The number of times I checked my phone to avoid finishing this essay about using our phones to avoid things >>>>>>
The number of times I checked my phone to avoid finishing this essay about using our phones to avoid things >>>>>>
Wanted to pop in here and say thanks for taking that car metaphor too far ;) It actually helped me conceptualize this really distinctive sensation I’ve been having of two kinds of energy drain. One’s the gas drain of using the engine, one is the passive drain of the battery. Simple, but actually SUPER helpful, as my “rest” hasn’t been particularly restful lately. If you’d just jumped straight to “rot” I don’t think I would have made the connection, so thank you for stretching that metaphor into a helpful transition. It was effectively written <3
Love this articulation - I’ve recently started art lessons (part of a New Year’s resolution to do things I’m bad at) and they take place on Sunday mornings, a time I would historically have spent ‘rotting’ in bed, on an endless TikTok scroll. Now I have to force myself out, ignore my body tiredness and sit for an hour and a half, away from my phone, thinking in lines and shapes instead of words like I’m used to. It’s astoundingly restorative. I’ve begun to look forward to them as times where I …
ok one more thing lol.
i once heard this term “time confetti” — it’s all the little moments of free time throughout our day. take someone who “has no free time” but they have 5 minutes between meetings, 15 minutes here, 10 minutes spent laying in bed instead of getting up. the idea is that we feel like we have no time because we fill our time confetti scrolling on our phone, which pushes our eventual “all done” time in the evening further and further back, until even then we have no time for any…
This makes me think so much about how society is set up!! With all of us in our individual pods, there's a lot less texture to fill our time. Like what if there were more third spaces for you to mingle in when you needed a break? What if during your rest time you were more likely to be around other people who could, say, make you laugh? Makes me think about the recent Atlantic piece about how actually a lot of modern alienation didn't start with phones, but CARS. Living far away from each other…