Am I a Phony
My phone is kind of important to me, actually...
SubStack is becoming (and maybe always has been) a Tumblr, Twitter, LiveJournal lovechild. I say that with a lot of love in my heart, and while I’m sad that I can’t customize things quite as much as the Tumblr I had when I was in high school, it is amazing the platform they are offering writers and creators to monetize. I’ve seen a lot of discourse on SubStack about notes, digital minimalism, and a general preoccupation with people’s digital selves. I fell prey to it myself, scaling my phone usage way down, only to discover that I missed some of the digital communities I’m a part of.
Every day, prophets scream at us that phones are rotting our brains, that AI is on the cusp of General Artificial Intelligence, that you should look/act/seek/learn/be different. It's an impossible and exhausting list of instructions, even when given with good intentions.
I volunteer at a literary event in my community every few weeks, and last night we had a group of writers come in to present the small art book they had made: “Instruction Manual for a New Era”. A collection of prose and poetry that, as described, offers instructions for our current moment, or perhaps the moments soon to come. I wanted to like some of the more artsy and metaphorical works, but the instructions grated at me. When one is in despair, as many of us are in the present moment, it can be comforting to have someone to tell us what to do. To tell us what is right, but what they offered in their work was not a balm for the soul or concrete advice for anything in particular. It was the standard liberal talking point of ‘be there for each other’ and ‘love your body’. Sentiments I am not against, but are not particularly helpful.
It made me think of “My Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion, though I didn’t really like the book (hot take, I know). If you haven’t read it, the book explores how to handle grief. Didion talks personally about her own grief after the death of her husband, and walks through the literature on how others have dealt with grief. Again, most of the writing felt diaphanous. The heavy reality of someone’s grief would tear through the advice given, except for one part not written by Didion herself, but by Emily Post. Post’s writing was absolutely instructional, practical, and real: allow the griever to be alone if wished, supply them with warm food and drink, and understand that they are unbalanced body and mind.
This is the kind of instruction we need to survive the world today.
Practical, straightforward, empathetic, and trustworthy.
In a world where everyone is telling us we are online too much, there is hardly anyone I trust to tell me how to change or if I even need to change. I ping-pong back and forth, scrolling too much on Instagram one day and deleting everything from my phone the next. I know that my digital self is as much a part of me as my physical body and needs minding. Yet, as soon as it becomes inconvenient, I fantasize about murdering her. To think I could buy a dumb phone and be free of the internet is a fantasy. Just as much as it is fantasy to think about buying a homestead and living off the land apart from society. Some people do it, but to be free from the ills of society is also to miss its many, many beautiful moments.
No one can tell me the right amount of time to be online, just as no one can tell me the right way to live or grieve. It’s the least clickbait-y conclusion possible, but it is true. I derive a lot of joy from browsing through beautiful things on Pinterest, I enjoy reading about people’s drama on Reddit, and I am a part of several entire communities on YouTube.
We each have to find the amount of phone time that makes our lives better, not worse. It’s finding the balance that's the tricky bit.
Until I write again, be well!