On one of the coldest afternoons in December, Chicago native Jackson Antonow stood in the wind, hands tucked into his coat pockets, talking about the book he never planned to write. “Enemy in Your Pocket: How Using Your Phone Less Will Change Your Life and How to Do It,” currently for sale on Amazon, did not begin with a revelation or a manifesto. It began with a feeling he could no longer ignore.
At 18, a freshman adjusting to college life, Antonow was spending nearly eight hours a day on his phone. “That was pretty much the norm for Gen Z,” he says. What unsettled him was not the number itself, but the constant hum of unease that seemed to follow it. He felt distracted, scattered and strangely pressured by a device that was supposed to make life easier.
So he tried something modest. He used his phone less and paid attention to what changed. Almost immediately, things shifted. “I didn’t need studies to tell me I didn’t feel well,” he says. “I just paid attention.” What began as a personal experiment slowly became a blueprint for a different way of living.
The book grew out of that shift. Antonow surveyed classmates and found average daily screen time hovered around five and a half hours. Using conservative assumptions, he calculated what that habit adds up to over a lifetime. More than 15 years spent looking down at a screen. The number felt abstract, so he reframed it. The average user spends about 84 days a year on a phone. Limit usage to an hour a day and that drops to roughly 15. The difference amounts to more than two extra months each year. “People can feel that,” he says. “That’s real time.”
After imposing the one-hour limit on himself, the results were tangible. His grades improved. His thinking sharpened. The pressure he’d carried for years began to lift. And he came to a simple but profound conclusion: many of us are “living on hard mode for no reason.” Intelligence, he discovered, was less about innate brilliance than attention and effort. With fewer distractions, he had both.
What surprised him most was not the math but the emotional weight of constant connection. Carrying every past social circle in your pocket creates an illusion of obligation. “You’re always bringing everyone with you,” he says. “People you barely knew then, and don’t know now.” Reducing his phone use didn’t just give him time back. It gave him clarity about where his energy belonged.
Still, the most meaningful moment came when a classmate approached him after reading the book. “You changed the trajectory of my life,” she told him. For a self-described “normal kid,” it was the kind of affirmation that stays with you.
Now a senior at the University of Wisconsin, Antonow is thinking about jobs, adulthood and possibly a refreshed edition of the book. But the heart of his message remains unchanged. He’s not selling a miracle. He’s simply offering a way to reclaim time, attention and a little more ease in a world that rarely hands those things out freely.
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