I was sitting on the concrete floor leaning back against the dingy cinder block wall behind me. That's it, that's literally all I was doing. I had been in my prison's solitary confinement for several months at this point. I was not allowed to have books or mail or any contact with another human being in any way. So there I sat for hours, for days, for months, as the season and year changed.
I am so grateful for being forced to learn that skill because no one will hold still for five minutes and it's exhausting.
I once had the universal opinion that kids are the ones on their phones all of the time until I quit using mine. Now I see that it's actually everyone. It's all of us. Phones, TVs, video games, tablets, and earbuds in, listening to music, you're never undistracted. Ever. How many of you sleep with a fan blowing for the “white noise”? It's astonishing how much stillness terrifies people.
I know what you're feeling. When I got out, they had already invented smartphones. I had never even been on the internet before and suddenly someone is showing me a video on a device he pulled from his pocket. It was witchcraft and I was enthralled. I became obsessed with these miracles of technology. I couldn't use them well but I was going to figure it out come Hell or high water.
I had all of the social media apps. Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and even MySpace because I had heard about it but no one told me that it died before I got out. I had games, and my base in Clash of Clans was a marvel of the gaming Viking world. I had Pandora, Stitcher, I-Heart, and Spotify. I used the camera on my phone to solve math problems, Meme making apps, photo editors, phone call recorder apps, calendars, ringtones, weather apps, you name it.
And then I looked up from my phone one day and realized I had absolutely no idea what my wife had just said to me. I literally looked around myself and then concentrated on what she had asked, knowing it had to be in my head somewhere, I was sitting only a few feet away. It's impossible that I hadn't physically heard the words she had spoken. Yet nothing. “File not found”.
My entire life, my survival had been predicated on my heightened spatial awareness. I knew what was going on around me at all times. I would wake from a dead sleep in my cell if the door opened. Not as a result of the sound it made but rather because I could actually feel the air pressure change around me. That's a real example, not an exaggeration. Yet here I was drawing a blank trying to figure out what the most important person in my life had just said to me.
App Genocide
I didn't just uninstall the apps on my devices, I systematically went through each one and deleted any profiles I may have created on them. Each time the prompt asked me “Are you sure?” I became more certain. My phone was the French Revolution and I was the Charles-Henri Sanson of dec-app-itation.
Strangely enough, I didn't die. As I divorced myself from all of these meaningless distractions, I wasn't withering into bones like an Indiana Jones villain with each delete. Even this article was handwritten on copier paper and then transferred to a word doc so I could copy and paste it onto Substack. This is the only one I've found that isn't a distraction, it doesn't matter if I ever write or finish any of these. Yet it's therapeutic to give voice to the ghosts in my head. So that's the balance I struck, or the lie I tell myself.
A lot happened following this purge. Enough that it's shocked me and continues to astonish me even now. The first realization was an expected one. All that screen time had crippled my ability to be productive. Time with my kids, having conversations, and doing smaller projects around my home to improve it, all diminished by some game or doom scrolling on social media.
I was giving attention I didn't even have to spare to a glowing screen. You tell yourself you only do that when you're bored but that's a cope. You do it even when there are legitimately more important things you could be doing. You don't pull your phone out when there's absolutely nothing else to do, you pull your phone out because you have a phone. It's your default move like a muscle memory.
The next thing I noticed was that I had been irritated all the time and didn't even realize it. Your device is making you anxious, sad, lonely, and even angry, all for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
I actually felt a weight lifted off of me that I hadn't been unaware even existed once I stopped. Turns out we, human beings, aren't designed to have that much information rattling around in our heads and it damages our well-being. The lizard part of our brain is still tribal and bases our reactions to an immediate community, not the world.
You're supposed to feel worried about crime in your neighborhood because it's a potential threat to you. Yet your brain can't emotionally tell the difference when you hear about one in California. It may be a dull reaction by comparison but you're stacking countless cases. Additionally, you're not designed to measure yourself against the totality of the human race. It's all overwhelming you.
After that, I discovered my new pet peeve. People doing exactly what I had been doing. Like a smoker who quit and is suddenly grossed out by the smell of cigarettes. I don't tell them to stop however if you glance at your phone while we're speaking I will literally stop mid-sentence and walk away. Even if I'm responding to a text, I will put my phone away the moment someone enters my space.
Like a cheating husband, I will immediately put it down as if I was never on it in the first place. People beat devices 10 times out of 10. I won't even acknowledge it if you're near me because I can't stand that you all prioritize yours. We were fine before they invented the text message. People weren't dying in mass. It's not as important as you've convinced yourself.
When I genuinely have nothing in particular to do, I sit. I sit just like I did all those years ago in my cell. No TV, no radio playing, no nothing. I can just sit and think about things like this. Lost in my own thoughts or thinking about nothing at all. And do you know what? I'm happy.
I feel genuinely peaceful. I feel calm and untethered. It still unnerves my family and coworkers how I can do nothing but sit, they ask if I'm okay, and I tell them “yes I am” with the most relaxed and natural smile you'll ever encounter. I got back to my roots.
Learn to be still. You'll thank me later.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Well said. Thanks.
Knocked it out the park with this one.