20-year-old ditched her phone for a day—now her screen time is down from 10 hours to 2: ‘Be present where you are’

Like many Gen Zers, 20-year-old Kylee Harris got her first smartphone in middle school, she says, and began consuming social media soon thereafter.

“Young Kylee was very much addicted to Musical.ly and Instagram,” she says. YouTube was also in the mix. That scrolling habit stuck around in high school as well, when Musical.ly became TikTok in 2018.

After graduating, Harris moved from her home state of Mississippi to Tennessee with her boyfriend, where she now works as a personal care assistant and a specialty cobbler making shoes for an accessible shoe brand.

On a day off in 2025, it dawned on Harris that something about her online habits needed to change.

“I had woken up at about 12:30 in the afternoon,” she says, “and then I looked at the clock, and I saw it was about 4 p.m. and I had not gotten out of bed. And the only thing I had done that day was scroll on social media.”