The 32-Year Mirror

Thirty-two years.

A student at Loyola University Maryland did the math on his screen time and arrived at a number: at his current pace, he would spend thirty-two years of his life staring at a phone. Not using it for work. Not connecting with people he loves. Just... staring. Scrolling. The accumulated weight of a thousand tiny pickups, day after day, decade after decade.

That number landed in his body. I imagine it landed in yours, too, just now.

Here's what interests me: he already knew he should use his phone less. We all know. The advice is everywhere—limit screen time, set boundaries, be more mindful, put it in another room. The advice is correct. The advice changes almost nothing.

What changed at Loyola wasn't the advice. It was the measurement.

Students in a psychology course tracked their actual usage through apps. One discovered she picked up her phone 190 times a day. Another found 55 games downloaded that he barely remembered installing. And our student with the 32-year projection—he could finally see the shape of his own pattern.

You can argue with advice. It's much harder to argue with your own data.

A principle I return to: presence reveals the pattern. Not willpower. Not motivation. Not better information about what we should do. Presence—the simple act of paying attention to what's already happening.

The students weren't doing anything wrong before. They simply couldn't see what they were doing. Their attention was captured by their phones, which meant their attention wasn't available to notice their attention being captured. A perfect closed loop, invisible from the inside.

The tracking apps didn't add knowledge. They added visibility. They made the invisible legible. And once something becomes legible, it becomes workable.

After a semester of measurement and short digital fasts—24 to 48 hours without a specific app or the phone entirely—the numbers shifted dramatically. The student who picked up her phone 190 times a day dropped to 3. Games were deleted. The 32-year projection shrank to 24.

Eight years of life, reclaimed. Not through heroic effort. Through seeing clearly.

What strikes me is how gentle this approach is. No shame. No rules imposed from outside. No white-knuckling through withdrawal. Just mirrors, held up consistently, and the natural realignment that happens when we can finally see our own shape.

This is how lasting change tends to work. Not through force, but through visibility. Not through knowing what we should do, but through seeing what we actually do. The gap between those two things is where we live most of our lives—and closing that gap starts with looking.

I'm not going to tell you to download a screen tracking app, though you might. The deeper question isn't about phones.

It's this: What patterns in your life are invisible to you right now? The ones you genuinely can't see—not the ones you know about and resist. The accumulated costs that would shock you if someone handed you the number.

Where would you need a mirror?

The body often knows before the data confirms it. There's a tiredness that isn't about sleep. A scattered feeling that doesn't resolve with rest. A sense of time slipping that has nothing to do with being busy.

These are signals. The question is whether we have the visibility to read them—or whether we're still inside the pattern, unable to see its shape.

Thirty-two years is a long time. Long enough to learn a craft, raise children, write books, tend a garden through decades of seasons.

It's also, apparently, what a phone can quietly take—one pickup at a time, invisible until someone does the math.

Find one mirror. Look.

Sources: The Daily Record — 'Loyola University class helps students break phone addiction' (January 8, 2026)