Dating in your late-30s? Frozen eggs and more will be on the menu
frozen my eggs
.' She delicately perched herself on the chair opposite, just as the waiter handed us the menus.
I took a quick scan to see if I was missing something. Were frozen eggs on the menu? At the time, I hadn't been on a date in more than eight years. I was just turning 30.
Yes,
dating apps
and the internet existed back then, kids, but what had developed since was a whole new world of etiquette, games, language, and coded behaviours that I was about to be submerged in without a life jacket, trying not to drown. Dating in your late-30s? Frozen eggs and more will be on the menu.
Let me be clear: I didn't want to be out there
dating
again. My five-year relationship had ended – we tried, but it was done – and I started dating out of pure panic. Who would date me? A single father, a stand-up comedian, still sharing a home with his ex? Take a number for that queue ladies.
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My first date, I thought, went well. A quick drink before my gig, nice chats, cool vibes. I closed the date with what I believed was the obvious line: 'I'd like to do this again'.
The scrunched-up look on her face still cuts me to the bone: 'You'll probably want to play the field first.' What did that mean? Surely if there's an attraction, we meet again, no? Later that night, the text arrived: 'I just don't want to be your first one back'.
It seemed like if I tried, I was doing it wrong, and if I tried to be open and not try, I was still doing it wrong. One date took place in a park. Takeaway coffees, tight schedules – just a 30-minute hello. I left thinking: there's no way we can know anything about each other in 30 minutes. How wrong I was. In that half-hour, she had determined I wasn't ready for a long-term relationship or to have more children within two years. She was on a schedule and I didn't make the cut according to the WhatsApp essay I received the next morning. Bear in mind: we didn't even know each other's surnames.
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'I was overheard saying my date wasn't very good-looking. Now he's blocking me'
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I did, however, meet some amazing people. And while it's not the official point of dating, I've made some brilliant friends. Some of the biggest laughs came from evenings with a fellow single parent. There's nothing like bonding over shared trauma after sneaking out of the home she still shared with her ex, so we can sip non-alcoholic beers, talk about parenting, Bluey, and how we don't understand why people hate their own children.
And then there were the others – evenings of intimacy with some like-minded creative type, someone who got you the second they kissed you. They carried your heart, told you there was nothing wrong with you – before vanishing back to wherever they came from.
'The men don't help themselves. I've seen the profiles: Leitrim jersey; balaclava; holding a fish.' Photograph: Getty Images
Of course, there are the truly embarrassing moments. Like driving home late from a gig in Galway when someone I'd never met in person messages: 'House is free, it's my birthday, I've chosen you'. So, at 2am, I'm dropped off on a road, 'could be fun, dude,' says my driver. Ten minutes later, I am pacing around an estate in the rain while her messages have stopped. How do I explain this to a Garda convinced I am not scoping out a house to rob? Taxi, home. The next morning: a flood of texts. Expletives, apologies. She'd fallen asleep.
What woke her? The candles she'd lit had set the curtain on fire. She woke up in the smoke and had to put out the flames. Then: 'Are you free tonight?' Followed by her anger at my rejection: 'You can't be serious – that's it?'
I get it. Women are scarred by men's behaviour. Many dating conversations were spent listening to stories of ghosting, or about the latest post on the Facebook page Are We Dating the Same Guy? where women post who they're seeing to see if there are any red flags.
And the men don't help themselves. I've seen the profiles: Leitrim jersey; balaclava; holding a fish. If not, they can't seem to keep their tops on. No wonder 'the ick' exists.
That said, women have their quirks too. Profiles that read like job descriptions: 'You better be able to make me laugh and be emotionally available'. Pick one. Also, loving dogs is not a personality. Neither is wellness. Or yoga. Or your gym pics.
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Online dating: 'Irish people are terrible on the apps'
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Don't worry, I know I'm the problem. Being a comedian doesn't exactly scream stable, grounded individual gliding calmly through life. That's why we do what we do. Does it sting when someone you liked ends up engaged to an accountant? Yes. But also, no. I can't change who I am.
