The year is 2063 and you were never interesting.

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you – your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Your life is an orchestrated shuffle of technology. Your days are spent at work with the medium screen and you come home to unwind with the big screen; reflexively grabbing for the small screen every 2 to 7 minutes. Your screen time is 4 hours per day, 6 hours on the weekends, 7 if you’re hungover (you often are). It’s the midwest, after all. Fridays are for going out, Sundays are for boozy brunch. And repeat.

You no longer think about hobbies. Your day is full, after all. Your life is a kaleidoscope of activity: fishing trips, police chases, cheating scandals. It’s neat and tidy, really – everything that’s interesting happens to you through the confines of a 4×6 rectangle. You start taking pilates because everyone else does. You hate it, and your abs never appear, and the classes cost $50 dollars a pop, but you can’t really think of what else you would do, so you go.

The great love affair of your life is… this. Sitting in the dark, your nose 6 inches from the screen. You have never separated, never taken a break. It started slowly, rockily. But by 25, it had its claws in you. By 30, it fills the dead spaces in your life. And you’ve never relented. It has consumed you wholly and the math has compounded. By this age, at 7 hours a day, 15 years of your life has been a screen.

— Read on lizleatrice.substack.com/p/the-year-is-2063-and-you-were-never