One of our family’s guilty pleasures is Survivor. My wife and I discovered the show after we moved back to the United States from Romania. My parents had several seasons on DVD, and we watched them shortly after our first son was born.
I’ve come to think Survivor is still the best game on television—tweaked and altered just enough each season to keep things fresh (and to provide endless fodder for fans who either embrace or loathe the latest experiment that tinkers with the formula).
Anyone who watches Survivor wonders what it would be like to be on Survivor. Could you endure the weather and the elements, the petty bickering, the social maneuvering, the endurance challenges, the constant hunger?
But one experience marks contestants today in a way that wasn’t the case when the show began 25 years ago (50 seasons ago!): spending a month without the smartphone we’ve grown accustomed to having beside us at all times.
Survivor Without Screens
Rachel LaMont, the winner of Survivor 47, recently appeared on The Quigley Dreamcast and described what it was like to get her phone back at the end of the game.
When it turned on, it was so bright I couldn’t look at it. The haptic feedback literally made me recoil. I just thought, “I don’t want to be on this thing anymore.”
Rachel said that for about a month after the show, she was “pretty phone-averse.” Having tasted a different way of being, her return to normal work was jarring. Living outside without mirrors or screens for a month, then going back to sitting in front of a phone or laptop for nine hours a day, felt intolerable.
And yet she acknowledged the resignation most of us feel. In today’s society, it often seems like “there’s nothing you can do.” Screens are simply part of life.
Where can you go and spend a month and not see a phone or a TV or a screen? It’s basically impossible. Even if you hiked the Appalachian Trail, you’d still have a phone on you. That’s the thing I think about the most—the chance to sort of time travel back and experience life the way we just can’t anymore.
When Rachel talks about Survivor, she talks most about the experience of time itself—how it felt slower and fuller. You could “really be present.”
I slept amazing out there. There’s just nothing. There’s no distractions. And I would just lay on the dirt and be like, “I wonder what time it is. Look at the stars.” I sat on the beach the night before I could have gone home . . . and I saw this shooting star. It went from the horizon up and it was almost a straight line, and it was so bright. It was crazy.
We often say time flies and our memories don’t work well, but Rachel thinks that’s because we’ve lost the capacity to really pay attention. We’re multitasking constantly, doing too many things at once, never fully present anywhere.
Since coming home, she acknowledges the good her phone makes possible—all the connections and communication with friends and family—while still despising the dependence it creates.
It’s tragic. You come home and think, “I hate my phone. I don’t need this.” But everyone you love lives somewhere else. The only way to talk to the people who understand you is through your phone. It’s a push and pull. . . . You deactivate Instagram, then you reactivate it. You reintroduce this addictive substance into your life. It’s an amazing medium for connection, and also awful and toxic at the same time.
Rachel’s experience names a tension most of us live with every day.
Catch-22 of Connection
We feel we need our phones. But we don’t always want our phones. We rely on them for work, relationships, and basic activities of life, even as we lament how much they rob us of attention and presence.
Speaking of attention, the problem has grown so dire that Netflix filmmakers now alter scripts to explain what’s happening on-screen, assuming viewers will be scrolling on another device while half watching on their laptop or TV. In this environment, sitting still for a two-hour movie feels like a win. What this level of distraction says about our minds (and what it portends for our ability to focus long enough to read and learn) is alarming.
And yet, there’s reason for hope.
Stirring Dissatisfaction Among Christian Students
In recent years, I’ve noticed something taking shape among Christian college students. This is anecdotal but consistent across campuses I visit. A student at Cedarville University told me that several friends in his group deleted Instagram entirely. Students at Liberty University described a group of guys who limited their social media use to seven minutes a day, and gave one another their screen-time passcodes so they couldn’t get around the restriction.
I know of churches seeking to cultivate a different culture among their staff, urging one another to keep phones out of reach during family hours. Youth groups that collect phones in a box at the door. High school students who meet up in town and agree ahead of time not to pull out their phones during dinner together.
Just as schools that once rushed to give every student an iPad are now reversing course, these young Christians are showing the rest of us something important: We don’t have to be slaves to our technology. We have agency. We have freedom.
It shouldn’t take a stint on Survivor to remind us there’s a real world beyond the omnipresent screen. We can push back. We can silence our devices. We can make them work for us again, instead of living as though we work for them.
It’ll take discipline, courage, and partnership with others. But I’m heartened to see pockets of Christian young people choosing a different future for themselves and their families. A generation relearning how to look up may yet recover what the rest of us forgot how to see.
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