And who I am is complicated. 'Do you feel the need to be funny all the time?' is a common date question. The answer? No. I get paid to do that. And sorry if I'm not funny on the date. That guy you saw on stage? I created him. He comes out when I want.
I also hear: 'I have to be careful what I say now or you'll use it in your act'. The ego behind that? That you'll say something so genius I'll scrap decades of work just to fit it into my set? Not to mention that I've yet to be on a date with anyone who is funnier than my seven year old.
Let me be clear: nothing anyone has ever said to me has made it into my act. However, it may end up in a column.
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Irish Times
14 hours ago
- Irish Times
I've met a wonderful man – but he's starting to give me the ‘ick'
Dear Roe, I've met a wonderful man. After years of crap dates, false starts, commitmentphobes and ghosting, I've finally met a man who seems to really want to integrate me into his life early in dating (introducing me to friends and family, calling me his girlfriend) and is intelligent and sensitive. My issue is that, a few months in, I find a lot of aspects of his personality quite annoying – anything from talking too loud in restaurants to interrupting when I speak. The sex hasn't been great but is improving as we get to know each other. I'm aware that because of things in my past (emotionally manipulative partners and harassment, borderline stalking from an ex) I can be quite avoidant, and that 'getting the ick' is sometimes more about finding excuses not to be with someone. But how do I know where the line is between avoidance and genuine incompatibility? Just because someone is smart, respectful, and ready to commit doesn't mean they're right for me. At the same time, does doing things I find 'icky' (but are wholly innocuous) mean they're wrong for me? Should I accept that no one is perfect, or keep looking? Let's look to the philosophers for this one. In Witnessing Subjectivity , Kelly Oliver writes that 'love is an ethics of differences that thrives on the adventure of otherness'. In Alain Badiou's In Praise of Love , Badiou describes the basis of love's starting and flourishing as the 'encounter between two differences'. For Martha Nussbaum, real-life love requires an embracing stance, and saying yes 'with a mercy and tenderness that really do embrace the inconstancy and imperfection of… real-life love'. READ MORE Or as columnist Dan Savage puts it, the price of admission for having true love is embracing that other people are different from you. And along with all the ways that fact makes life more rich and beautiful and exciting and magic, it also fills life with people who talk too loud, who interrupt, who chew with their mouth open, who walk around after a shower only naked from the waist down (the least dignified form of naked) – or whatever their particular constellation of annoying little differences is. The price of admission that they pay is embracing that you also are different to them, and accepting all of your annoying little differences. .form-group {width:100% !important;} I will admit that I find the idea of 'the ick' quite emotionally immature. I promise that I'm not just picking on you – I have been ranting about this for the past couple of years as the term has been popularised on social media. Commonly understood as a point where your attraction to someone dies or turns to one of disgust, people claim that the ick is an unconscious, unavoidable reaction that there's often no coming back from. In my mind, however, people listing off all the tiny, irrelevant, human reasons they use to discount potential romantic partners feels lacking in empathy, self-awareness and perspective. Icks can often feel deeply embedded in gendered norms, as straight women list off men using umbrellas or lip balm or getting emotional as inspirers of 'the ick', while straight men list women eating a normal amount or enjoying a beer or sitting with a wide-legged stance being an irredeemable turn-off. There are also ungendered icks – an unusual laugh, the awkwardness of chasing runaway coins, an unflattering outfit, licking the yoghurt off the lid – but what they have in common is a projected shame around being seen as human, imperfect. When we judge other people for being awkward or graceless or dorky or flawed, we're also criticising ourselves by proxy. What are the trivial expressions of humanity that we believe make us unlovable and immediately disposable? Icks can also, as you are aware, be self-protective mechanisms – ways of pushing away people and justifying our fear of real connection. Instead of admitting that we fear being vulnerable and liking someone, we can create a tiny but inarguable reason to dismiss them. Self-protection and projected shame can go hand-in-hand: the moment we see someone we like having a flawed moment, we become acutely aware of our flaws. Rather