Look Up!
On the consequences of living in a screen-obsessed culture
In the first print issue of Lohi Journal (in stores now), we met with Mia Ljungström Nevado, founder of the LookUp-movement. The movement’s mission is to inspire people to step away from their smartphones and tablets. We talked about the impact of living in a screen-obsessed culture, and what we can do to change it.
Below you’ll find the complete article, in which Mia Ljungström Nevado shares her journey from the Hamptons to Stockholm (via Ecuador), as well as her collaboration with Yondr, a phone-free programme for artists, educators, and individuals.
The conversation took place at Villa Dagmar in Stockholm.
Lohi Journal How would you define the problem with screens today?
Mia Ljungström Nevado Social media gives you a dopamine kick, it’s almost like winning the lottery when you see that you have a new message. It’s very addictive. But also, gaming and social media. Few people have that kind of self-control. The technology is so clever, and we give it to our children. But many schools don’t want to give up the screens because they’re afraid of the kids falling behind. But the technology rewires the brain from very early on, and children with a lot of screen time will learn fewer words. It’s not the phone that’s dangerous but what’s on the phone. Being social media in small doses is fine, but the problem is that it’s so addictive. And people will mostly see the highlights and not the lows in others’ lives on social media, because we don’t want to show ourselves when we’re vulnerable, and so people only get half the story but believe that it’s an accurate reflection of what their lives are like.
I know that when we lived in the Hamptons, my life on social media looked beautiful, but at the same time my husband was very sick. I didn’t want to share that, but only posting the good times made me feel like a fraud.
Loneliness kills many people and social media is adding to the isolation. In my dream world, we would also have analogue restaurants and cafés where people go to talk. If we want it to change, it needs to be a conscious choice. If you have a movie night with your partner, but both of you are on your phone, that’s a very different movie night than if you’re together without your phones.
We need to give people this experience. Anna Lembke, professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, wrote in her book Dopamine Nation that using a phone late at night disturbs our sleep. It’s important that we put our phones away, otherwise they interfere with how we feel the following day, as they’re less than one foot away from our pillow. She says that in order to break the dopamine addiction, you need longer stretches where you don’t have your phone. That’s why we need to make schools phone-free and bedrooms phone-free, giving your brain the break it needs. And that’s how we heal. If we don’t do that, the brain becomes over wired.
Lohi Journal But it’s also unsustainable in other ways, as well?
Mia Ljungström Nevado Yes – our phones, our streaming and especially ChatGPT are so unsustainable. People like to shame other people for flying, but if they want to make a difference, they should shame people for streaming. Because the streaming is much more damaging than the airline industry. No one talks about this, even though it’s far worse than all the airlines together. But we don’t think about that. So many young people have real concerns about the future of the environment, they feel doomed and don’t even want kids of their own. And at the same time, if you use ChatGPT, you will use more energy than a whole household will use in a day, simply by asking one query. It uses more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity daily; in comparison the average US household uses just 29 kilowatt-hours. It’s because to draw all that data, you need energy to cool down the servers.
Lohi Journal Tell me about your background, how come you founded the LookUp-movement?
Mia Ljungberg Nevado I worked as a travel writer – I was once a honeymoon journalist for a Danish wedding magazine! I used to work in management for this beautiful hotel north of Copenhagen, Skovshoved Hotel, built in 1660 and with only 22 rooms. I was the youngest general manager. Then I started international PR and marketing, while I kept writing.
I met my Swedish husband and moved to Stockholm, had a column in a local magazine here but also took other assignments, like for Condé Nast Traveler. People liked reading my work because I took more of an interest in the people behind the hotels, I like how their personalities shine through, especially at real family hotels like the Marbella Club, where a prince just fell in love with this piece of land...
That put me in contact with the founder of Six Senses, British-Indian Sonu Shivdasani and Swedish Eva Malmström Shivdasani. I started helping them a bit with PR, which led to me launching my own PR business. But then in 2013 we had to move to Ecuador, so I closed the business and focused on the kids. I returned to writing, because I realised that what I loved about that is that you connect people to places, or you connect people to people, and connecting is my ikigai.
