Today's struggles with computer addiction
I'm just thinking aloud with the keyboard here, I don’t think this is interesting to anyone but dunno.
The tentacles of addiction are all tangled, and it's useful to think them through.
First, there's an hierarchy, like opium to morphine to heroine to fentanyl:
- Computers are addictive
- The internet more so
- The modern web (social media etc.) more so
- Smartphones more so.
Removing one item makes me fall back to the previous one; not having a smartphone makes me mastodon all day on a laptop. Cutting off social media makes me blog or do software projects. Take of the Web and I start exploring Geminispace. If the internet was fully down I'd probably play games or do even more writing.
This does not mean it's useless to remove smartphones. It's better to be hooked on morphine than fentanyl. I’m happier blogging than on social media (this very blog started during a Mastodon break). It just means adjusting my expectations. Perfection is the enemy usw.
Second, the insidiousness. I've toyed with the idea of listening to audiobooks or podcasts in my MP3 player, but the audiobook support turned out to be fiddly—I put audio files in a supposedly supported format, and they don't show up in the menu, and the whole thing is clunky and annoying to deal with. I downgraded my smartphone to the Fairphone 2 from 10 years ago specifically so that the slowness and clunkiness would act as a deterrent, but it's still so much easier to get podcasts on AntennaPod or audiobooks on Voice or music downloaded offline from Bandcamp or SimpMusic (a Youtube Music pirating app). This has improved the quality of my trips a lot, by cutting on impulsive smartphones use; I should recognise that, celebrate my partial victories. But still, once I have even the small, clunky smartphone on my hands while I'm out, boom! Before I know it I'm doomscrolling r/worldnews on the tram rather than reading an ebook or having situational awareness, which is what I do when I have no smartphone at all.
The problem with smartphones is that they have a ton of useful thing and it's impossible to dissociate it from the damaging things. It's been a slow realisation to me how much the damaging things outweigh the useful. Even a degoogled phone with no social media apps or games and a small screen and slow old hardware is too much. All it takes is a browser, and WiFi is fucking everywhere. どこにいたって、繋がっているのよ。
Third, the elephant in the room: While I've made major progress in cutting off my cellphone and Internet use while outside, I still cannot fully get rid of smartphones because I need various authentication apps, certain chat apps and stuff. I can leave them at home, and wait to do my banking at home, that's not a problem. The problem is that I then end up using the smartphones at home. For hours. Because of the insidiousness: since the smartphones are already there it's just so convenient to have my medicine alarms in them, and my podcasts while doing chores, and checking my Slack alarms from work at a glance. And I'm so lonely in this big apartment that it’s very tempting to have some video or audio clip following me at all times, so there’s the illusion of human voices. The fact that I have so many lovers in other cities just makes going home to an empty bed feel even lonelier. So at some point I got into the habit of putting on videos to sleep, or to shower, just to stave off the dead silence of Germany for a while. I came to feel, wrongly, that I need to find some attention-engaging video clip to leave on the background in order to shower. Sometimes I'll be stuck for twenty minutes on the infinite scroll, trying to find a video that hits just the right way that I “can” get up to do dishes.
And then once I bring the smartphone to bed at night to listen to the soft voice of “ASMR Needy Girlfriend Wants Your Attention (F4F) // Pouting // Whining” for the millionth time, booom! doomscrolling r/collapse until 3am, and so on and so forth.
I know a solution to this, I'm just avoiding committing to it: I could leave all the smartphones in my daughter's room, she would help me with this. When I actually need them to validate paypal or whatever, I simply go into her room, do it, and return.
The rest is learning to cope. To find substitutes, the way people who stop smoking chew gum or take coffee breaks.
I don't have to cold-turkey silence; in the absence of company to sleep, I have both a TV and a radio, and both of them have timer functions. The loss of midnight Bernd das Brot with the demise of KiKa is irreparable, but I'll manage. I lived most of my life with boring TV to sleep.
It is annoying that there's no purely mechanical alarm able to set several alarms per day. But in the absence of buying a bunch of alarm clocks, the Nokia is perfectly able to wake me up to work or remind me of hormone times. It can do a timer, too, if I need a timer that's not the mechanical kitchen timer.
I generally have to get used to not having audiobooks or podcasts on me all the time, when showering and doing podcasts and walking outside. I kinda want to have a physical media music player again, but no money, so it will have to be the mp3 player, or nothing. It will probably do some kind of good to my psyche to be listening to my thoughts more often, I suppose.
The last 3 things that force me to have a smartphone while outside are all the fault of my university: The train ticket, the library card, and the cafeteria access are all apps. But I only seldomly go to the library and cafeteria these days, the cellphone could stay home otherwise except for the train thing. I'm considering writing a .pkpass reader for the Nokia for this reason; though I'm unsure whether the small screen would be enough for the Deutschebahn scanners.
The alternatives are: get yet another old Android, install absolutely nothing on it, lock out the web browser app if possible, never turn wifi on, and treat it as a glorified access card with just the train ticket and library barcode app, leaving it off in the backpack otherwise; or, resign myself to paying 60€/month more to have a different train ticket, despite already having one. These both feel bad to me.