Losing Touch With the Mundane

Eighth Grade, 2018

My alarm goes off. I reach for my phone from its place on the shelf. I rub my eyes as I haphazardly scroll through my notifications, clearing away the ones I don’t want. Finally, I open Instagram, and begin to veg.

This is how my morning begins every day. Regardless of whether or not I need to be somewhere early, or have work to get done before noon. On days that I don’t need to be anywhere, I’ll tell myself, “Just until nine,” but on some mornings, I’m not out of bed until 11. It’s beyond frustrating for me (a morning person), but it’s not the only time this happens.

When I’m waiting for my food to microwave, brushing my teeth, petting my cat, walking to the mailbox — it’s always the same. My thumb gets caught under the blue light of my phone screen, and I scroll, tap, swipe.

At first, I thought it was just sheer addiction. I thought that finally — after five years of having a smartphone (shoutout to my red Samsung Rant and blue LG Rumor that kept me from the clutches of Apple for the first six years of my phone-owning life) — I had just become obsessed. Which isn’t completely false, but after trying out the Forest app for a couple days, I realized that the problem wasn’t the phone. I didn’t feel any overwhelming urge to dive for it the minute the timer went off so I could check social media, and even with the notifications I had coming in, I wasn’t dying to open them immediately. Instead, I just felt antsy.

Without my phone — the object of my affection anytime I had nothing productive to be doing — I couldn’t sit still. I had nothing to occupy dead space and waiting periods; it was as if I had developed a fear of being empty-handed for more than a couple of seconds. I began to realize that what I was addicted to was not my phone, but the feeling of never being completely idle.

When I was younger, these kinds of do-nothing moments were magic to me. I would think of story ideas, scrutinize my surroundings, start asking questions to the people I was with. Even now, I romanticize and pine after such times; the content that I consume on a daily basis is of exactly this — people stepping away from social media and the Internet to let themselves be unoccupied. Spending their mornings reading, eating lunch while watching people stroll by in a park, sipping tea and looking at the artwork in a cafe. Obviously, this is very idealized; with life as busy as it is, it’s difficult for most people to allow themselves moments like these. But that’s the thing — I’m not that busy.

So why, when I have the time, can I not seem to put my phone down and experience the wonderfully mundane moments that I pine after so fervently on a screen?

I’ve tried time and again to simply push my phone away from me and fill my time with something else, but it’s not that easy. After years of getting used to having social media’s algorithm serve me a feast of media content on a silver platter, I’ve lost the ability to cook for myself — so to speak.

With social media providing me with all the instant stimulation my brain could need, what’s the point of exerting my last two brain cells to actively seek out its own? It’s infinitely easier to open an app and scroll through dozens of photos, nine-second videos, and memes that will give me an endless stream of quick, immediate amusement, than it is to start a conversation or actively think about my surroundings to work for my enjoyment.

It doesn’t help that there’s a neverending cycle of new content every day, so much so that it’s impossible to keep up with in any meaningful way. To be “in the know” is a game of chase, running to keep up with quantity, having to leave quality behind every time. As a consequence, spending too long on one thing starts to feel wrong. Waiting for the bus begins to look like an opportunity to consume more, and the small minutes in between cooking seem like a way to catch up on the last hour of posting alone; otherwise, these moments feel like a waste of time.

But I want that seemingly useless time back. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that I’ve gotten to the point where I dread idle moments. If I’m forced to be unoccupied for even a minute, I begin to think about the media I could be consuming — What YouTube video should I watch next? I should clear out my saved folder on Instagram. Has my favorite TikToker posted again? — and then the moment is over.

I’m as guilty as everyone else of double tapping photos at twenty miles an hour as I scroll, not really looking at the photos, not watching through the whole video. I skim articles instead of fully reading them, and feel antsy if I force myself to read every word. Constant media consumption has stolen my attention span, and with it my ability to sit still still with one piece of media. Combating it has not been easy; while I’ve still been trying to physically keep off my phone (including leaving it to charge in the other room from dinner until I go to bed), I’ve begun to retrain my brain to put quality over quantity again.

Instead of scrolling through hundreds of Instagram posts for an hour, I watch two Japanese lessons that I’ve been saving for far too long in my YouTube watchlist. I replace three skimmed article readings with one or two full ones, taking my time to understand the whole piece.

In ditching the shallow media consumption for a more meaningful one — nit-picking the content for myself — I’ve slowly started making for an Internet experience that feels not only more productive, but more refreshing, as well. So that when I leave the screen, I don’t feel so bogged down by the sheer amount of content I’ve just consumed. I feel more in the mood to reflect, giving me the energy to actually live what I usually only watch in hundreds of vlogs, read (skim) in dozens of posts.

I still allow myself moments of mass media consumption, but I bookend it with letting myself be empty-handed, opening myself back up to bursts of child-like attentiveness in the color of the sky, the crookedness of a picture frame on my wall, the sound of rushing water. So that maybe one day, I’ll be able to watch videos of strangers enjoying idle moments and close the tab thinking, “I’d rather just go and do it.”