My weekly screen time report arrives every Sunday morning. It is always high. Eight hours, nine hours, sometimes more. The phone delivers this information with the faint judgement of a health app that knows you've eaten badly - a neutral notification that somehow manages to feel disapproving.
The culture around screen time is universally negative. Phones are bad. Social media is bad. Being online is bad. We should be outside more, present more, disconnected more. Every think piece, every wellness guru, every parenting article agrees: screens are the problem, and the solution is less of them.
I disagree. Not with all of it - mindless scrolling is genuinely corrosive, and I've lost enough evenings to Twitter threads that led nowhere to know the feeling. But the blanket condemnation of screen time misses something fundamental: it depends entirely on what you're doing with the screen.
The same screen, different worlds
Here's a thought experiment. Two people spend six hours on their laptops on a Saturday. Person A scrolls through social media, watches YouTube videos, refreshes their email, reads some news, argues in a comment section, and goes to bed feeling vaguely hollow. Person B opens a code editor, builds a feature for a product they're working on, designs a new page, tests it on their phone, deploys it, and goes to bed with something new in the world that wasn't there when they woke up.
Both of them had six hours of screen time. The screen time report treats them identically. The wellness discourse treats them identically. But the experiences couldn't be more different. One was consumption. The other was creation. One left them emptier. The other left them fuller. Same screen. Same hours. Completely different outcome.
I spend a lot of time on my laptop. An uncomfortable amount, if you look at it through the lens of conventional screen time wisdom. But when I look at what that time has produced - fourteen live products, a portfolio site, a blog with dozens of posts, a creative project that has been shared thousands of times - I struggle to feel guilty about it. That screen time built things. Real things. Things that exist in the world, that people use, that I'm proud of.
The laptop I'm typing on right now is, by any reasonable measure, the most powerful creative tool I've ever had access to. More powerful than any canvas, any typewriter, any darkroom, any studio. On this single device I can write, design, code, deploy, publish, and share. I can go from idea to live product in a weekend. I can reach anyone in the world with something I have made. That isn't a time-wasting machine. That's a creation engine. The only variable is what I choose to do with it.
Consuming versus creating
The distinction between consuming and creating isn't about moral superiority. Consumption is fine. I consume plenty - I read articles, I watch videos, I scroll through feeds. Consumption is how you fill the well. It's how you find inspiration, discover new ideas, stay connected to what's happening in the world. Consumption is input, and you need input to produce output.
But there's a ratio that matters. If you're consuming ninety per cent of the time and creating ten per cent, something is off. The input isn't being processed into output. The inspiration isn't being converted into action. You're filling the well but never drawing from it.
For me, the ratio shifted when I started building products. Before Claude Code, before I discovered that a non-coder could actually make things, my screen time was almost entirely consumption. Reading about what other people had built. Saving articles I never went back to. Bookmarking tools I never tried. Admiring from a distance. Consuming the output of people who were actually making things.
The moment I started creating, everything changed. Not just the ratio - the feeling. There's a qualitative difference between a Saturday spent scrolling and a Saturday spent building. The scrolling Saturday leaves you tired in a way that feels like you've done nothing, because you've done nothing. The building Saturday leaves you tired in a way that feels like you've accomplished something, because you've accomplished something. Same fatigue, completely different emotional residue.
The most fulfilling use of a screen
I've tried most of the screen-based activities that modern life offers. Social media, streaming, gaming, reading, browsing, shopping, messaging. All of them have their place. None of them - not one - is as fulfilling as building something.
Building hits differently because it is generative. You start with nothing and end with something. That's a rare experience in daily life. Most of what we do is maintenance - keeping things running, responding to things that have already happened, managing the status quo. Building is the opposite. It is additive. It is forward-looking. It's the creation of something new where there was nothing before.
There's also something about the tangibility of it. When I build a product and deploy it, there's a URL at the end. A real, live, shareable thing that anyone in the world can visit. I can text it to a friend. I can share it on LinkedIn. I can show it to my son - "look, Dad made this." That URL is proof. Proof that the screen time was worth something. Proof that the hours produced something. Proof that the investment of attention yielded a return.
Compare that to the proof of a day spent scrolling, which is: nothing. No URL. No product. No thing you can point at and say "I made that today." Just a vague memory of content consumed and time spent and the Sunday morning screen time report that makes you feel slightly worse about yourself.
Reframing the conversation
I think we need to change the conversation about screen time entirely. The question shouldn't be "how much time are you spending on your screen?" The question should be "what are you making with your screen time?" The metric that matters isn't hours spent but things created. Not time consumed but value produced. Not screen time but screen output.
This isn't about productivity hustle culture. I'm not suggesting you need to monetise every minute or turn every hobby into a side business. Building for the sake of building - the joy of making something, the satisfaction of solving a problem, the pleasure of seeing an idea become real - is its own reward. You don't need to justify it commercially. You just need to do it.
My son will grow up in a world where screens are everywhere. That isn't going to change. The question isn't whether they'll use screens - of course they'll. The question is what they'll do with them. Will they be consumers or creators? Will they scroll or build? Will they spend their screen time watching other people make things, or will they make things themselves?
I can't lecture them about screen time when I spend eight hours a day on a laptop. But I can show them what those eight hours produced. I can show them the products, the sites, the tools, the creative projects. I can show them that a screen isn't just a window for watching the world - it's a workshop for changing it.
The screen isn't the problem. The screen is a tool. Like any tool, its value depends entirely on how you use it. Use it to scroll, and you'll waste your life. Use it to build, and you'll make something worth the time.
My screen time report will arrive again this Sunday. It'll be high. And for the first time in years, I won't feel guilty about it. Because I know what those hours built. And it was worth every minute.
