When my close friend Amy encountered Nan Goldin’s Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, at an exhibit in Los Angeles, it left her emotional. The photo finds five friends sitting by the ocean waves, enjoying slices of fluffy cake and laughing with a sort of reckless abandon. Amy shared the photo with me, and I was glad for it. Hey, I thought. These are my friends. I took a closer look at when the photo was taken. 1973.
In 2025, my friends and I go on and on about how we’re living out our teenagehoods in an age of smartphone mania. It’s an ongoing discussion with no particular genesis, picking up whenever there’s a lull in our giddy excitement around one another.
“Man, my screentime has been insane,” someone might say, and that sets us off. We’ll continue to indulge in the self-deprecation that surrounds today’s chronically online culture until we sound like our parents always did.
“Maybe it’s just that damn phone.”
“Brainrot” is a Gen-Z-spearheaded term that partly describes how it feels to be weighed down by the ball-and-chain in our pockets. Half of the time, it’s the butt of our jokes, as wry humour is infamously Gen-Z’s coping mechanism of choice.
I’ve even resorted to writing poems about it. There’s a distasteful lethargy that comes with spending countless hours scrolling, searching for something that I think will make me feel good, but never quite suffices.
I titled one of my poems “Social Mania”, thinking of the addictive dopamine hits that come with my social media usage. “It’s a symbiotic curse,” I scribbled. “I did not consent to living in an experimental generation.” Re-reading this now, my friends’ similar descriptions come to mind.
“I feel wasted.” “Heavy.” “Empty.” “Gross.”
We acknowledge, even lament, that there’s a normalization of the addiction that entraps us. Every person I know whips out their smartphone to pass the time in the café line or to avoid the inaction of a bus ride.
In social settings, we gently graze our phones as a reminder if anything feels uncomfortable, unsafe, or even slightly unfamiliar. In other words, if the daily life experience of inevitable mundaneity dares to put us out of our comfort zone, we have an easy out.
A quick click and swipe, and we’ve got instant escapism. Constant accessibility with, essentially, no limit. The thing is a daily crutch.
But I’ve noticed that there’s more to the smartphone’s effect than simply anesthetizing our mundane moments.
Of course, no one in 1970 was unlocking their phone to post rock stars like Jimmy Page shredding his guitar. There's a shocking magnitude to those eras and their distance from the 2020s, giving audiences and concert tapes from each period a sort of untouchable sheen.
The ‘90s, however, aren’t so untouchable. (I myself missed the decade by a short six years). In 1996, at the Knebworth Festival, the English rock band Oasis performed to a quarter of a million people over the span of two evenings. 250,000 people bore witness to those record-breaking shows -- not through screens, but their own eyes.
Today, concert audiences are punctuated by smartphone camera lenses. We rush to film evidence of our being present without actually being present, instead placing our trust in algorithmically-manufactured interpretations of the event.
What I mean is, not even the head-banging, body-thrashing, adrenaline rush moments of our lives warrant a break from the screens. A far cry from the days of Oasis at Knebworth, attended by a crowd of people who are still very much spry and kicking in 2025.
If I were a teenager when Oasis was topping the charts, would my ‘90s self call my current self stupid for experiencing life through an object’s eyes instead of my own?
At its worst, my screentime has been up to seven hours per day on my phone -- and this is a negligible count compared to many teenagers.
Almost every day, I ponder what it would feel like to live unafraid of all of my body’s senses without the buffer of the smartphone -- unafraid to touch something rough, hear something unpleasant, feel something underwhelming.
I think about how much life is defined by that which is vibrant in its regularity, and on the other hand, I think about how meaningful standout moments become when I embrace them in their entirety, experiencing something for myself rather than documenting it for others.
And each time, I land on how much of all that has sunken away into these invisible seven hours a day that don’t belong to me anymore.
After arriving home from a day out with friends, “too worn out” to wash off my makeup just yet, I sprawl across my bed and open Instagram.
My guitars sit, propped against my bedroom wall. My bookshelf of stories I once relished is just at the edge of my peripheral vision. My mother eats dinner alone in the kitchen. I recognize, rather pathetically, that I’ve got to look more closely at these invisible seven hours.
Since my parents were my age, the world has gained plenty through technological advances -- and hooray for that. But the problem we’re facing now is the danger of gaining so much that we lose ourselves.
I want teenagers from 50 years down the line to be able to look at photos of me and my friends and find themselves, rather than feel like they’re watching the ghosts of an unfamiliar past.
Because yes, there’s never been anything altogether Earth-shattering about our daily lives, nothing so invigorating that keeps us on a constant high. But occasionally, I want to sit by the ocean with my friends. I want to love them by the water and laugh with reckless abandon. And I want to be there when it happens.
Especially if there’s cake.
Deya Nurani is a freelance contributor based in the US.
