This Life Gives You Nothing

Jonah Weiner writing in Blackbird Spyplane: “This Life Gives You Nothing”

My phone has trained my brain to work in a way that I don’t like. I wanted to re-train myself.

This powerful essay came to me at an opportune time, as I’ve been slowly trying to enshittify the experience of using my phone so as to make myself want to spend less time with it. Not by using any of the minimal launcher apps or other sort of fringe overhauls that force such an experience, but by making small tweaks — turning off notifications from Reddit, deleting Instagram from my home screen, things like that.

As a consequence, I’ve now found myself staring at my home screen, idly swiping between it and the app drawer, maybe checking the weather for the fifth time today, at a loss for what to do with this machine that used to release a steady drip of dopamine. Jonah has inspired me to attempt to fill that idle time with reading. Perhaps not anything as heady or profound as his Proust, but books nonetheless.

I suspect this will be a challenge for me since I tend to hate leaving things unfinished¹ and thus only tend to pick up a book when I have sufficient time to finish a chapter. I’ll try to break this habit with small bursts of reading throughout the days, hoping that my brain will learn to remember better between them.

And, since I can never let anything lie in simplicity, I’m already devising ways of ensuring that my spot in the book syncs between my phone and Kobo. Whether that makes me a the best kind of nerd or glutton for punishment is up to you, but I’ll never pass up an opportunity to solve a problem with a cool little integration.

The social media corporations are not our friends, and we ought not be letting their products affect the way we think. Easier said than done, but imperative.