than lose control and reveal ourselves as imperfect, we push them away and trade them in for someone new, with whom we can start the cycle of perfect, early-days performing, where we remain shiny and flawless until the ick cycle starts again. Or we could embrace that, as Tim Kreider once wrote, 'if we want the reward of being loved, we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known'. We could dig deep and put forth our most flawed, awkward, clumsy, coin-chasing, yoghurt lid-licking selves – and believe that we are worthy of love as we are. We could believe that our partners will embrace our humanity, and our differences, and forgive us a million times over for our irritating habits – and we could commit to forgiving them a million times over in return. I am sure your partner talking loudly and interrupting you is annoying, and if his interruptions feel patronising and disrespectful rather than excitable and clumsy, then that's not an ick, that's an important value mismatch and you should leave. And if he is unkind or unethical or is treating you badly, or even just if the annoyances start to outweigh the good and you genuinely don't enjoy being around him that much and your attraction is waning, then yes – break up with him and find someone you like more. But if he treats you well and makes you laugh and is willing to work on your connection? Well, maybe just get more practised at saying: 'Actually, I wasn't finished' when he interrupts you. Maybe forgive a little more, knowing that he will forgive you for your annoying habits, too. Maybe stay focused on the big, important values instead of the tiny, trivial details. I know you've been seriously hurt before, and I'm sorry. I've been there. I know it's easy to believe that to keep yourself safe, you have to have your shoelaces tied, ready to run. But imperfection is not danger. Imperfection is vulnerability. I suspect that you're scared of the vulnerability of loving someone, and being seen by someone – and ironically, this fear is making you a little bit emotionally unavailable. But that vulnerability is where the potential for real love lies, so you need to decide if you want to show up for it. My partner has never hung up a towel to dry in his life. He is late to everything. He once inexplicably showed my philosopher-poet father a computer-animated redesign of a centaur, which was just a horse with a man's arse. I write about sex in a national newspaper. 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Irish Times
14 hours ago
- Irish Times
Why do we hoard? My mother's death made me think again about possessions
When my mother died last year, it fell to me to clear out her home in Co Laois . Sorting through her cherished hats and costume jewellery, I came to question why we hold on to so much stuff. At some point in most of our lives, we will be faced with the job of arranging what to do with the belongings of a deceased family member. It's an unenviable task, both emotionally and physically exhausting. When you speak to those who have already been through the process, they will offer sympathetic words and advise you to be ruthless. Yet, as you sort through the loved one's things, it's hard not to be drawn into what's left behind as part of an archival search for meaning. In the early months following my mother's death, I had dealt with drawers and wardrobes full of clothes, dutifully doling out special items to those who wanted them and giving rails full of clothing to a local charity sale. But soon I came across match boxes full of carefully collected sets of buttons and biscuit tins filled with old keys, tiny locks, nails, screws and, yes, more buttons, belt buckles and clasps of all sorts. It felt like I was back in the 1950s. READ MORE The generation of people born in the 1920s and 1930s grew up at a time of scarcity, in the aftermath of Ireland's revolutionary period. They went on to live with severe rationing during the second World War and after it. I remember reading once how in the early 1940s, many of the iron railings in England were removed and melted down for scrap metal to produce munitions. These more ornate outdoor railings were often replaced with old metal bed frames. Such reuse was the modus operandi of people living through wars – who learned never to throw anything out that might have another use. In more recent times of plenty, this strong sense of frugality has been replaced by an overzealous consumer culture, which has little concern for where things end up once they are discarded. As a result, when you are sorting out things from the past, you quickly realise that there are very few channels through which to pass on items meticulously stored away for some possible future use. And yet, I find myself carefully going through all this stuff in my mother's home out of respect for those who kept it. And I am unwilling to pile it all into black domestic waste bags – or, worse again, throw everything into a skip. It's a bit like panning for gold – most of what I find doesn't seem to have much value at all. So where should it all go? For example, keeping so many pens – even those once cherished Parker pens with replaceable ink cartridges – seems anachronistic in an era where branded pens are chucked out once their ink runs out. Costume jewellery belonging to Sylvia Thompson's late mother. