Tuesday 142: Paperlife

I have a tried-and-true method for pursuing things that require some willpower: Start early, and don't anticipate. When I started running consistently, it was late fall. The holidays were right around the corner, and with them the new year, which was an obvious time to adopt a new healthy behavior. For whatever reason, though, I remember having the thought that if I just started now, on some random midweek day in November, I'd get some kind of momentum ahead of all the people who'd be struggling through their resolutions in January and February. I also remember thinking that if I could run consistently through a winter in New York, I could run through anything (It worked, but I was wrong: Summer in New York is way harder).

So when I start anything new now, I stick to that approach, and it works for me. I don't set a date, I minimize plan-making components, and I start quickly. The less thinking, the better. It's definitely not an approach that works for anyone, and probably not for most people, but one thing I think it does engender for everyone is a good sense of vision and perspective. When you make an impulsive decision to improve some aspect of your life, then pursue it, you find yourself in a headspace that encourages further tinkering. You have realizations about your life and the way you live it that can be really positive.

Now, I'm sorry to disappoint, but this is all exposition for some likely obvious and underwhelming observations about how I need to look at my phone less. The thing is though, we've all had these thoughts before: The phone is bad. It's a time suck, it's bad for your eyes, the UX design is creepy and addictive, the thing itself is full of cobalt that's blood-harvested in Congo or something, and then we can get into what's actually on the phone, which for an adult is all sorts of useless, pointless content that's uniformly created to elicit the particular flavor of lizard-brain responses that phones thrive on—rage, mostly—plus Wordle.

This morning's impulsive behavioral modification was born of the thought that I really should read more. At first flush, that suggests that I should be on my phone less. But when I'm on my phone, I'm generally reading. It's probably something stupid, flawed, useless, or untrue, but it's still reading. What I really meant, then, was more literal: I should read paper books with greater regularity.

Something clicked when I had this thought. The phones really are poison, and should be treated that way. I can make the comparison to alcohol. For me, alcohol has always been a fun time party drug. In high school, college, and after, social, cultural, and romantic life centered around the act of consuming alcohol. It's a dangerous drug and its cultural normalcy is steeped in pretty troubling patterns of social behavior, but drinking is often very fun! You have to square the fact that you're poisoning yourself—biologically, chemically, psychologically—with the fact that you're also having a good time.

It's a dance that, as I get older, I'm decreasingly interested in doing. Though I'm genetically predisposed to it, I don't consider myself an alcoholic. The social opportunities to both drink and have fun are fewer and farther between these days, and drinking pretty much any amount of alcohol these days just hurts my-39-year old body. I think one day pretty soon I'll probably have my last drink and not even know it.

The point of noting all this is to say that the phone is just as poisonous, and it's not even fun! Everything that comes with it sucks. I've woken up with a hangover plenty of times in my life and considered it worth it—I've seen good bands, had good times with friends, and have no regrets—but I've never awoken and thought, "Boy I'm tired, but I'm glad I read all those tweets at 2 am." I think we should all start treating our phones like the poison they are.

1. Keep it away from me. It doesn't matter how many anti-phone steps you take to make the thing less appealing. Silent mode, focus mode, whatever—it's all useless if the obelisk is in your pocket, on your desk, at your bedside. The compulsive behavior is rooted in the physical object as much as it is the digital ecosystem within it.
2. Leave without it. Whenever you go out, ask yourself if you need it. Can you get where you're going without directions? Maybe just look them up before you leave. And for the emergency conscious, remember that everybody has a phone. If there's an emergency, borrow a phone.
3. Rediscover paper. Make lists. Take notes. Read newspapers, books, and take the time to enjoy the paper itself. A lot of this stuff may start as a workaround—you might have to look up a recipe on the computer then jot down the ingredients before you go to the store, rather than just taking your phone—but as you do it, you'll start to discover and enjoy different analogue approaches to the way you go through your life.
4. Delete the apps. Whenever you return to the phone, take a few moments to click through it and delete some stuff. I don't travel much, but I have like four different airline apps on there. Even if it's a listless activity, it's nice to kill your phone a little bit whenever you have no choice but to use it.

This all comes off as a bit self-helpy, but I believe it has a greater purpose, and readers should consider the fact that I have absolutely no basis for any of this stuff. I think this is one way we might, collectively, begin to redefine our relationship to technology and the world around us, which is in dire need of adjustment. By beginning with simple, paper-based organizational principles, we can experience the domino effect of new imaginative behavior. I realized just the other day that I only really read books in bed. I have a couch that's great for lounging and watching television or looking at my phone, but when I sit down on it to read a book, it feels foreign. In a matter of minutes, ignoring my phone has affected my relationship with my fucking furniture. It's easy to see how much it will affect my da-to-day life, my experiences, my relationships, all for the better.

The perspective is really simple: Rather than saying, as with most resolutions, "I will start doing this different on this upcoming date," there's an urgency. It's not about using your phone less tomorrow, it's "Fuck the phone, starting now." The phone is evil and it's stealing so much from all of us.

On my bookshelf:

Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon; Ghosts, Edith Wharton; Painted Devils, Robert Aickman; A People's Guide to Capitalism, Hadas Thier