Intentional Living: What a Conversation About Screens Taught Me About Presence

The season I almost postponed this conversation

I had to pause this show for a while before Tom Campbell and I recorded. I lost one of my dads, and a few weeks later, my husband's mother passed too. It was a lot, back to back, and there were points where I genuinely didn't know when I'd come back to Coffey Talk.

Tom was patient with me through all of it. And when I finally sat down with him, I realized he'd already written the book I needed during that exact season.

It's not really about the phone

Tom's book is called Gotta Look Up, and on the surface it sounds like another warning about screen time. It's not that. It's about what we miss when we stop paying attention to our own lives, whether the distraction is a phone or a job or a version of success we borrowed from someone else.

He told me technology is a tool. Whether it improves your life or controls it depends on the choice you make with it every single day. That's a small sentence, but I haven't stopped thinking about it.

Quicksand, joy, and where you're headed

Tom talked about three ideas he built for himself during his hardest years: Life's Quicksand, Trees of Joy, and Anchors of Hope.

The quicksand is whatever you're stuck in. A divorce, a job that isn't working, a version of yourself you don't recognize anymore. He said the instinct is to thrash, and thrashing is what makes you sink faster.

The trees of joy are the small things that pull you back to yourself. For Tom, that was animals, hiking, and eventually writing. For me, it's been service. When I'm at my lowest, showing up for someone else has always brought me back faster than anything I could do for myself alone.

The anchors of hope are the future you're actually building toward. Not the crisis you're surviving. The life you want on the other side of it.

Where I've used this without knowing it had a name

My youngest left for college a few years ago, and I remember being surprised by how hard that transition hit me. Not because I didn't want her to go. I did. But I had worn the role of day-to-day mom for so long that losing it, even for a good reason, shook something loose.

I didn't have language for it then. I just knew I needed to plug back into my community and find new places to serve. Looking back, that was me planting trees of joy without calling them that.

That's the thing about a conversation like this one. It doesn't give you new problems. It gives you words for the ones you've already lived through.

What I'm carrying forward

Presence is a choice. I want to be where my feet are, and I want to notice the abundance that's already around me instead of waiting for a crisis to remind me it's there.

I don't think that means throwing out technology or pretending screens are the enemy. It means asking, every day, whether the thing in my hand is adding to my life or quietly running it.

That's the question I'm sitting with this week. I'd love to know what you're carrying forward too.

You can listen to this episode on:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gotta-look-up-with-tom-campbell/id1835167771?i=1000783902472

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7KxxBE8bgebbk4SvaVvBbO

YouTube: https://youtu.be/gpsvyNgeTyY?si=YMzTRe02XNoiiJV6

Or anywhere you get your podcasts.