WITHOUT FAIL, ONE of my most hated regular smartphone notifications is the screen time ping on a Monday morning.

Most of the time I clear it before I can fully berate myself over what is usually an eye-watering number of hours. Occasionally, the figure gets burned into my memory, and I instantly start to regret all the time I spent doomscrolling absolute rubbish.

I call it my digital hangover. It’s not that different to a real hangover. Instead of getting flashbacks to singing Wonderwall on a karaoke machine or saying yes to that dodgy kebab on the way home when the answer should have been no, these flashbacks tend to involve remembering how long you spent mindlessly scrolling things like stupid cat videos, people scooping slime, or even filthy rugs being cleaned with machines called ‘Dirt Reynolds’ (don’t knock it until you watch it, it’s deceptively hypnotic.)

My screen time varies, but last week, it was 41 hours and 28 minutes. Granted, nine of those hours were spent watching TV shows or movies, and three went on productivity and finance, but over 19 of those hours were spent on social media.

I felt sick, and thanks to the old digital hangover flashback, I knew exactly what I spent a particularly wasteful portion of those hours watching. One evening, I watched a live TikTok of an American guy sitting in his room putting elastic bands on a giant watermelon until it exploded. I feel like I need to bathe my eyeballs after admitting that.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

I’d like to tell you that I saw sense and gave up after about ten minutes, but I did not. For some reason, at 11.30 pm when I should have been trying to sleep, it was strangely compulsive viewing. The live video, from a content creator I didn’t know or follow, popped up in my feed and caught my attention for a few seconds. Before I knew it, I had clicked into the live and stumbled into the........

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