Why Your Screen Time is an Existential Crisis

Imagine you are a Greek king who just got on the bad side of the gods. Your punishment is simple but incredibly cruel. You are forced to push a massive, heavy boulder up a steep mountain. You sweat, you struggle and you finally reach the very top. But the moment you get there, the rock slips from your grasp and rolls all the way back down to the bottom. You have to walk down and do it all over again. Forever. Sounds like absolute torture, right?

Now, I want you to look down at your hands. You are probably holding a glowing glass rectangle. You use your thumb to pull a feed down, you wait for the little loading circle to spin and new content appears. You scroll through it for a few minutes. Then, you pull the screen down to refresh it again. You repeat this motion endlessly. You watch the feed refresh, you scroll and you refresh again. Welcome to the modern mountain.

The Sea of Bowed Heads

I am a senior in high school, and I see this everywhere I go. If you walk into my school cafeteria during third period, you will not hear the loud, chaotic chatter you might expect from a bunch of teenagers. Instead, you will see a sea of bowed heads. Everyone is hunched over their phones, thumbs swiping in perfect synchronization, completely disconnected from the people sitting less than two feet away. We are all pushing our own tiny digital boulders. And honestly, it is starting to feel a little insane.

To understand why we do this, we have to talk about a guy named Albert Camus. If you have no clue who Camus is, do not worry. I only learned about him recently in an AP English class, but his ideas completely changed how I view my own life. Camus was a 20th-century French-Algerian philosopher, though he actually hated being called a philosopher. He was essentially the ultimate cool guy of the literary world. He wore sharp trench coats, smoked cigarettes like they were going out of style and eventually won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But more importantly, he wrote a famous essay called "The Myth of Sisyphus," which introduced a concept that hits incredibly close to home today. He called it "The Absurd."

Understanding the Absurd

The Absurd is not a complicated idea, but it is a heavy one. Camus believed that human beings have a deep, wired-in desire to find meaning, order and purpose in life. We want the universe to make sense. We want to know why we are here and what it all means. The problem is that the universe is completely silent, cold and chaotic. The Absurd is the uncomfortable clash between our desperate search for meaning and the universe's total refusal to give us any answers. We shout into the void asking for a master plan, and the void just gives us crickets.

Historically, people handled the Absurd by turning to religion, grand political causes or philosophical systems that promised to explain everything. Camus called this "philosophical suicide." He argued that by blindly accepting a pre-packaged meaning, you are essentially running away from the uncomfortable truth of reality. You are putting on a blindfold because the actual world is too messy to handle.

So, what does a mid-century French writer have to do with us sitting on our phones in 2026? Everything. Today, our screens are our preferred method of philosophical suicide.

Escaping into the Artificial Void

We use our devices as an escape hatch from the Absurd. Think about the last time you were left alone in a quiet room with absolutely nothing to do. No phone, no television, no background music. It is a terrifying feeling for most of us. When you are alone with your thoughts, the void starts to creep in. You start wondering about your future, your choices and the general weight of existence. It is incredibly uncomfortable. To avoid that dread, we immediately reach for our pockets. We plunge our brains into a continuous stream of social media, video games or endless news feeds. We drown out the silence of the universe with the noise of the internet.

But here is the dark irony of our digital habits. We think we are escaping the void, yet the screen itself is just an artificial void. We are trading the grand, mysterious emptiness of the universe for a shallow, glowing emptiness that actually makes us feel worse.

The Doomscrolling Loop

Let's look at a very specific digital habit we all share. Doomscrolling. We sit on our beds at midnight and compulsively consume negative news, disaster videos and toxic comment sections. We tell ourselves we are just staying informed, while we are actually trapping ourselves in a cycle of despair. A 2024 study published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports by researcher R. Shabahang and his colleagues dug deep into this phenomenon. They found that doomscrolling directly evokes existential anxiety and fosters deep pessimism about human nature. By constantly exposing ourselves to an endless stream of negative digital content, we generate feelings of learned helplessness. We are literally conditioning our brains to feel powerless. We try to run away from the Absurd by looking at our screens, but the algorithms just take our existential dread, magnify it and feed it right back to us.

We are not solving our search for meaning. We are just making ourselves miserable.

