At age six, Sarah Hill was handed her first iPad by her parents, which she used to play games like Angry Birds and Minecraft whenever she was bored. By age 21, the Alabama native had fallen so deep into virtual reality experiences and playing video games that she’d stopped seeing friends, showering, and brushing her teeth. “If you compare video game and tech addiction to drugs,” she says, “VR is the meth of drugs.”
At college, she spent so much time holed up in her room compulsively accessing a chatbot site, Character AI, on her phone that she failed classes. “I remember the night I told my parents I’d lied about everything and I flunked,” she recalls. “My parents didn’t have any words. They were like, ‘Just go.’ I went to my room, but the last thing I saw was my mom resting her elbows on the counter and just crying. That was the worst thing I ever saw.”
Hill’s parents flew with her from Alabama to a town just outside of Seattle and enrolled her at reSTART, one of the nation’s few residential treatment programs for digital overuse that treats tech addiction as a danger on the scale of alcohol or drug addiction. Clients are required to abstain from the internet, smartphones, gaming, and other technologies—often for months at a time. On her first day there screen-free, Hill lay down on her bed and cried.
