Photo by Taylor Vick on Unsplash

plugging in

After six months, I put Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) back on my phone again. It came to me as a revelation. I was thinking about Gandhi sleeping with naked girls and I quite suddenly understood why he did what he did.

Gandhi’s method is great because it solves a question I had—whether I’ve truly overcome my doomscrolling addiction. If I wanted to know, really know, then I have to prove myself. Daily. I need access to the apps. I need to confront my temptation and not yield. The apps at my finger tips. They need to be there when I unlock my phone. To tap or not to tap, to tap or not to tap…

I also thought of Mike Pence’s refusal to dine alone with women other than his wife. The Billy Graham rule. It seems so silly at first blush, but I’ve come to admire it. It’s also easy to uphold, and it acutally, totally works. Essentially what I’ve been doing the past six months—denying myself access to the bad apps by deleting them off my phone.

Then I asked myself, do I want to be Gandhi or Pence?

(You already know my answer.)

But wait. Why stop here? Let’s go further than Gandhi. What I need to do is open the apps first thing in the morning. Look at five Reels or Tweets on my feed. And then—Can I resist? Can I stop myself from expanding an inane Tweet or Instagram caption? Can I put my phone down?

Meta’s TikTok clone is called Reels because it’s meant to reel you in. TikTok is called TikTok because tik tok, tik tok, there goes all your time.

vobnox asking the one ring-holding gollum if she can try it on

My detractors might say, “pfft VobNox, you won’t survive! You consistently abandon yourself and the world when you play The Sims.” That is true. For me, the experience machine arrived in the year 2000. *cue: The Sims 1 soundtrack*

j: can you hold your pee? vobnox: put the sims on. it's the only way

I go into what I call “Sims mode”. I experience flow. I don’t drink, I don’t eat, I don’t pee, I don’t poop. I’m quite sure that I can’t feel pain in Sims mode. If you can launch The Sims in a PC high up in the himalayas, I’m confident that my body will behave like those of the yogis there. Impervious to sub-zero temperatures and low oxygen levels. Completely transfixed on the one thing that matters.

when i lock in, i lock myself in 😭

My biggest difficulty I’ve always had, I think, is disengaging. I write in my journal and it’s two hours later. I launch The Sims and six hours pass.

My favourite way to disengage is adopting a goal-oriented view of approaching activities. “Read no more than one chapter.” “Stop when Sim gives birth.” It feels easier to disengage when a goal is met.

My experience with time-boxing has been quite poor. “Browse Instagram for no more than 15 minutes” with time allowances allocated doesn’t work as well for me. It’s real nifty that iOS pauses the app when limits are up, and flashes a reminder. But tell me why I consistently tap on that “Ignore Limit” button. I know why, I was in the middle of a Reel! Smh! Let me finish. It kills me that I have the Ignore Limit → Remind Me in 15 Minutes combo committed to my motherfucking muscle memory. Each tap an admission of my shameful weakness!!! It’s honestly doing a lot of damage to my psyche. I can feel it.

The trouble with apps like X and Instagram is that the goals aren’t immediately obvious.

For that reason, they seem like they should be “time filler” apps. Usage relegated to at the gym or waiting in line, so I naturally disengage between sets or whatever is happening in real life.

I am excited to invent some goals though, which could be fun or revelatory. I mostly use the apps to Know What’s Going On. News, gossip, discourse. I was also an active member of the Furby community. The silly thing with counterfactuals, of course, is that I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on anything in the last six months I’ve been away. The most important news and memes surface their way to my inbox or in real life, do they not?

Goal 1: expose trolls for fun

I just did this last week and had a good time. By “expose” I mean to extract something human or reasonable from a naughty actor. It’s my first time engaging a troll and it’s the closest experience I’ll have to exchanging koans with a Zen master methinks. Playing by a set of rules that are paradoxical, endless one-uppings, and first person to feel hurt (get ‘pwned’) loses.

Goal 2: post things and respond to DMs and comments

I did this for a period of time. Post and go. Don’t linger around long enough to get sucked in. Interested to have a go again.

That’s all I’ve got.

how to plug in the correct amount

On my first week back on X I chanced upon @vgr’s 2018 thread titled How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin. Just a few weeks earlier, I had started typing Walden by Thoreau. Quite the coincidence.

This tweet in particular lit a fire under me:

I’m curious about taking a seasonal approach of spending 6 months of the year terminally online, and the other 6 off.

Being plugged in all the time just feels so wrong to me now that I’ve managed to spend some time away. But being away doesn’t feel right either.

Wondering if mindfulness meditation is my answer to being plugged in without falling into its awful traps.

I wish I had more to say, but I don’t. I’m going to be online for a little bit, see how I feel, and report back.