Phone cameras were meant to help us capture our lives, not consume them. So what went wrong?

There's a saying you'll have heard a thousand times: the best camera is the one you have with you. It's long been a rallying cry for the smartphone generation: a way to stop worrying about gear and just make pictures.

But a new study suggests something has gone badly wrong with that idea. The device we carried everywhere to capture life is consuming it instead.

Research published by Jolt, a screen-time app, reveals that average daily mobile use in the UK has more than doubled in a decade, rising from 1 hour 17 minutes in 2015 to around 3 hours 21 minutes today. That's an extra 31 days a year spent staring at a screen that fits in your shirt pocket. A whole additional month, every single year, thumbing through content you'll have forgotten by Tuesday.

In the USA, the survey shows that Americans spend 85 hours a year (over two working weeks) scrolling on their phone as soon as they wake up, before the day has started.

For photographers especially, this should land with a sting. We're supposed to be the ones who look at the world; it's our whole deal. Yet here we are, eyes sunk into our screens, deep in an Instagram rabbit hole at 11pm.

The great irony

Henri Cartier-Bresson called it "the decisive moment": that fraction of a second when composition, light and gesture align into something true. You can't manufacture it. You can only be present for it. Yet we're increasingly choosing not to be present at all, staring at a feed of other people's decisive moments rather than looking up and finding our own.

The smartphone didn't just give us a capable camera, it handed us a portal. Open the camera app or open TikTok? The choice is always one swipe away, and much of the time, TikTok is winning.

Three hours and twenty-one minutes per day is a lot of walking around with your eyes open. It's a lot of early mornings in interesting light, afternoons spent studying how shadows fall, evenings noticing how a café window glows. Instead, for most people, it's Reels, news alerts, WhatsApp threads that could have been a phone call, and shopping for things you don't need.

What to do with 31 days

At the same time, it would be absurd to suggest that smartphones are the enemy of photography. They are, simultaneously, the most democratising force the medium has ever seen and its most effective saboteur.

But 31 days is a remarkable number to sit with. If you spent even a fraction of that extra phone time actually shooting (wandering somewhere unfamiliar, revisiting somewhere familiar with fresh eyes, learning something new about light or post-processing), the compound effect over years would be transformative.

The phone in your pocket is a remarkable photographic instrument. It's also, if Jolt's data is to be believed, one of the most effective ways ever devised to stop you from actually using it as one.

The conclusion is obvious. Put it down. Go outside. The light is doing something interesting. TikTok will still be there tomorrow.

See our guide to the best camera phones, and if you want a simpler handset that won't allow you to spend so many hours doomscrolling, check out the best dumbphones