From Ecuador we moved to the Hamptons where my husband was on the board for a hotel while I continued as ambassador for Six Senses. Eva and Sonu sold the company but kept Soneva Fushi in the Maldives, and now they’ve also created Soneva Secret and Soneva Jani, both also in the Maldives, as well as one in China. It attracts people who understand true luxury and who appreciate how lowkey it is, based on slow living. The concept is “no news, no shoes”.
Anyway, so we moved to the Hamptons and in the summers, I would host big events. I did so many fundraisers and events and wrote for different magazines! Again, it was about connecting people to places. An influential Hamptons magazine asked me to write about summer camps and I agreed but only if I could do it my way. Because I would see these stressed-out kids arriving from New York, and I wrote a piece about camps that offered children time to spend in nature.
My work attracted the attention of Donna Karan, who liked that I was good at connecting people, and she asked me to do her “Self-care Saturday”, which focused on wellness and health. I accepted and of course it was a lot of fun, but what I noticed – as we were in the Hamptons – was that there was often a celebrity or two in the room, and that distracted people. No one was listening to the speaker, they only wanted to take a selfie with the famous person. I grew frustrated, because that wasn’t the aim of the events, and I also thought about the celebrity. It had to be irritating for them. They attended to listen and learn, not to appear on fifty people’s Instagram accounts.
After a summer of doing this, Bob Roth (who’s the CEO of the David Lynch Foundation) introduced me to transcendental meditation. Ever since, I meditate twice a day using a mantra and it calms my mind. When the season was over, we went to the Maldives and we sat there, with no shoes, like everyone else. It was a beautiful morning and we had breakfast by the ocean front. There was a table with ten kids, with headsets and iPads, only looking at their screens. Our sons were running down by the water, and they saw two big Manta rays. All the other kids and half of the adults missed it because they were glued to their screens. At that moment, I thought this was insane. They would rather be locked into whatever game they were playing at the moment. They had travelled all the way to the middle of nowhere in the Indian Ocean, to sit in front of a screen instead of having an incredible experience. And there were so many influencers staying there, constantly changing outfits for social media. I wondered what had happened because it didn’t use to be this way. We had been coming for many years, and this was something new. We used to have engaging conversations.
It’s the most sustainable resort in the world but the influencers didn’t seem to care that this was the first resort in the world to become plastic free, or that they melt all their glass bottles and invite the world’s best glass-blowing artists to come and create art, that they clean up the island or that they use a water-filtration system to eliminate plastic from the ocean.
The itch had started. After this crazy summer in the Hamptons and seeing the technology-obsession in the Maldives. And then it just so happened that we missed our connecting flight in Dubai, so we checked in at the Atlantis. And that’s where it finally hit me. They gave us a selfie map, with the places where you can take the best selfie including what to hashtag. I thought the world had gone insane!
That night I couldn’t sleep and instead I reached out to Sonu and Eva. He had gone to Eton and to Oxford and was very well educated, and Eva, who was a supermodel back in the days, is very environmentally conscious. I told them I had to be honest and even though I loved Soneva, the concept “no news, no shoes” no longer held. Sure, there are no shoes, but people are glued to their phones. The incredible conversations that made the experience of staying there so special is not happening anymore, because people are filming the sunset instead of watching it. In the kids’ club, where there are marine biologists and astronomers, kids sneak in their phones and ipads and the rest of them are like ants to sugar. They can’t resist it.
You can read everywhere that people working in technology and who belong to the one percent don’t allow their kids to use smart phones. Screens are the worst things that can happen to the kids’ minds. I suggested that they consider turning the WIFI off in some of the areas, to help people connect again. Two weeks later, Sonu responds, with all managers in cc, saying that I have a point.
Now breakfast – and some other places – is screen-free. It’s a start! That made me think that I could make a change by speaking up about something that I care about. And all events I do for them are phone-free. That’s how it started, in 2018.
Lohi Journal And what was the next step after that?
Mia Ljungström Nevado During the pandemic, every Monday I invited people to a two-hour nature experience. No news, no phones, no talk of Covid. I wanted to give people a two-hour break. Can you imagine, in the States – it was incessant. But when we moved to Europe in 2020, I realised that the problem, especially among children, is much bigger here. I decided to continue my work here, and it has just grown and grown. I do art events with Lotta Kreuger Cederlund at Stockholms auktionsverk. I did Vogue Scandinavia’s launch party, and Monocle did a story about my work. Most people don’t understand what I do before they’ve experienced an event. So, they ask me to come and speak, and I say I’d much rather come host a two-hour nature walk, like I do with the international psychology students at Stockholm University, where we talk and look at the art installations.
