DAEDALUS // PART 3 of 3 / THE END
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I’ve read so many more books in the two-odd months since I’ve changed my lifestyle around my phone. There's something to that tired cliché about reclaiming one's attention span. Since December 1st, I've read:
Digital Minimalism (2019) by Cal Newport
Dopamine Nation (2021) by Anna Lembke
The Art of Loving (1956) by Erich Fromm
The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power (2021) by Max Chafkin
In Defence of Food (2008) by Michael Pollan (re-read)
Willpower (2011) by Roy Baumeister & John Tierney
Doppelganger (2023) by Naomi Klein
The Virgin Suicides (1993) by Jeffrey Eugenides (re-read, abandoned within the first 50 pages)
Orbital (2023) by Samantha Harvey
Yellowface (2023) by RF Kuang
The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang (re-read)
Everything we do is at least half for show. Even when nobody’s watching, we’re often secretly auditioning for the love, the admiration, the warmth of others. Imagining nods of imaginary approval from uncaring cities outside open windows.
Perhaps it began with the ubiquitous TV set, Warhol: everyone wants their fifteen minutes. Maybe since we could witness everyone's fifteen minutes unfold in our palms, second by mundane second, we've begun to behave like we're always in the thick of ours.
“The medium, or process, of our time - electric technology - is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted.
Everything is changing- you, your family, your neighbo[u]rhood, your education, your job, your government, your relation to "the others." And they're changing dramatically.
Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by the very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak.
Words and the meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways.
The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.”
Marshall McLuhan in the Medium is the Massage, 1967
More likely, it precedes all of this. In Victorian England, for instance, table legs sat covered with white cloth in empty rooms, projecting sexual modesty to non-existent guests. Forever, people have policed their private lives out of fear of neighbourhood gossip, even when no neighbours were watching. Man as social animal, ever afraid of ostracisation, ever driven by the desire to be accepted. The smartphone didn't create this phenomenon, it just amplified it. A change not just of scale, but of kind.
A DESIGN FOR LIFE
I half-searched for missing kudos in my empty apartment when I first purged my phone. At least half my screen-time in the week that followed was spent showing friends, family, acquaintances – anyone who'd look – how low my screen-time had become. And when the compulsive phone-checking finally ceased, it was partly replaced by me picking up the device just to admire its minimal, greyscale aesthetic. I worried: the thing with performances is that they eventually end; reality catches up.
But then things changed; a sort of calm took over. Forty-odd days past the stipulated end of my ‘experiment’, I haven't felt compelled to reinstall any of the deleted apps. I also haven’t felt compelled to rail against technology; I’m far more integrated with emergent tech than I used to be before I began this experiment, and I still use my phone; just more deliberately. I'm losing something - and we'll examine what that is - but it hasn't felt like loss. Instead, it feels like time gained.
It's difficult to overstate how profoundly this reclaimed time has shifted my perspective on life. As I started putting this together for an audience (of one, I have to keep reminding myself) I hinted at the changes I was beginning to notice in my relationship to attachment. I wrote about my being a symptom of a larger societal addiction to stuff. How my digital audio player (DAP) came to symbolise, in object form, both a journey of digital decoupling, and an obsession with artefact. I wrote also about my fear of being left behind – left out of plans, excluded. How the smartphone, with its promise of endless connectivity just exacerbated these fears. Why is nobody texting me? Why is nobody inviting me to the cool shindigs everyone else seems to frequent? Like the pre-smartphone seventeen-year-old who aimlessly hung around his friends fearing social isolation, I had grown accustomed to picking up my phone over and over again, hoping to find signs of being a part of something bigger at the bottom of a text exchange, at the other end of a shared reel, in a missed call notification.
Just as deleting Spotify prompted the quick procurement of a DAP, complete with downloaded albums and an obsessive quest for the highest quality audio, the reduction in phone time created a vacuum that I rushed to fill with frenetic social activity. It’s what men with a happy single life do, I rationalised. Late nights and groggy mornings punctuated the first three weeks of my thirty-one-day experiment. Deleting these apps is making me more social, I insisted. That's good, right? A good thing - until I stumbled home at 6 AM on a Friday, having been out every single night for weeks. My diet: a veritable smorgasbord of bar nibbles and drink. My exercise regimen: a relic of an increasingly distant past. My mental state: shaky.
Later that Friday, a friend intervened. Sat me down and asked if this was really the life I wanted to be living. Suggested I slow down.
