Being Casually Radicalized on a Tuesday Night
The one about using my phone and being mildly braindead.
According to Apple, my average screen time is down. It has very slowly gone down exponentially over the past month or so. Baby steps, but we’ve seen a slow crawl from five plus hours to hovering between a low five and a high four to now firmly being in the four and a half hour region. It’s my Purple Heart.
In seriousness, I am trying to use my phone less, kind of. It’s more like I’m trying to lighten up on the doomscrolling. I think I’ve been successful in that regard, at least.
I’ve started doing the New York Times Daily Mini, which has been a fun brain game to wake up to every day. (I’m too stupid for the Daily Crossword, aka the real deal.) My daily average for those is a flat two minutes right now. A recent Saturday mini killed me at 4:14; “texter’s qualifier” turned out to be “FWIW” which drove me up the wall. Joel Fagliano is my enemy.
A weird thing that has happened that hadn’t really sat with me until recently was that I don’t really play video games or look at Twitter all that much anymore. Anybody who knows me knows I used to spend a religious amount of time doing both but at some point, I kind of quit doing those things cold turkey. I didn’t have a reason for it, it just happened.
My girlfriend and I were listening to this in the background. At one point, Blake has a rough transition that’s a step late because he tries to shoehorn “Life Round Here” in the middle but I hadn’t heard that song in a minute so it kind of hit still. Dropping your own song in a set and it hitting is a crazy flex. There’s an awesome Jersey Club mix of “JACKIE BROWN” near the end of this set.
Recently, I started following some Instagram accounts that have been planting seeds in my brain. @thetransitguy is an account run by Hayden Clarkin, who works in transportation engineering and urban planning and is trying to spread awareness about public transit and walkable cities around the world in relation to the lack thereof in the United States.
I forget which post it was that flipped a switch in my brain but one of the earliest was this post with a map of the transit system in Zürich. Clarkin pointed out that Detroit has 230k more people with a far less expansive combination of buses and trains. Very cool, very chill, and not infuriating at all.
It’s a very nuanced issue that I won’t pretend to be an expert on. What I will say is based on being exposed to the plethora of information Clarkin posts along with doing more research on how public transportation in the United States eroded over the course of the 20th century is this: it feels like cars suck total ass?
It got me to thinking about how weird smartphones are. If you’re Online™️, you’ve probably seen that meme about how our brains are designed to eat berries in a cave — feels pretty reductive but also fairly accurate. I guess it didn’t occur to the makers of the iPhone, or really anybody, that having the entire history of the world at your hand would be overstimulating to the point that it would fundamentally change our brain chemistry.
One day in 2007, you woke up and thought, “Wow, how cool; they combined a phone, an iPod, and a GPS all into one!” Now, you wake up, check your phone, and see posts about how many times Israel has bombed the fuck out of innocent children today, let alone this week interspersed with sports highlights and clothing drops. (Don’t get it twisted, it is free Palestine on this side.)
Over the past month, I’ve run into or met people that I only know of through Twitter. One of them was an unplanned run-in in New York while out and about. (If you’re reading this, Sunny, sorry I didn’t hit you up after.) The other two were dinner and coffee with friends who were visiting Los Angeles.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with using a smartphone. I guess comfort is besides the point. Some days, I walk around and and have definitely thought, “Wow, look at that jerk walking around with their head down in their phone. I would never!” Lo and behold, the next day, I’m checking my email while walking my dog.
A handful of times this year, I’ve dreamt about what it’d be like if we didn’t have smartphones. On one hand, maybe people would have better attention spans. On the other hand… huh, maybe these shits are really evil. (It’s nice to be able to see your loved ones’ faces and to have media at your fingertips.)
Recently, my boss gave me feedback on how I talk about work. I said something I thought was relatively innocent: “I’m doing better about working through bad days…” He hit me back immediately with something like, “That’s a bad way of looking at it, you can make mistakes but that doesn’t make it a bad day.” I didn’t think much of it. I still don’t really, but maybe he was onto something.
I still have days where I look at my phone way too much. I used to think, “Wow, I looked at my phone way too much today,” and then I would feel bad about it. At some point, I realized there’s nothing I can do with this information. All I can do is go to sleep and try to use it less the next day.