enough genuine human interaction that I don’t feel the need to conjure voices on video streams all day long just to distract me from my solitude.