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by egypturnash
2209 days ago
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Does "I was born in the early seventies" count? I spent the first decade or so of my life with "computers" as room-filling things in TV and movies, and boxes in school labs; laptops didn't reach a place on the price/performance curve that worked for me until around my mid-thirties, and I spent the first forty years of my life without a smartphone. Honestly yeah, I think smartphones have done terrible things to my focus. I periodically delete stuff off my phone that exists solely to distract me; the only social media app on my phone is a pinned webapp for the Mastodon instance I run. Sometimes I go through phases of habitually setting my phone to airplane mode when I put it back in my purse, to throw up one more little barrier to make me think "do I really want to blow half an hour fucking around aimlessly scrolling internet trash in hopes of finding something actually interesting". Really I'm a lot happier when I'm walking along looking at the world and watching my brain disengage and think big slow thoughts than when I'm walking along with my head down, constantly buzzing with tiny thoughts spawned by sites designed to keep me scrolling as long as possible to keep their engagement numbers up so they can look like a better place to sell ads. My primary work tool is my laptop - but I'm an artist, I don't need to be online to get most of my shit done. I like to go work out in cafes and parks, with all the radios turned off to help extend battery life - and to eliminate the ever-present distraction of the Internet. I don't envy people whose work requires a constant connection! I don't think a period of cold turkey would be a bad idea. Who are you when you turn off that constant stream of distractions, who are you once you've stopped craving that constant distraction? If you're young enough you might have no idea of who that is. Find out. Remember what it's like to be that person as you start experimenting with letting the Distraction Machine back into your life. |
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