Reduced screen time frees users from shackles of work, constant scrolling

What can a person do in 134 days without a smartphone or mobile internet?

For Yang Hao, the answer was "quite a lot".

He crossed 24 provincial-level regions and traveled through 68 cities and counties. He read nearly 40 books, recorded about two terabytes of footage and wrote roughly 220,000 Chinese characters, much of it while on the road.

Before he embarked on the journey, another measure had been bothering him: six hours and 57 minutes.

That was the average amount of time Yang spent on his phone every day in a week. There was nothing especially unusual about what filled those hours. He worked, answered messages on WeChat and browsed social media. Often, he said, he picked up the phone without quite knowing why.

The habit had begun to trouble him during the pandemic, when more of everyday life seemed to migrate onto screens.

"I started wondering: If I reject the phone and this whole system, can I still live normally?" Yang said.

Natural rhythm

In late 2023, Yang, who was pursuing a doctorate in the United Kingdom, returned to China and decided to find out.

He switched off his smartphone and computer and left them behind. Setting out from his hometown of Taiyuan, Shanxi province, he spent the next 134 days without apps providing mobile payments, navigation, ride-hailing, online hotel bookings or social media.

Yang picked a general direction, slung a backpack over his shoulders and set off armed with only a map. Instead of following itineraries recommended on social media platforms, he decided he would arrive somewhere by train, randomly board a local bus and see where it took him.

If something along the way caught his eye, he got off.

In each new city, he usually started at a museum to get a sense of the place, then visited a local bookstore, looking for clues to places that might interest him. At other times, conversations with local people determined where he went next.

Yang's journey gradually acquired its own rhythm.

He became fond of slower, conventional trains. Through the window, he said, "the landscape drifted past like scenes from a film".

Without a phone, he could not book tickets in advance, so he was often forced to wait. Sometimes that meant spending two or three hours in a rundown waiting room in a county town before the next train or bus arrived.

At first, those intervals made him uneasy. There was no feed to refresh in a waiting room, no message to check five minutes before boarding, no short video to make a delay disappear.

So he read. He made notes, watched passengers and looked through windows. Sometimes he simply sat.

"Of all the things I experienced, perhaps the most important was learning how to pass time in a more interesting way," Yang wrote in his notes. "How to wait is an art. Before, the thing I held for the longest every day was my phone. Now it is a book," he said.

What he had not expected, however, was that living without a phone made him look suspicious to some people.

At a bus station in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, Yang was trying to buy a ticket to Ningcheng county when a station worker suggested that he check something on his phone.

Yang told her he did not use one.

The woman stared at him. If he carried no phone, she said aloud, perhaps there was a reason he did not want people to know where he was. Others nearby began listening.

Eventually, according to Yang's account in his book Guanji, which he refers to in English as Disconnected: A Happy Excursion Against the Digital Leviathan, the woman reached a conclusion.

"You must be a spy," she said.

Yang found the scene funny. He also found it revealing.

He had removed only one ordinary object from his life, yet to the people around him, going without it seemed almost as unnatural as missing a part of his body.

A smartphone, he was beginning to realize, had become more than something one carried. Not carrying one could make a person appear out of place.

"The whole social system seems to assume that everyone is online all the time," Yang said. "People expect to be able to find you, and they expect you to respond."

Disconnect to reconnect

A smartphone can neatly fill those minutes that seem empty — waiting in a line, standing on a train platform, or killing time before a friend arrives.

Social media makes those gaps easy to fill. There is always another video, photograph, opinion or notification waiting beneath the last one.

DataReportal's Digital 2026 report found that adults spend an average of 18 hours and 36 minutes a week on social networks and video feeds. Among women aged 16 to 24, the figure rises to 25 hours and 45 minutes.

Xu Yaqian, a self-employed designer, tried something much smaller than Yang's experiment that was no less revealing.

"During the first boom in short videos a few years ago, there were times when I scrolled until almost dawn," Xu said. "It felt as if the phone had been enchanted and grown into my hand. I was exhausted, anxious and blaming myself, but I still wouldn't put it down."

Xu felt his attention becoming increasingly fragmented. He could barely remain focused for a few minutes before reaching automatically for the phone, opening a social-media app, and then scrolling.

"I would go online to look up one specific piece of information," he said, "and suddenly realize I was watching a Xiaohongshu creator explain how she decorated her bedroom."

The problem is not confined to China.