Lohi Journal What is the connection between LookUp and art?
Mia Ljungström Nevado I’ll give you one example. One of the art pieces at Royal Djurgården, where I conduct the walks with the students, is by Elmgreen & Dragset. They created this egg-shaped sculpture for Georg Jensen, where you can put your phone away when you come home. Their Stockholm art installation “Life Rings” is a reminder to stay connected.
Studies show that even if you’re engaged in a deeply personal conversation with a good friend, on illness or divorce or something similar, if the phone rings, the other person will probably take the call. They don’t do it to be rude, but it’s a contemporary habit. So Elmgreen & Dragset are trying to draw attention to this matter through their art. If people see someone in trouble, like drowning, the first instinct should be to save the person, but today people will film it instead. That’s what the artwork is about. It’s insane when you think about it.
Lohi Journal Do you also see the movement as connected to the slow lifestyle-movement?
Mia Ljungström Nevado Do you know Tony Cragg? He’s a British sculptor and artist and I did an event with him. When I was at the gallery the night before, about 40 people and lots of collectors, he was talking, and a phone went off. The guy takes the call! He went into the corner, but everyone was distracted, and someone else took a photo and posted it on Instagram. So Cragg spoke for five minutes and there was like one question if that even.
The next day, we did the LookUp-event, and Cragg asked me if it was OK that he talked for about fifteen, twenty minutes. I said sure, talk for as long as you want. He spoke for an hour and a half! That’s what happens when people share an experience and are 100 percent present, they listen, and they engage. The minute a phone interrupts you, people become distracted, like smoke from a cigarette. You can’t avoid it; your eyes will automatically be drawn to the phone.
I think people will need analogue media more and more, personally I don’t like reading online, you read differently, but people are going to spend more and more time digitally, while at the same time, AI will replace a lot of our boring chores, so we’ll have more free time, but that time we’ll probably just spend online, instead of reading books and real magazines, studying art or experiencing real human connections. All those things that make us feel good. That doesn’t happen online. Also, what happens when you read online, you keep jumping around from one article to another. If you like pink, you’ll only be recommended articles on pink, because that’s what happens with the algorithm. If I read a magazine, I might see blue, green, yellow… and we need that inspiration. Otherwise, we’ll become so narrow-minded.
Lohi Journal Is this also a generational issue?
Mia Ljungström Nevado My hometown, Mariager in Denmark, is a certified Città Slow-town, which is similar to the slow food-movement. It’s an Italian movement that promotes places that support the local community and take care of nature. Two things that they do; they encourage the locals to buy locally.
There are only 3,500 people in my hometown, it’s built around an old monastery on the water, with a thick birch wood forest around the village. Cobblestone streets. When my husband saw it for the first time, he said that it was like a commercial about why Danes are the happiest people in the world! It’s called the town of the roses.
Anyway, in this place, the locals know that if we start buying online or go to the big supermarkets, we’re going to kill this village. When you move there, you know you have a responsibility to buy locally. That’s what the village is about. And they have put up all these nature paths and walks, to get people to move. That lifestyle is exactly what technology is killing, it’s killing those villages.
Both adults and kids move so much less today than before. Four hours a day are spent on Spotify, Netflix, gaming, social media, or whatever our dopamine kick is. Four hours a day translates to two full months in a year. When people hear that, first they don’t believe me and I tell them, you can calculate it yourself. But kids spend twice that: For kids we’re talking about literally almost half of the year that’s spent in front of a screen. Taking away from eating healthy, moving your body, getting sleep, being in nature, being with other people. We have to remind people to honour and celebrate the old traditions, because if we don’t, in the future it won’t exist. We’ll just sit in our sofas and get fat while ordering fashion and food, being spoon-fed…
Lohi Journal Is the educational system part of the problem?
