I Turned Off the Second Screen

In the first week of April I unplugged the iPad in the kitchen. The iPad was, in theory, for recipes. In practice it was for whatever the New York Times push-notified me about while a tomato sauce reduced. The recipes thing was the cover story. The actual job of the iPad on the counter was to keep me from being alone with the tomato sauce.

I have been doing what people in my house call "small experiments in subtraction" for about three years now. The iPad was the latest one. Six weeks in, I do not particularly want to write a triumphant essay about how it changed my life, because it did not change my life. I will say, however, that I am writing this essay slightly faster than I would have written it in March, and I think that is not a coincidence.

What "second screen" means

The phrase "second screen" originally meant the phone you used while watching the TV. It has gradually broadened to mean any screen that is on at the same time as another screen, which is most screens, most of the time. The kitchen iPad was a second screen for my own life. I was not doing anything on the iPad. I was just keeping it warm.

I want to be careful here, because I am not making the argument that screens are bad. I am making a smaller and stranger argument, which is that I had, somewhere along the way, started using a screen the way a person in 1992 might have used a cigarette — not for the nicotine, but for the thing to do with your hands while you were waiting.

I was not doing anything on the iPad. I was just keeping it warm.

Six weeks of small data

I kept a small notebook by the stove. I am not going to claim it is rigorous data; it is the diary of a person trying to pay attention. A few things showed up consistently.

I noticed silence. The iPad had, without my realizing it, been generating a low-grade ambient soundtrack — video previews, notification chimes, the sound a webpage makes when an ad autoplays. With the iPad off, the kitchen was as quiet as the kitchen actually is, which is to say full of the small sounds of cooking, a refrigerator compressor, a dog’s sigh, a car going by outside. I had forgotten what those sounded like, separately.

I noticed that I started talking to my wife more. We have been married for thirteen years; we do not have a communication problem. But the easy availability of a screen, on a counter, while she was telling me about her day, had been allowing me to be sixty percent present in a conversation, and the difference between sixty and ninety percent is not a small one.

I noticed that recipes, which were the alibi for the iPad in the first place, turned out to work approximately as well from a printed cookbook propped behind the burner. The relevant cookbook, in my house, is "How to Cook Everything" by Mark Bittman, which has been on the shelf since 2008 and is missing its dust jacket. I read the recipe before I started. I did not need to consult it every ninety seconds.

What this is not

This is not a "throw your phone in a drawer" essay. I am not throwing my phone in a drawer. I do most of my work on a phone or a laptop, I read the news on a phone, and I am not interested in the asceticism market — the market for hand-tooled leather books and a Faraday-cage pouch you keep your phone in during dinner. That market is, mostly, performing virtue at $80 a pop.

I am making the much smaller claim that a screen on a kitchen counter, kept warm for no reason in particular, was costing me something I did not know I was spending. The cost was attention. The cost was the quiet. The cost was a small percentage of the marriage, which is a thing you do not want to spend small percentages of.

The iPad is in a drawer now. I will probably plug it back in at some point. If I do, I would like to plug it back in deliberately — because there is a recipe I actually want to read, not because there is a small empty place on the counter that needs to be lit up. That is a small thing. Most of the things worth changing, in my experience, are.