Morgan Dreiss, a copy editor in Orlando, has severe ADHD that they say requires them to always be “doing at least three things at once.” The result? A daily average screen time of 18 hours and 55 minutes.
“I'm reading a book or playing a game pretty much from waking to sleeping,” Dreiss tells WIRED. What they read comes from the library app Libby, so the books count toward overall screen engagement. Dreiss currently keeps their phone’s autolock feature disabled so they can continuously run a mobile game that pays out $35 for every 110 hours logged. (They’ve earned about $16 so far.)
For years, studies have brought forth worrying data about the potential negative effects of excessive screen time on both physical and cognitive health. Concerns over the neural development and mental health of young people glued to their phones have led to major legislative and courtroom battles; recently a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing their platforms with addictive features.
While the question of whether one can be clinically “addicted” to something like social media remains a subject of fierce contention, there seems to be a broad consensus in this decade that people would be better off scrolling less. On the more extreme end, there are virtual communities that share strategies for ditching smartphones and digital detox retreats where no notifications can find you.
Yet there are those, like Dreiss, who resist the emerging common wisdom about reducing screen time. You might call them “screenmaxxers.” It’s not that they necessarily have some totalizing concept of their habits; journalist Taylor Lorenz is likely in the minority of screenmaxxers eager to put the screen directly inside her brain, as she recently confessed to WIRED. It’s just that, for various reasons, they’re on their devices pretty much all the time, and they don’t see that as a problem whatsoever.
Part of the equation, of course, is work. Corina Diaz, 45, who lives in a remote forested region of Ontario, Canada, works in video game marketing and does influencer management for a game publisher. “So, a lot of screen time,” she says.
Diaz met her husband online in 2005 and had a child three years ago—her screen time increased when she was awake at strange hours because of her newborn, she says.
But Diaz has sought friendships online since the 1990s, when that meant availing herself of tools like Internet Relay Chat and bulletin board systems. “I’ve always felt screens, phone or otherwise, connected me to things I care about,” she says. “In particular, niche social groups that don’t have great mainstream visibility.” Now that she lives two and a half hours outside Toronto, the closest major city, her screen is “a bit of a connection lifeline,” she says.
Daniel Rios is in a similar position. A computer programmer, he lives in the South American country where he grew up after having lived abroad for years. Most of his friends moved away and didn’t return.
As a result, Rios keeps in touch with people over Discord, his primary social outlet. Not living in a city, he doesn’t go out all that much, and screens fill his days—though he says it’s “hard to quantify” exactly how many hours it all adds up to. “When I'm not working at the [desktop] computer, I'm playing at the computer or watching TV,” he says. “If I'm not at the computer, I'm looking at my phone. If I'm not doing any of the above, and I'm out of the house, I'm still probably listening to something on my phone.”
While Rios doesn’t actively seek to maximize his screen time, he says he doesn’t “really feel a need to cut out screen time in any capacity, either,” adding that that would mean “being bored at home.”
At an average daily screen time of 18 hours and 58 minutes, Brooke Williams, a UX designer in the San Francisco Bay Area, says her loved ones have occasionally expressed “annoyance or disbelief” at her level of phone usage. But as the “Google and TMZ in one” for her family—the person who always informs them when someone famous dies—she thinks they benefit from how much she’s online.
William says she has a sense of “hypervigilance” stemming from her family history and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The condition is “managed ‘well’ in that none of my issues seem to be harmful at this point,” Williams says, though “the constant monitoring of social media is definitely a part of it.”
“It helps me feel in control in a way, because I know I know as much as I can know. I can keep track of things, know what I have the power to change and what I don't.”
More broadly, screenmaxxers seem to believe that the general alarm over screen time distorts the issues at hand. “I think screen time is a tangential issue to other, bigger problems,” Diaz tells WIRED. “Social isolation, overworking, maybe addiction.” The screen is merely a medium, she says, “that should be regulated in terms of what content it delivers and how.”
Meanwhile, Diaz suggests, “Good screen time is undervalued, especially when it’s supporting accessibility, education, and socialization.”
Dreiss is more emphatic, calling the warnings about screen time a “moral panic” that seeks to “pathologize dopamine like that's the entirety of what addiction is.”
“I'm one of those people that gets really heated when people try to claim you can get ‘addicted’ to things like this,” Dreiss says. Like Diaz, they see phones as a kind of catch-all scapegoat. “Any negative effect of ‘screen time’ I've ever seen has just been some other societal issue being pushed off on a convenient villain,” they say.
In short, don’t expect to convince a friend or relative who’s permanently on their phone that it’s diminishing their quality of life. While plenty of people would love to see their screen time stats reduced—whether by sheer willpower or through the use of productivity apps that block time-sucking apps—there are plenty of others at peace with the infinite scroll. You can judge them all you want, but the screenmaxxers are undeniably adapted for this world.
