Fighting the Screen

Six kinds of people:

1. Those that unabashedly drown themselves in Insta and TikTok and chan sites, but can somehow keep up a job and family life too

2. Those that unabashedly drown but are losers like me who can’t do anything else, who can’t juggle online with a real life

3. Those who fight tooth and nail against screen addiction and are winning the fight because they can keep up a a job and a family life with the time they free up

4. Those who fight the screen but can’t manage to do anything else because the fight is all encompassing

5. Those who effortlessly stay offline (or they don’t even have access to tech), and can have a job and a family

6. Those who effortlessly stay offline but they don’t do anything else.

Since pandemic first started in 2020, I’ve gone from that sixth category to the fourth category. I spend so much energy and effort trying to live more away from screen, with mediocre success and not much grass actually being touched. I don’t even have socials, just like Wikipedia and the notes apps and Emacs or just fiddling with settings or watching movies, but it’s enough for me to be glued to the screen for hours on end.

So on the one hand I’m kinda jealous of category one who can manage a full life and still indulge in a li’l doom scrolling, but I’m grateful that I’m not in category two because that sounds like hell. I’d rather keep fighting forever than succumb to the appified society.

But my entire point was to add in the dimension of how rich or worthwhile your life was.

I had a three step dimension (not addicted, addicted but fighting, and addicted but not fighting) and then I multiplied that by a second two step axis: an OK life of joys and precious moments, or a completely hollowed out shell of a life that feels like a crab tearing me up from the inside.

That’s a technique I often use when thinking: to “fill out the entire matrix” of parameters multiplied by each other and then consider what makes every single field in that matrix special. It helps me see when I’ve missed something or not thought something through entirely.

In this case I’ve been so afraid of category two that I’ve neglected to learn how category one is doing it.

October 2023 (so around fifteen monthns ago) I read The Bullet Journal and it quotes the oft quoted (but apparently hoax) story of a guy being asked to write his top 25 goals list, but then the twist is that he’s asked to move places 6 through 25 onto an “absolutely *** do” list to make sure those top five things get room to breathe.

Smart as I am, I figured out a “lite” way to do it. Instead of committing to only five things for the rest of my entire life, I decided to do things in four-month chunks, called “terms” (spring, summer and fall). One term I mightfocus on only four projects while another term I might say “OK, this is a term where can work on a whole bunch of projects.”

So far, and I’m hesitant to even write about this because I get grief from people who don’t understand how much I was struggling with my involuntary SOFA mindset, with dozens and dozens of started microprojects, as awesome of some of them were and a lot of them did get completed, I was still frustrated with not having done any larger projects in many years. I did some cool projects in my twenties but the last four or five years have just been a bunch of mosquitoes.

But so far the new approach hasn’t been panning out. Stripping away things don’t automatically make life richer or better. I’m tired all the time. I don’t leave bed. I feel sick all the time. I’m always exhausted and in pain.

Just moving to an empty room doesn’t automatically make great art.

I was lonely in my teens but then at my most creative during a few blessed years when I was surrounded by fellow artists and we all could show each other our work and have some company in that.

Minimalism, so far, hasn’t been the answer. And I’m not even good at it. My little room is more cluttered than my old apartment ever was and I fill my days with reading fiction now that I’m refusing myself to start a bunch of “for fun” microprojects.

I’m not giving up on the new “minimalist approach” yet, though. That’s how much I struggled before. I don’t want to just go back to that, I want to

One disaster in my productivity life was when I switched my GTD system from paper to digital in 2010. I’ve had a few false starts at switching back to paper but finally did it in October 2023, but that’s been a struggle and hasn’t really started working great yet. So that maybe wasn’t the singular silver bullet.

Coincidentally (as far as I can tell) my D&D group also collapsed so it’s been a rough year. I’ve also gone through some breakups.

Another thing that started at that same time, end of 00s, was that I started living alone. Which I hate doing. Les autres: can’t live with them, can’t live without them. But with my constant fatigue and never-ending colds I don’t really see myself improving even in the company of others. I spent four days (three nights) at a friend’s house in another city last weekend and I didn’t get a lot done helping around their house since I have such a hard time being up, spending all day on the sofa and all night on the bed.

Main point is, if you want to “turn your computer off and touch some grass” or whatever the kids say, the grass won’t come automatically just by turning your computer off. That’s what I’ve learned. The opposite might be true (that there are happy grass touchers out there with a turned-on computer in their pocket). I wouldn’t know about that.

Don’t worry. I’m not about to go on TikTok or Insta any time soon. I still hate the Internet. I’m still going to try this approach. But what I’m learning is that while screentime was the symptom, quitting screentime isn’t the cure. I’ve been a jerk to my online friends and that haven’t given me any more IRL friends.

That’s the main point I wanted to get across here and that point gets completely lost with your reply. Thank you again for writing it. I might want to get back into Gemini. Maybe I’ll find it inspiring in a way that old 19th century novels or smutty manga tankōbons aren’t, since Gemini contemporary and geminauts are wrestling with the issues of our time.

Update

I really turned a corner a few days after writing that. This digital semi-detox feels really great now. I feel otimistic about getting my brain back. So I’m back in the corner of “fighting the screen is worthwhile, actually”.