When I had decided to delete all the trash off of my phone, I was already deep in a crisis. Forces at work had conspired to make me miserable and had succeeded, largely because I'd allowed them to. A relationship had ended abruptly, albeit justifiably. Outwardly, I began clinging ever more desperately to anything that made me feel part of a community. I was perpetually out. Always fun. Always available.
Always connected. Always on my phone. There’s a reel received. She loves me. There’s a message received. He loves me. There goes my phone, there it buzzes, there it rings, there it pings. They love me. They want me. They need me. They need me more than I need them and they will never, never, ever leave me.
VIRAL
Covid broke us all. We seem to have descended into a sort of collective amnesia about those years spent distanced from each other, experiencing human connection almost entirely through screens. Even those of us fortunate enough to not have lost loved ones to the disease spent the first six months alone, closed off, scared. Many lost jobs, saw relationships crumble, fell into seemingly endless spirals of boredom, frustration, and despair.
It took reading Naomi Klein's brilliant Doppelganger to remind me that yes, it had happened. Covid had happened. And it broke us all. It certainly broke me. I experienced a layoff, a relationship's dissolution, a spiral that seemed without end. And I was among the most fortunate. As the pandemic gave way to life after it, I struggled with social reintegration. People's intentions became inscrutable to me, especially in areas where I'd struggled most during the pandemic: romantic relationships, work. I experienced the alienation that comes with imposed long-term isolation, the anxiety that comes with forced reintegration. The world seemed riddled with post-pandemic maladies, and every thinkpiece in my carefully curated feed tempted me to abandon nuance in favour of simple explanations. I didn’t see this new strain of social anxiety coming. At thirty – a writer/musician/commercial director – I felt like a more helpless version of that seventeen-year-old student I once was. A more potent variant of a decades-old anxiety. I understand this vulnerability now, but then it blindsided me. Perhaps I lacked the words for it, or perhaps because we were all experiencing a similar thing, I didn’t see the experience as individual.
Or maybe it was because my screen served as a constant reminder that I wasn't alone.
VACUUMS NEED FILLING
Maybe much of the doom and gloom that seems to punctuate our zeitgeist is fair.
But we don’t give ourselves enough credit, both as individuals and as a collective, for how we rebuilt the social ties those years we spent apart strained. I’ve seen Zoom get a bunch of credit, high-speed internet too: for allowing us to stay connected despite not being able to be physically proximate. Vaccines and mask mandates get a lot of credit from some; their lifting, from others. The sheer resilience of the human beings fortunate enough to have made it through those dark and trying times? I’ve seen very little coverage to that effect.
Maybe it’s too twee for the era of outrage. It’s easier to pin the virus on people and our recovery on technology, perhaps. Or maybe we don’t say it because it’s obvious. Of course we’re resilient, it’s taken for granted; assumed. Just like the cosmic miracle that is our ability to communicate with each other is taken for granted. My personal experience has taught me the opposite approach is likely the best. I, like many people I know, have displayed tremendous strength to become the person I am today. Long-time readers may find it odd for a writer of dystopian fiction and murky music to be saying this, but I assure you it’s true. And the same is likely true for many of the thousands of long-time readers reading this.
It’s also true, however, that the wear-and-tear of having gone through the journey is real. Attachment, fear of isolation, and finally, the red herring we were sold to fix those problems: being glued to the computers we carry with us everywhere we go.
1 STEP
Every journey to someplace far begins with a single step.
When I started on this journey on the first of December, I thought of it as a month-long experiment in decluttering my phone. Now that I’m in possession of a decluttered phone, a digital audio player, and a music collection, I see this as part of a longer journey of decluttering my once-addled mind. And technology, when used intentionally, actually enables that, instead of getting in the way.
In the forty-odd days since the conclusion of that experiment, I’ve seen no immediate reason to reintroduce any of the apps I’ve lost, and I’m beginning to see compelling reasons to lose a few more (and gain entirely new ones). However, here’s the interesting thing: the apps on my phone, my screentime, the time I spend on my phone, none of it is an area of focus for me anymore. The marginal gains in attention I will make from continuing the cull will likely be overshadowed by the downsides of losing functionality. Project Daedalus comes to an end.
What replaces it is a broader design for life. Yet again, I’ve allowed a simple task to become the first step in a journey to ‘someplace far’, metaphorically speaking. Old habits die hard.
Yours,
Akhil
Mumbai (or Bombay, as you like it), 8-Feb-2025
