Maybe he’s just a phone addict who likes to keep checking his cigarette?
Photo by Charles Cheng on Unsplash
Self-isolating at home, I should be in my element. All the time in the world to study and write, but work levels hit a bit of a slump over the week as I joined in with all the pandemic pandemonium going on in the ever more distant world around me.
Going to the supermarket, again, to stock up on stuff, again.
It’s a long while since I’ve even drank cans in my house but we all got a week’s supply, just in case.
Our fridge was packed on Sunday night, until Monday morning came and it was half empty again (or half full – I’m usually more of a half-full kind of guy). Partly from eating half the food; partly because we’d just drank a week’s supply of cans in the giddy wake of the Six-One News.
Good job I’d no college to attend on Monday. Well, no college to commute to – it’s all online now. I suppose this situation is giving us a kind of social and technological Great Leap Forward – forcing things that were going to happen slowly, hesitantly, over the next few years to happen overnight. It’s not going to be the only change in that regard.
And sure then it’s Paddy’s Day.
Whatever about the consumption of food and drink, it’s the consumption of information that’s been slowing down my full embrace of the self-isolator’s lifestyle. This situation should be my own Great Leap Forward in forcing me to stay at home and study and write even more than I already had been.
Too many distractions. At least we got Paddy’s Day out of the way.
Just one barrier to complete blissful solitude remains. The one thing keeping me in touch with the outside world at times.
The last thing I need to self-isolate from is my bloody phone.
I’d been going so well on a recent self-imposed phone restriction over the last few weeks. Completely unrelated to the spread of the Coronavirus as I followed its course on Twitter from ‘just in Asia’ to mainland Europe to Ireland. I just felt like I could do without the distraction; my phone addiction is as bad as anyone’s at times.
Nothing too drastic, I’d just been leaving it at home the odd time when I go to the shops, or going for a walk without it. It’s good practice not having it as backup in social situations, or being your first resort to help you endure the mind-numbing pain of standing in the queue in Centra.
I’d also been practicing leaving it outside my room when I’m studying, or writing, or doing anything which required me not to willingly distract myself with mindless scrolling, including talking to my housemates. You tell yourself you’re ‘just keeping informed’ – “if there’s one thing the election taught us it’s that everyone needs to keep informed”.
Except that’s absolute horseshit, most of the time.
You don’t need to stay so consistently informed, all of the time. And even now, in a real situation, I’ve had to take a step back from googling different countries + ‘coronavirus’. It’s been interesting to see the different responses from different places as it’s spread across the globe, and even now there’s some cognitive dissonance in reading media that’s US or UK focused, to Irish media, to stories from places like Italy and Spain. Pictures of empty supermarket shelves in Milan a few weeks ago were somewhat amusing, though no cause for concern for us all the way over here.
Now it’s coming at us from all angles. Friends, family, mostly for me through the medium of wonderful, glorious, rumour-spreading, secret group forming whatsapp. The source of all the muck that isn’t fit to rake. It’s keeping us informed, in the know. But now it’s unstoppable.
And we’ve all fallen for the rumours, the gossip, the scaremongering, the craic. The army are being called in. I was loving it. Here we go, excitement levels through the roof.
JUST LOCK ME DOWN AND TAKE AWAY THE KEYS ALREADY!
Except it turned out to be shite. For now. Tuesday, 11am, and I was free to go for a run in the Phoenix Park and text my mam that, as she’d told us (on whatsapp), the church bells were ringing out as a ‘call to prayer’.
It’s not even about information anymore, it’s just a means by which I’ve become hooked on the notification and news feed mechanisms in my phone and the apps contained on it.
One of the papers ran a story of sorts the other day, reporting that Facebook wasn’t going to ban people from forwarding messages in whatsapp groups.
Good.
It’s not their job. It’s up to every man, woman and child around the world to take responsibility now, to take responsibility for their own phone use.
In spite of my overall writing and study ‘productivity’ being better than ever lately, I’ve found it hard to get up in the mornings on days when I don’t have to be anywhere other than working at my desk – I was sometimes spending up to 45 minutes on twitter before I even got out of bed, being full of energy when I did but massively procrastinating up to that point.
