Akhil Srivatsan 5/28/19 Akhil Srivatsan 5/28/19

THE MIDDLE

1.1. An introduction

Today, on 23 December, twenty-two days since I deleted all non-essential apps from my iPhone, I had my first complete daydream in years. A daydream with a beginning, a middle, and an end. What it was about is irrelevant, what matters is the reappearance of daydreams in my life. The first since 2015, a year I spent as a full-time novelist. Some of those daydreams related to futures I never ended up sharing with an ex-girlfriend. Others related to book tours that have since not occurred. Others still related to rock concerts experienced from the vantage point of imagined stages. A few of those rockstar daydreams have since come true. In all cases, however, the daydreams ceased.

Had ceased, I should say, until today.

I tend to complicate Decembers. I preempt the imaginary line between years by taking stock of the year gone by. I evaluate my present moment. I make plans to build a better future. This year, however, I was set to have a rather uncomplicated December. I had a complicated November instead. Within its first week, I had fallen out of a relationship and found myself disempowered at work. This in turn brought forward my annual end-of-year tradition of self-evaluation to November. Frees up December, I thought.

Frees up December to take on a passion project. Maybe you sift through the hundreds of songs you have recorded since your last released record, my people are…, and build an album out of the best ten, I thought. Or maybe you sift through the tens of unpublished pieces you have written in the last few years and start publishing the best. Get Stranger Fiction off the ground in a meaningful way again.

Flashbacks of my first go-round growing Stranger Fiction over the second half of 2020 and the first half of 2021. A global pandemic. Weight gain as another relationship fails. A layoff. Ambulance sirens blaring; shut in, all alone for half a year. Repeated Instagram pings as followers accumulate – 100, 200, 500, 1000, 3000 – until Thai t-shirt salespeople hack into a non-2FA-secured account. No account, no followers. Small-scale individual insult added to small-scale individual injury.

So that’s a no it would appear, I thought, on December’s passion project being Stranger Fiction. A no to generating content at pre-decided intervals so instabots can amplify my instacrap to other instabots. A no to what, through both actions and words, I have been told repeatedly is a frivolous activity.

Then, on the 30th of November, I stumbled upon a video that led me to my big project.

I got the idea from a video series by YouTuber Digging the Greats, starting with a video titled Using This iPod For 30 Days Changed My Life. Its premise appealed to me on a fundamental level; my Wrapped 2024 playlist had just landed, and I was appalled at its state.

The only songs on it from the 2020s were: Hollywood Baby by 100 gecs, Taambdi Chaamdi by Kratex & Shreyas, Daddy and the Fields by Nourished by Time, and Introduction by Faris Shafi. Of these, I like, as music, only the tracks by Nourished by Time and 100 gecs. That’s 3% of my hundred most frequently played Spotify tracks in 2024. A world of music available to me at a cost subsidised near-infinitely by artists’ human need to create no matter how limited the commercial upside, and the best I could do is a lousy three tracks. This is not who I am. My first go-round writing on Stranger Fiction, my ‘back catalogue’ if you will, is proof. In December 2020, I was listening to the following albums.

I started off December 2024 being told by Spotify that I was listening mostly to Cake, the Strokes, Green Day, etc. Old stuff. Put another way:

“Lately I just don't know what to listen to. I could listen to absolutely anything, but I don't. Sure there's all kinds of playlists. Spotify even has a new AI DJ feature. But that's not what I'm looking for. Lately I have this deep feeling to just run in the exact opposite direction.”

– Digging the Greats

Once I was done watching the series, I was convinced: I was going to delete every non-essential app from my phone. Including – no matter how uncomfortable the idea made me – Spotify. (It did, however, take me a day of deliberation to reach that conclusion about Spotify.)

The obvious ones to go were social media time-sinks. This generation’s cigarettes – addictive, yet somehow still completely unrestricted. I recall having spent day 0 spending hours scrolling vertically through Reels, horizontally through AI-generated reposts of streetfights on Reddit, and then vertically once again through YouTube Shorts, the lowest form of doomscrolling. Instagram and Reddit were out right away. I wasn’t ready to sacrifice YouTube just yet; that came later, along with Spotify and Chrome.

