Catherine Price
Award-winning health and science journalist, speaker, founder of the Screen/Life Balance movement, and bestselling author of books including How to Break Up with Your Phone and The Power of Fun.
Make Attention Capture Harder and Connection Easier
Author Catherine Price and horticulturist Rebecca McMackin argue that the obsession with productivity reflects a culture that makes attention capture and measurable output the default while treating play, friendship and contact with nature as indulgences. Price recommends changing those defaults by adding friction to compulsive phone use and protecting activities that need not produce anything, while McMackin makes the case for gardens and less-managed lawns as ways to relinquish control and make room for other life.
Playful Connection, Not Passive Leisure, Makes Free Time Restorative
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, Catherine Price, Elizabeth Dunn, and Laurie Santos made the case that fun is not a frivolous reward for finishing serious work but a condition for sustaining it. Drawing on psychology and behavioral science, they argued that adults lose fun when overwork, phones, passive leisure, and performance pressure crowd out the playfulness, connection, and absorbed attention that make life feel energizing. Price defined fun as playful, connected flow; Dunn’s research added that social time, active leisure, and protected time affluence are central to a genuinely good day.