Spending that time sleeping would have been better for me.
I’ve found leaving my phone charging in the kitchen instead of beside the bed while I sleep to be a big helpin beating the urges to constantly refresh and update and log in to the news, or the lads on whatsapp, or Twitter, or whatever. Out of sight, out of mind.
Not having the phone is a massive incentive to get out of bed. I’ve also found there’s a ‘breaking the seal’ effect, which anyone who’s ever held in their first trip to the pub bathroom or smoking area in order to prevent subsequent exponential increases in the frequency of their need to urinate or smoke will understand.
The longer you can hold off using your phone in the morning, the less you’ll feel have the urge to do so throughout the day.
Why shouldn’t you use your phone so much?
Well, if you weren’t already aware of what overuse of your phone does to your brain then you’re about to find out over the next few weeks. Attention gone to feck, anxiety increased, inability to focus on doing simple tasks, deterioration of relationships, and eventually, diminished ability to enjoy anything.
And the old lie we tell ourselves is that we’re ‘informing ourselves’, or ‘educating ourselves’ and so on, when in reality reading endless articles and opinions and messages does nothing of the sort. You don’t learn from an abundance of information, as anyone who’s ever taken the Leaving Cert will understand (and if it was my choice I’d have replaced the written portion of the language exams WITH the oral). It’s what you do with it, and it’s impossible to really do anything when your attention is being yanked in six different directions for a large part of the day.
Most of the ‘information’ ends up being just noise.
Elections.
Press conferences.
Murders.
Anything to do with Trump.
None of it really matters to your daily life, and it makes us all a tad sensitive to things going on around us.
Maybe this will be our Great Leap Forward in really appreciating just how much our phones fry our brains.
And your environment is stronger than your willpower. You need to fix your environment first. If you wanted to quit smoking, it’d be good not to have any cigarettes lying around the house. Same for boozing.
The only thing you can do to stay sane is to self-isolate from your phone.
Like a lot of people I’m out of work for the time being. This is an unprecedented crisis. Pandemic anxiety is a real thing, and the whole situation is hitting us all in ways we couldn’t have even conceived of a month or two ago.
There’s no need to make it worse by connecting yourself to the infection of information that’s spreading moreso than ever.
At least the global pandemic is news worth paying attention to, for once. But it’s still an overdose of information. TMI, as they say.
Notifications prey on the way our brains respond to them; like that of a gambler’s brain when the wheels stop spinning. Check the thing. Did I win?
Some people have given me the kind and constructive criticism that the pieces I write are ‘long’, or even ‘too long’. They’re probably right, and every half-decent writer probably needs a good editor to make them great – but I’m also a fan of reading.
Like, actual reading, for more than the length of time your eyes get to glance at a headline as it scrolls past your line of sight; in paragraphs and pages and chapters that aren’t broken up into top ten lists. Reading for its own enjoyment. Reading that isn’t just about gathering information, but about allowing your own brain space to breathe and reflect. I’d kind of like to stick to my principles and stick to writing in long form.
Now could be a good time to train yourself to read something longer – and more genuinely informative – than a Top Ten Things To Do In Quarantine list. Come to think of it, if you “can’t” read a book, you’re basically illiterate, aren’t you?
You should be able to figure out the Top Ten yourself, and if you can’t then now’s the time to learn. Your phone won’t teach you, and you’ll learn more from reading the classics than you will from reading the Guardian’s Live Panic Feed.
Sure we all have the time to read now, don’t we? Or is that just more noise coming out of the ‘News’?
Maybe no-one actually wants to self-improve in self-isolation, and we’re all still just on our self-isolating honeymoon, but then in a week or two we’ll all have ditched the home workouts, the window gardening and the creative use of solitude, and we’ll just be hooked on a cycle of Netflix and news and crisps and bullshit, plugged in and left on charge ‘til we all start foaming at the mouth and a light crust begins to form over us, and I’ll include myself in that miserable prediction.
Who knows what’ll happen? Not even your phone can tell you, that’s for sure.