With Instagram and Reddit went a whole host of past and future timesinks that had temporarily lost the battle over my mind to these two belligerents. Twitter, Threads, Pinterest, TikTok, other names I have since forgotten. These products represent a sort of attention deficit storefront display for my hyper-active mind. They exist only to quiet my brain when it asks – what if you run out of YouTube? What happens when there are no more reels of tiny dogs? What will you feed me then?

Then came the far more challenging decision to deem music streaming as non-essential. It was easy to get rid of Apple Music, next to no heartbreak deleting Bandcamp, Soundcloud, Mixcloud, YouTube Music, Deezer. These apps promised a near-infinite inventory of music in case a browser-enabled laptop was out of reach and Spotify and YouTube were insufficient for whatever musical need cropped up. In my context, these are to music streaming what Pinterest is to doomscrolling; ornamental. Spotify was tough. And it was not immediate; it took a day of active deliberation in my addled mind.

Third, video streaming. I gave no thought to deleting Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Starz, sport streaming services from every country I’ve inhabited / visited despite not having watched a sport in years. In hindsight, it must have been twenty to thirty apps, all barely touched, each and every one of them having lost the battle for my attention to the biggest of dogs: YouTube. Perhaps it was the shame of having spent over an hour on YouTube shorts just a day earlier watching every short posted by ColinAndMichael, but I found it a lot easier to delete YouTube from my phone than Spotify.

Finally, fundamentally useful apps that, in my addicted hands, had a high potential for abuse. Google Chrome – gone. ChatGPT – gone. Wikipedia – (with a great deal of reluctance) gone. What was once my primary source of information about the world was now a way for me to speculate about Ariana Grande’s relationship status in 2021 while on the pot. No more.

I grouped the apps that remained into only four folders – one for phone basics, one for utilities, one for work apps, and the fourth, hidden away, for apps on which I just couldn’t waste my time like my building’s community app. Then I turned my phone greyscale. Project Daeadalus, I called this experiment, my project for December 2024.

I have reclaimed much of my brain in the 22 days that followed that set of decisions. I, on average, spend nearly five fewer hours on my phone than I used to. I don’t feel phantom buzzes in my pocket at random points of the day. I have built new relationships (IRL) and deepened existing ones. I’ve enjoyed the following records.

Nala Sinephro – Endlessness
The Cure – Songs of a Lost World
Chat Pile – Cool World
Previous Industries – Service Merchandise
Gabe 'Nandez, Wino Willy – Object Permanence
Daudi Matsiko – The King of Misery
Viagra Boys – Cave World
100 gecs – 10,000 gecs
Sleaford Mods – UK GRIM
Jamie xx – In Waves

And, as of day 23, I have regained the ability to daydream.

1.2. Day 23

The results are, however, more nuanced than the previous few paragraphs may lead the reader to believe.

Our culture of digital excess is only part of a much larger culture of excess. As a willing participant in this culture, I gorge myself on food that’s bad for me because I cook a lot less frequently than I should. I cook a lot less frequently than I should because cooked food is so readily available to me – delivered so much more often than not in under forty minutes. In theory, I could use the food delivery apps on my phone to make healthy choices: I could call in salads with ingredients I don’t have the skills to prepare well, bowls of fruit I don’t have the time to cut, three-ingredient sandwiches in rye bread I don’t have the training to bake. But I don’t call in these things because they simply don’t taste as good to the oversated palate as a meat patty and cheese between buttered potato buns. Or fried chicken. Or fried potatoes. Or fried anything.

I belong to the first generation of people that, in a median week, consumes more meals prepared outside the home than inside it. If done responsibly, there’s nothing really wrong with this, but the median member of this generation will also, on a median day, consume 30% more calories than the median member of their grandparents’ generation. We generate ten times more plastic than we know what to do with. And burn at least thrice as much fuel as the earth can capture. All of the above statements are just as true for me as an individual as they are for the slice of society that is the fortunate techno-elite.