Most adults in the United States age under 30 said their phone is the first and last thing they look at every day, according to a recent YouGov poll. Nearly 40 percent sleep with it next to them. Even internet slang captures the unease: compulsive scrolling has given rise to terms such as "doomscrolling" and "brain rot".

Xu began setting limits on screen time, replacing scrolling with films and books, spending more time outdoors and seeking face-to-face interaction.

After about half a year of trying, he reached his goal this year, reducing his daily screen time from five or six hours to one or two.

The desire to step away is spreading, and a business has grown around it.

One product, called Brick, uses a small device to block selected apps and websites. Regaining access requires users to tap their phone against the device again, adding a physical obstacle between impulse and action.

On Taobao, Chinese consumers can buy an even more literal version.

Search for "smartphone detox" and rows of time-restricted phone lockboxes appear. A phone is placed inside the box until the timer expires. Some listings showed thousands of people had paid for such products.

Meanwhile, phone-free gatherings have appeared in cities including Amsterdam and London, where participants put away their devices to read, draw, play games or talk to strangers.

Rise of 'slow media'

The turn away from constant connectivity goes beyond simply putting phones aside.

In Slow Media: Why Slow Is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart, media scholar Jennifer Rauch examines a renewed attraction to books, handwritten letters, vinyl records, film photography and other forms of media that demand more time and attention. Rather than rejecting technology altogether, the idea is to reclaim some choice over the pace at which media enters everyday life.

Yang's journey reflected this idea. During his 134 days offline, books replaced his phone, while physical maps, slow trains and unplanned encounters did the job of digital-assisted travel. Slower forms of media, he said, can leave more room for "thinking and understanding".

But choosing to slow down is not easy for everyone.

Hu Yong, a professor at Peking University's School of Journalism and Communication, has argued that excessive phone use cannot simply come down to a matter of willpower. When work, life and entertainment all take place on the same device, getting rid of it completely can be unrealistic.

Hu has also warned against shifting all responsibility onto users when hardware and apps themselves are designed to keep people engaged.

Zhang Ran, 28, who works in foreign trade in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, said: "I can't really get away from my phone. From the moment I open my eyes, my work is already running across my phone and computer."

Even at the gym, she checks her phone to see whether a client or supervisor needs her.

Her workday usually starts at 9 am and can sometimes stretch past 10 pm.

"I always feel as if very little of the day actually belonged to me," Zhang said.

To compensate, she said she scrolls to relieve her stress.

A clip from a television program she has already watched. Then another. Sometimes it is two or three in the morning before she stops.

Zhang has tried to break the cycle. Once, she turned off her phone for an entire Saturday and spent much of the day reading. "Time felt both fast and slow," Zhang said. "It felt like I had recovered a familiarity with time that I'd lost."

But as her work became busier in recent months, those phone-free Saturdays disappeared.

"Sometimes I still have to answer work messages on weekends," she said. "I feel like I'm always online."

Call of duty

Zhang's dilemma represents what some believe is now a labor issue. Shanghai labor law expert Lu Jingbo has argued that mobile and remote work are increasingly blurring the boundary between work and rest, making it more difficult for workers to truly disconnect outside working hours.

For Zhang, turning off Xiaohongshu is one thing, but ignoring a client is another.

"If a job that requires me to stay attached to my phone keeps making me feel worse," she said, "I may quit and rest for a while, and try to find my focus again."

After his journey, Yang collated the observations in his notes into a manuscript and approached several publishers.

They turned him down.

Ironically, the reversal in his literary fortune came from the very thing he had spent months trying to escape.

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A media report about his experiment began circulating online. It drew traffic and attention. Publishers began contacting him — including some that he had approached before, he said.

"I tried to escape the virtual network woven by the internet and traffic," he said. "I didn't expect that traffic to be what brought the publishers back to me."

Yang, who has since completed his PhD in contemporary art at Lancaster University and now teaches cross-media art at Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology, called the episode "particularly ironic".

"It reflects how society works now," he said. "It is very difficult to escape the logic of the internet."

He also acknowledges that modern life cannot simply be separated from the internet.

The journey did not make him reject the smartphone. It changed the boundaries he wanted to draw around it.

"When I'm working, reading or writing, I switch it off for a while," Yang said.

"I still have to live by the rules of this society," he said. "But I also want to keep some independence for myself."

Contact the writers at zhaoruinan@chinadaily.com.cn