I would have liked to look at my phone a little more

The Wall Street Journal, one of the main economic newspapers in the United States, has had a monthly column reserved for three years to talk about retirement. The section Retirement rookies (which could be translated as Retirement for beginners) is written by two people. It is signed by Stephen Kreider Yoder, one of the former editors of the newspaper, and his wife, Karen Kreider Yoder, both retired from professional activity and motivated to reflect on this new stage of life. The couple, who have not yet reached seventy years of age, live in San Francisco and are presumed to have a privileged and quiet retirement. They address everything from the most typical dilemmas such as the opportunity to travel, move to a quieter town or buy a motorhome, to some fears such as health, widowhood or staying in good shape. They delve into psychological and emotional aspects related to personal identity when you stop working. They also deal with economic issues, such as the anxiety of running short of savings, the need to reduce expenses or the consequences of inflation for retirees. However, from the first columns they wrote, a recurring concern of the Kreider Yoders about time management becomes evident and, above all, a certain demand to invest it wisely. In these three years, they have insisted on the complexity of finding a balance between doing a lot of activities and learning to disconnect, changing old routines for new ones, making lists of realistic plans without getting stressed or correctly distributing attention to the rest of the family. Time is a background headache that always appears.

In the last column, they posed a title with a question and an answer that has had a lot of impact and stimulated debate: "Where does our free time go during retirement? Too often, on social media." In the article, Stephen laments how he gets absorbed by his phone when he picks it up for something theoretically brief. He wanted to look for a video on YouTube to fix a vacuum cleaner malfunction at home and ends up sucked into tutorials, dog rescue videos, or fragments of series episodes. When he realizes how much time has passed while looking at trivial things, he feels as if he's been abducted because he loses track of time. Karen laments her phone dependence. Every day she completes the Wordle while having coffee, checks the weather on it, has her calendar, to-do lists, and, of course, scrolls on Instagram watching people collect eggs from chickens or creatures cooking for their parents. She confesses she has even hidden her phone like a bottle of gin when she feels guilty about being so focused on the little screen.

The media and experts constantly warn about the dangers of mobile phones for children, but, on the other hand, the risks for adults are not discussed. Especially for older people who may have more free time and no need for anyone to supervise their routines. It's possible we're focusing the problem on children to avoid taking responsibility for our part of the conflict. In the column, the Kreiders admit a feeling of saturation and self-loathing that is becoming too common for them. "There is something particularly insidious about the way the phone absorbs the time that retirement has gifted me," they write. "I need a conscious strategy to manage this fascinating and perverse technology. The time I have left is too valuable." Retired or not, it's easy to recognize ourselves in this mirror and in how the phone has emptied a large part of our time of meaning. We must ask ourselves if the phone is altering our ability to have fun and make the most of the time we have left, which is always less than we would like. It's unlikely that when our time comes, we'll say, "I wish I had looked at my phone a little more."