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw A carved wooden plate belonging to Sylvia Thompson's late mother. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw On a brighter note, I have found a home for those hundreds of buttons of all shapes and sizes. They have gone to a dressmaker/designer who, hopefully, will create some new costumes where lots of buttons will become a feature rather than a functional part of a garment. I also found a local amateur dramatic society willing to take a selection of hats that my mother wore with pride. Anyone born in the early part of the last century will also remember the fashion for costume jewellery – beautiful delicate broaches with sprays of flowers, or abstract patterns with semi-precious stones embedded into their design. Or long necklaces with coloured beads of every hue you could consider. These flamboyant and inexpensive jewellery items added a touch of elegance to a dress worn to a dance. But, nowadays, few bother with such accessories. So, some of these boxes will again be stored away as they await an event to share them with the next generation, some of whom may be interested in vintage jewellery. I will also store away selected chinaware, Waterford crystal glasses and collections of brass ornaments in the hope that someone will be charmed by them in the future. In addition, I will personally cherish a carved wooden plate with an embedded musical box that played a tune as it turned on its pedestal. This was used for home-made birthday cakes when we were children. But, back to the question at the heart of this redistribution. Why do people hoard such an amount of things in the first place? Is it to remember a time when they were more energised by life? Is it for fear of losing some of their identity as they age? Or, more prosaically, is a reluctance to clear the clutter from the past and live more fully in the present just a form of laziness? Some mental health experts say that stressful experiences are often the reason for holding on to things that are no longer of use. That stress might be following a death, a divorce or another loss. Those who are socially isolated sometimes hoard more things too. The Buddhist philosophy – and, indeed, the Christian message – of not putting excess value on material possessions encourages us to live with what we need and no more. If our society functioned in a way that everything had a reuse value – that one person's trash was another person's treasure – would this help those to let go of the things they have kept but no longer need? When war or climate catastrophe forces people to leave home abruptly, they have no choice but to separate themselves from their belongings. Would your life be any different without them? Would you feel lighter and more able to focus on the present moment instead? Or would you just start collecting all over again?
Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
A smarter life? Meet the Gen-Zers who are switching off their smartphones
It's not easy to catch Jack Brocklebank on his smartphone. The 23-year-old often lets his battery die, or abandons the phone somewhere in his house. If he makes an appointment to meet someone, the Trinity graduate sticks to it: no changing. 'My mam laughs at me,' he says. 'It's like back in the day when there was only a phone box. Once I have a plan, I am committed. It's like, 'Call me once. Make the plan and I'll show up. If you're not there, I'm not going to get your text.'' Like a growing number of people his age, Brocklebank is making an active choice to downgrade his use of phones and social media . He took the decision following Covid when his screen time rocketed. 'I was on screens 14-16 hours a day,' he says. 'I would have been on Zooms until three o'clock every morning. I used to have 100-and-something Snapchat streaks, of people I would text every day. I wasn't going for walks. I wasn't sleeping. I'm only now readjusting.' Did his phone use feel like an addiction? 'It's entirely addictive,' he says. 'There can be withdrawals. Like, I would get very irritable, very snappy, very short-tempered ... Say I were to go off my phone for four hours, and then if I went back on and I didn't have a text or a notification, I'd do something like post on Instagram, so I'd be like, 'Oh people are liking that, they still care.' And if that wasn't getting as many likes, you'd have to delete it, and then stop on your phone for a few days. I was caught in this vicious cycle.' These days, things are very different. 