And it is not just the news that hurts us. The way we use social media to replace actual human connection is a massive part of the problem. We convince ourselves that being in a group chat or following a thousand people online means we are part of a community. We think we are interacting with the outside world, yet we are actually isolated in our own little digital bubbles.

The Illusion of Social Media

This illusion of connection is incredibly damaging. A 2024 experimental research study conducted at the University of Northern Colorado looked at how different types of social media use affect our mental states. The researchers randomly assigned participants to different activities like active posting, broadcasting or just passive scrolling. They discovered that the passive scrollers reported significantly higher levels of loneliness compared to all the other groups. When we just sit there and quietly swipe through other people's lives without engaging, we are not connecting. We are acting as ghosts haunting a digital landscape. We see everyone else allegedly living their best lives, and we feel entirely left out of the human experience.

This brings us back to Camus and his concept of the Absurd. If running away into our screens makes us anxious and lonely, what are we supposed to do? Camus said that physical suicide is a coward's way out, and philosophical suicide is a cop-out. The only valid response to the meaningless universe is Rebellion.

Camus did not mean rebellion in the sense of starting a riot. He meant a deeply personal, internal rebellion. You have to look the void straight in the eye, acknowledge that the universe is chaotic and lacks a master plan, and then choose to live passionately anyway.

Imagine Sisyphus Happy

At the end of "The Myth of Sisyphus," Camus writes a sentence that blew my mind when I first read it. He says, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

How on earth could Sisyphus be happy? Camus argues that Sisyphus becomes the ultimate Absurd Hero the moment he accepts his fate. He stops hoping for a magical rescue. He stops wishing for an easier life. Instead, he finds profound meaning in the struggle itself. He feels the rough texture of the rock against his hands. He feels the strain in his muscles. He notices the dirt under his feet and the sweat on his brow. He is fully, completely alive in the present moment. By totally embracing his physical reality, he conquers his punishment. The boulder is his thing.

Camus was a man who deeply loved the physical world. Growing up in Algeria, he spent his time swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, playing soccer with his friends and soaking up the intense sunlight. He believed that the ultimate rebellion against a meaningless universe is to experience the sensory world as vividly as possible. You cannot do that if you are constantly staring at a piece of glass.

Staging a Personal Rebellion

Being on our screens is the exact opposite of what Camus advocated. When you are lost in a doomscroll, you are not feeling the sun on your face. You are not noticing the smell of the air or the sound of the wind. You are completely detached from your physical body. You are sacrificing the only tangible reality you have for a stream of pixels that will be completely forgotten by tomorrow morning.

As I get ready to graduate and head out into whatever the future holds, this realization has hit me like a ton of bricks. We are wasting our rebellion. We have the entire physical world right outside our doors, full of messy, beautiful, absurd experiences, and we are ignoring it so we can watch someone lip-sync on TikTok for the fourth hour in a row.

We need to become modern Sisyphuses, but we need to choose the right boulder. Pushing a digital feed up a screen is a pointless punishment that only brings anxiety and isolation. We need to drop the phone and pick up the actual weight of living.

So, how do we practically apply this 20th-century philosophy to our heavily digitized lives today? It starts with small acts of defiance. The next time you find yourself stuck in a mindless scrolling loop, I want you to mentally hit the pause button. Acknowledge what you are doing. You are trying to fill a void with empty calories.

Then, do the hardest thing possible. Put the device down.

Walk outside. You do not need a grand destination or a perfect sunset to post on your story. Just walk outside and exist in the physical space. Feel the temperature of the air on your skin. Listen to the cars driving by or the birds in the trees. Look at the people around you, real flesh-and-blood human beings who are also navigating this weird, chaotic universe. Talk to your friends face-to-face, even if it is awkward or imperfect.

The outside world does not offer simple answers or neat algorithms tailored to your preferences. It is unscripted. It is unpredictable. But it is real. By stepping out of the digital illusion and choosing to engage with the physical world, you are staging your own personal rebellion. You are looking at the Absurd and responding with your own vital, undeniable existence.

We only get one shot at this life. There is no hidden meaning waiting to be decoded, and there is no digital escape route that will actually save us. There is only the rock, the mountain and the choice of how we climb. Choose to live in the real world, fully awake and fully alive. I promise you, once you start feeling the actual weight of the rock, you will finally understand how to be happy.