Mia Ljungström Nevado Now we have seven schools using this bag from Yondr and the kids really like it, because before they were so obsessed with what was happening on Tiktok, they would make excuses to go to the bathroom to look on social media, and the girls would feel pressure to always be beautiful because of the risk of ending up on Instagram, while boys always gaming. But now they’re playing. And we have focus back in class.
When the students take notes on their laptops or their phones, the AI is already there, guessing what they’re about to write. They don’t need to think to form the words. They might as well not write the notes, because they won’t remember them. But if you want higher grades and work faster, just put the phone away.
Every time the phone vibrates, or you get a notification, you pick it up and then you lose where you are. And then it takes twenty minutes to get back to where you were. In 2018, a teacher in Sweden gathered all the students’ phones. After 45 minutes, they counted the number of notifications, and it was around 4,000. God knows how many there would be today. Studies show that students perform better when not having their phone close by. It messes with our mind. Even when we think we don’t use it, our minds are constantly drawn to it.
Recently, Gillian Keegan, British Secretary of State for Education, visited a Norwegian school that’s used this tool for five years, because she was curious to learn the reason for the high scores in testing and in wellbeing. Teachers don’t have the time to collect phones and can’t be responsible for them either.
It’s so hard to change. We now have kids who don’t want to go on school trips because they don’t want to be away from their games. That’s what we really have to fear, the isolation that is spreading. What happens when you literally sit in your bed, working, instead of going into the office to be around others? It’s not good. We need to separate work from private life. You don’t get that separation anymore, everything kind of links together.
The US Surgeon General Vivek Murphy was just interviewed about the loneliness epidemic in the States, and he said that we see a real crisis in American colleges. A lot of the kids in college now have grown up with screens. They’re addicted. They move away from home for the first time, living on their own, and in the olden days, the college experience was very social and fun. But now they sit in their rooms with their screens, and they’re missing out. It’s a real issue.
There is currently a fascination and love of technology, especially in Scandinavia and perhaps in particular in Sweden. Because Stockholm is a tech-based capital. But look at Silicon Valley and the growing popularity of Waldorf schools there. The strictest parents are the ones that work in technology because they know the dangers of screens.
Lohi Journal What do you see in the future?
Mia Ljungström Nevado I think it will go in both ways. Technology is developing super-fast. And we’re not going to have less of it. In India, there’s a village where they decided to turn the Wi-Fi off, collectively. Every afternoon, the kids are outside playing. In Netherlands, there’s a supermarket chain that introduced the opposite of self-scanning, a slow queue instead of a fast check-out. It’s for those who want to have a dialogue, to chat with each other and with the cashier. So many people live alone, in single households, and now when we can work from home – which is great – but then small talk becomes really crucial.
I truly believe that if we don’t start breaking this cycle – I don’t have to leave the house to see a new movie, I don’t need to go to the store to buy food or clothes. A lot of kids will only meet each other online. We need to set up circumstances where you can have meaningful, engaging connections. It’s the same with zoom meetings. Yes, they’re good but they can never replace physical meetings where you get a sense of the other person. ‘Yes, I like you, I want to do business with you.’ That’s very hard to get through a screen. That’s why I organise events with emphasis on either art, culture, or nature. Nowadays, many companies will have digital meetings even though everyone is in the same building.
You can never push this on anyone. They need time to process it, you can never force it. It’s like a drug addiction, they have to decide they want the change. There’s so much more I want to do, but there are only so many hours in a day.
Lohi Journal And lastly, and on a lighter note, do you have any travel tips?
Mia Ljungström Nevado As I said, I used to be a travel writer. You can travel anywhere in the world now without talking to anyone on your trip. You can use apps to order food and check in without meeting anyone, getting travelling tips online. People should be asking what this is doing to us.
When travelling, my husband and I always ask the most well-dressed local person in the street where the locals go for coffee – we look for people who seem to know, and then we ask. Many people don’t want to disturb anyone and so they’ll just look it up on their phones. But it’s these kinds of conversations that make us feel alive. That’s what we have to remind people of.
I think it’s such a shame when you check into hotels nowadays and they only give you the Wi-Fi password, I much prefer to relax in a comfortable chair with a magazine. Because the minute you go online, you’re reminded of work because of all the notifications. So – talk to well-dressed locals and ask for their best tips.