'I'm on my phone less and I'm happier,' he says. 'I'm not going, 'Oh, do people think I'm good-looking on Instagram ?' Or, 'Do my friends care about me?' I'm also spending more time with them in person. Even my mam is on the phone more than me. My phone did have a lot of power over me, but at this point it could just go missing.' READ MORE Back in the early days of smartphones, there was a sense of excitement about the possibilities the technology could bring: that the internet could democratise opportunity and offer access to information almost instantaneously. Now in its place has come a widespread unease. Educators report that young people, used to gamified social media, struggle to focus at school. Phones have a zombifying effect where people scroll but can't remember, once they put the phone down, what they've been watching. There is a greater understanding that algorithms are driving the content people see. 'Your attention is a currency,' says Garret Nugent, an 18-year-old secondary school student from Dublin, who has also decided to restrict his use of social media. 'I realised if my attention was valuable to companies, I should pay more attention to where I was putting it.' Now coming into his Leaving Cert year, Nugent has deleted TikTok and keeps a tight rein on his screen time. 'I got rid of a lot of apps,' he says. 'TikTok is marketed as a way of relaxing, but it's not relaxing. You feel hollow.' Nugent first got a smartphone at 13, having been given a flip-phone around the age of 10. A keen musician, it wasn't long after he started using social media that he realised his piano and harp playing was suffering owing to the time he was spending scrolling. He decided to wrest back control after he'd been home sick from school and spent the whole day on TikTok. 'It was outrageous,' he says. 'I spent 11 hours on TikTok. I would have been 14 or 15.' What was he watching? 'The worst part is you don't really remember. There was a lot of Minecraft. I got a lot of 'fun fact' ones, like about 'Oh, this guy invented penicillin.' Comedy sketches were very common.' Garret Nugent: 'It was outrageous. I spent 11 hours on TikTok' Nugent's smartphone usage these days is considered. 'It's about deciding what you're using your phone for,' he says. 'I'd rather watch videos I choose of something I'm interested in than spending hours scrolling things, barely deciding to watch them.' Factoring in the use of pragmatic apps such as Google Maps, Nugent's screen time is around three hours a day. 'For the moment, I feel like I have things in a solid place,' he says. 'I'm comfortable with how I'm using my phone.' [ Social media is destroying young people's mental health. Why do we keep tiptoeing around this reality? Opens in new window ] It takes a certain maturity to be able to zoom out and look at your life online with such critical appraisal. It's also indicative of a new generation of young people who are feeling the burn from their phones, and want to control their smartphone usage to improve their mental health and deepen their attention spans. According to a recent report by GWI, a research institute which surveyed the views of 20,000 young people and their parents across 18 countries, the number of 12- to 15-year-olds who take breaks from their smart screens rose by 18 per cent to 40 per cent since 2022. Another survey conducted by the British Standards Institution found that almost half of young people said they would rather live in a world where the internet did not exist. Are young people scared of their smartphones? That might be a stretch, but there is certainly a growing degree of caution among some. Nuala Whittle, a 26-year-old masters student from Co Wicklow now living in Berlin, is still on Instagram, but has a timer set to go off after 30 minutes to remind her of how long she's using it every day. She's wary about the messaging that comes to her via social media apps, particularly in relation to body image. 'My main source of weight questioning came from a really early age from Instagram and Tumblr,' she says. 'At the time, I was too young to realise how damaging that would be.' What did she see? Whittle reels off the video and picture messaging that would flash up on her feed. 'Tips for 'here's how you can go your whole day without fainting'. And, 'here's how you can keep it under 100 calories per day'. Or 'here's how you should make up for the green apple you ate'. That was mostly Instagram. At the time they had a caveat saying, 'you might see some harmful images'. Of course when you're 16, you're like, 'I want to see the harmful images. I'm big and mature.' You look at it with a morbid fascination, but there's a part of you that's like, should I be paying attention to this?' Nuala Whittle: 'When you're 16, you're like, I want to see the harmful images – I'm big and mature' Whittle didn't talk to her friends and family about what she was witnessing. 'You just kept it to yourself,' she says. 