By day 4 of Project Daedelus, I had my hands on a Shanling M0 Pro, an old microSD card I found lodged in a Nintendo Switch I no longer use, an old UGREEN 6-in-1 hub, and Bandcamp + the iTunes Store. Digital product consumption replaced by physical product consumption. Shiny new things: digital audio players, microSD cards, hubs, downloaded albums that are mine.

Attachment isn’t erased, but redirected. I know now – intimately – the environment of longing and wanting and having that’s created the conditions for my addiction. I also know that the best digital audio player for my needs is the Astell&Kern SP3000. I know that tracks downloaded off of Bandcamp – when formatted as AIFF files – sound significantly better than those downloaded off of the iTunes Store, or worse, the corners of the internet I used to frequent as a younger music nerd. But all of these sound better than streamed music. I know that if I replace my chi-fi in-ear monitors (IEMs) – nerdspeak for earphones – with Shures or Klipsches or something, I will be able to get a truer, richer sound.

There’s no app I can delete to fix the part I play in society’s ‘stuff’ addiction. I now have a more intimate understanding of it. And with that, I have a more intimate understanding of the gaping, growing, emotional void in me. Over the final week of this thirty-one-day experiment, I hope to build a life that’s better geared to filling it.

1.3. Sidebar

There’s no such thing as a decision; there’s only trade-offs. The choice of not having Reddit on your phone is yours, and it may appear to you that you’re making a decision to have a brain that isn’t always stimulated. But in the bargain, you’re choosing to be bored when on the pot. You can make the decision to delete Bumble from your phone because it’s just meaningless experience after meaningless experience, and that’s if you’re lucky. But if you do delete Bumble, you’re going to find that your dating pool shrinks to only the people you already know, the people they already know, and the one-odd new person you meet every now and then.

Alternatively, it may appear that the choice of having Reddit on your phone is a choice to have the same video thrown at you by a different robot every fifteen minutes. And the decision to have Bumble on your phone may appear to you as choosing quantity over quality, a constant reminder of the futility of dating, ‘it never really goes anywhere’, etc. These things may appear to be choices, but they’re not. They’re trade-offs.

When framed as a choice, so many decisions the computer in your pocket asks you to make appear to be decisions of convenience. They seem like no-brainers; why would anyone choose to experience inconvenience? The answer? For the same reason someone might choose to cook a meal over an hour, rather than ordering in a meal while spending that hour comatose in front of a screen blaring season five episode whatever of Friends – the one where everyone finds out – for the nth time in the last two years.

1.4. Why did I decide to do this?

I started this project on 1 December. I did it because ‘the algorithm’ was recommending me the same music over and over, and I, despite not really liking it, was blaring it into my ears unquestioningly. Twenty-four seven.

Also, I was spending much more time than I’d like to admit on apps I thought, even back when I had them on my phone, were meaningless time-sinks. I don’t want to spend as much time as I used to on unfunny reels and boilerplate memes. I don’t want to spend any time at all on TikTok. I hate what Reddit has become; it doesn’t at all resemble the community I joined more than a decade ago. And I hate that I flip through YouTube Shorts blank-faced, glass-eyed, before I sleep.

“I came here tonight because when you realise you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”

– Harry Burns, When Harry Met Sally (1989)

When I deleted the apps from my phone, I thought I’d struggle with keeping myself occupied, with dealing with real-time emotions real-time, with fitting in with a reel-sharing Spotify-loving world. Instead, I’ve found myself more socially integrated and more in touch with my own emotions than ever before; more engaged. It’s like emerging from a trip that’s lasted over a decade.

The other side of the story is that dealing with real-time emotions real-time without a phone to distract you results in all sorts of realisations about oneself. And then there’s the question of attachment, and how it steals attention to a much greater extent than any smartphone can. Rather than limiting my cuts to the space of smartphone applications, do I need to make a different sort of cut?

The ‘why’, it would appear, is attention, but not in the sense of focus. It’s about the choice of where to point one’s gaze – in the several liminal spaces of life, and in a broader sense. To immerse oneself in the ‘river’, so to speak, of life, rather than to dip one’s toes in it.

Part 2 of this three-parter, out next week, will deal with the first three days of this project: the ‘how’ of it.