“That’s enough screen time for today,” you tell your kid, urging them to turn off the video-game console or iPad. As for what they should do instead, you are not quite sure. And what about you? If only you could put down your phone and listen to your spouse, or read a book, or embrace the sensation of your own existence, then surely you would be a happier, better person.

But this is wrong. Screen time is not a metric to optimize downward, but a name for the frenzy of existence in an age defined by screens. You may try to limit the time that you or your children spend with screens, and this may bring you minor triumphs. But you cannot rein in screen time itself, for screen time is the speed of life today. To recognize that fact—and to understand how it happened—is a small, important step toward salvation.

Long before screen time was a brand name for self-loathing—long before it had given rise to smartphone apps that were supposed to cleanse your soul of backlit sin—the notion had to be invented. This happened in the summer of 1991, when Mother Jones published an issue called “We Hate Kids.” Its cover featured Bart and Lisa Simpson, characters then but two years old; tucked away inside was an essay by the writer Tom Engelhardt called “Primal Screen.” “The screen offers only itself as an organizing principle for children’s experience,” it said. Television shows didn’t just tell stories; they showed characters such as Garfield watching television themselves, sometimes obsessively. MTV, then scarcely more than a decade old, famously put literal televisions on-screen and on set.