'You never spoke to friends about whether they were going down the same rabbit holes, or acting on the things they saw.' A private unease built up in Whittle. 'I saw a lot of very graphic self-harm content. I was like, 'Should I be seeing this?' And you never say it. Because when I was growing up, we didn't have the same awareness of the fact that images are marketed to people. And depending on what demographic you are, you get a certain type of content. Your age is dictating a lot.' Whittle now tries hard to restrict her Instagram use, but still regularly hits two hours a day on the app. She feels the marketing targeted at her has changed as she has grown older. 'When I was young, it was weight-based. Now it's this trend towards anti-ageing. My current marketing is a lot of Botox and filler and tweakments and 'here's these tiny things that you can do to not age any more than this'. I'm also seeing a lot of celebrities, and 'here's a breakdown of what they have had done'. When I was in New York, I saw girls of 10 or 12 in Sephora looking at anti-ageing products. Because now the marketing is 'prevention is the best cure, you have to start early'. They were in these brightly lit make-up chairs, dissecting their faces.' Young girls can be seriously impacted by social media use. In a 2025 survey by social enterprise the Shona Project , 52 per cent of teenage girls said filters and editing apps negatively affect their self-esteem. But teenage boys face profound challenges too. 'I had stealthily censored pornographic images pop up on my Instagram when I was in my early teens,' says Tadhg McLoughlin, a 23-year-old from Clondalkin in Dublin. 'It would be accounts run by OnlyFans models where they'd post themselves dancing and then you'd go to a profile, and it would be like, 'Click my link'. Two years ago, I had really explicit, pornographic images pop up on my 'For you' page on TikTok. I reported it. With kids and teens, there's a lot of preying on morbid curiosity.' A student of screenwriting in Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, McLoughlin has spent years trying to restrict his social media use, with some successes and failures. 'I've been trying to get off the phone, particularly social media,' he says. 'I deleted TikTok for three months and then my girlfriend was giving out that she couldn't send my TikToks so I redownloaded it, but I think I'm going to delete it again. The content is horrible. I don't remember half the stuff I see.' Tadhg McLoughlin: 'I think I'm going to delete Tiktok again. The content is horrible.' Photograph: Dara Mac Dónaill Even when young people try to get off their smartphones, invariably they wind up back on them again, their hand forced by the demands of the modern world. Ita Mac Carthy is mother to 13-year-old Sandy. 'Sandy got rid of his smartphone for a flip-phone for a good six months,' she explains. 'We reintroduced the smartphone when he went on a school trip abroad so we could contact him by WhatsApp , and now he's on Instagram. I'm not sure how long he'll keep Instagram or his smartphone: they don't make him happy and he knows it.' [ Smartphones are an easy scapegoat for a more profound unhappiness Opens in new window ] Trying to reduce screen time is like playing a game of Whac-a-Mole: once you put the phone away, a compelling reason pops up to use it – you might need WhatsApp for a video call with family abroad, Revolut to pay someone for gig tickets or to split a restaurant bill, the camera to scan a QR code, or even email just to keep up with homework. 'My school uses Teams, Microsoft Word, the whole Microsoft package,' Nugent says. 'I also need my smartphone for navigation: I use Google Maps a lot.' Two-factor identification messages ping in while you're already using a screen: a laptop. 'I was applying for my driving licence and it kept sending me text verifications,' Brocklebank says. 'Banking is one of the main things. You have to run after your phone to send confirmations.' Can so-called dumbphones – the app-less, old-fashioned mobile phones – help? Not really, the young people interviewed for this article report. Smartphones are designed to be central to our lives and inseparable from our person. We need them to function in the modern world. According to research firm Data Insights Analysis, sales of dumbphones will decline by 1.3 per cent in 2025. 'I wish I could live comfortably with a 2007 flip-phone,' McLoughlin says. 'Ideally I would just have calls and texts and maybe a camera for pictures, or email. But I just don't see things going that way, where that's even a possible choice, because of the culture we live in.' FOMO, or the fear of missing out , is a large part of what forces people back on to smartphones and social media: WhatsApp and Facebook groups can be vital for our social or work lives. There's a secondary aspect too: the craving most of us have for the warm, fuzzy feeling of validation that comes with social media usage – with the likes, reposts and thumbs up – and the pinpricks of insecurity if we aren't online. Brocklebank would get upset sometimes if he went offline for a time, only to find a low number of unread messages waiting for him when he logged back on to social media. 'It was, 'Am I still friends with that person?'' he says. 'I was so sure they didn't like me.' Jack Brocklebank: 'My phone did have a lot of power over me.' Photograph: Tom Honan In The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores how smartphones fuel insecurity and encourage constant social comparison among young people. Haidt believes great structural strides must be taken – by placing responsibility on governments and technology companies – to protect young people from their smartphones. Many Irish professionals working in education and mental health agree. 'It's causing mayhem in our school and I'm sure in lots of other schools that are not discussing it because we're caught between a rock and a hard place because of confidentiality,' says Mary*, a primary schoolteacher in Munster. 'We've seen first-hand the impact it's having on very young children after Holy Communion when they're being given access to mobile phones. It's impacting their mental health, their social interactions. We were saying in school it should be a Department of Health not a Department of Education topic because of the impact it's having.' Countries including France, the Netherlands, Italy and Luxembourg have introduced school-wide bans on phones during the day. Earlier this summer, the Department of Education stopped short of banning smartphone use for post-primary students, but issued a new directive for primary schools to bring in new policies that ban the use of smartphones during the school day. Rachel Harper, principal at St Patrick's National School in Greystones, is the founder of It Takes A Village, which signed up eight primary schools in the catchment area in 2023 to a no smartphone voluntary code until the children reached secondary school. 'Going back two years ago, nobody was talking about this,' she says. 'Parents were quietly worrying about it, but were afraid to speak too much because they didn't want to come across as judgmental to other parents.' Rachel Harper, principal of St Patrick's National School in Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Alan Betson For Harper, who is on the HSE Therapeutic Wellbeing Pilot project steering group, it's vital to normalise such conversations. 'All of us working together, that's how we're going to get change. There have to be a lot more restrictions with the tech companies themselves.' For now, the change has to come from within. Eighteen-year-old Nugent has a variety of tools to ensure he doesn't idle away his days on social media. 'I had Minimalist Phone from the start of third year,' he says. 'I deleted it and re-downloaded it. I've had it now without deleting it for maybe a year and a half.' Minimalist Phone is an app that helps users to navigate social media in a mindful way. 'It changes your phone screen so you have to search for apps if you want to go into them,' he says. 'Before opening certain apps, you can get a timer and you have to wait for a bit before opening the app. I also got an app called NoScroll – you can block certain websites. You can block YouTube shorts in YouTube – that solved that issue for me: a lot of the things posted there are just TikToks, posted in YouTube.' [ Excessive use of social media creating generation of 'broken people', psychiatrist says Opens in new window ] McLoughlin has a Gameboy for his long bus journeys to college. 'If I want to entertain myself, I have a specific game, a piece of media, that I'm going to engage in, and I'm controlling the environment,' he says. And he has a notepad, not a Notes app. 'I'll write things down physically on paper. I'll keep my notepad with me all the time.' Brocklebank has spent a lot of time reflecting on the hold his phone once had on him, and what it means to him to have freedom from it. Letting his phone run out of battery helps him appreciate the magnitude of the spell that was once cast on him. 'One day I was standing in the rain and my phone died and I was like, 'Oh, I'm holding a brick now,'' he relates. 'It took away a lot of the phone's power.' As for Nuala Whittle in Berlin? She has a sharper, more brutal tactic to reduce her smartphone use. 'Throw it,' she says, with a laugh. 'When you want to stop using your phone, launch it as far away from you as you can towards a surface that won't break it. If you're on the bed, throw it on to the couch. If you're on the couch, throw it on to the carpet. And then, if you're really comfortable in the chair, just rely on the fact that you're so comfortable that you don't want to get up.' 'Sometimes you have to do silly things,' Whittle concludes. 'Literally: just throw it away.' *Mary's name has been changed.
