Lately, I feel like screens are making me even more tired than they usually do. Maybe it’s working longer for uninterrupted periods of time. Or finding hobbies that leave me refreshed, making screens feel exhausting and pointless. Or maybe it’s revisiting some Deep Work strategies from Cal Newport’s books that have brought an awareness to how draining and useless a lot of my screentime actually is. Or maybe, I’m just feeling the normal side-effects of growing up: just like ice cream and alcohol, maybe we have a lower tolerance for what’s worse for us the older we get.
Whether it’s gaming, social media, or bingeing podcasts, it feels like most people around me are constantly consuming something. I myself was guilty of having either podcasts or music constantly playing in my ears like Ansel Elgort’s character in Baby Driver. Although I don’t check social media much, I still fall victim to the “infinite scroll” on Pinterest and check my non-work email for new content multiple times a day. I watch TV when I eat, do chores, and finish administrative tasks on my computer.
Although I knew the aforementioned habits weren’t doing the best for my well-being, as vices go, they’re pretty tame. It wasn’t until I hiked the last 100km of the Camino de Santiago that I realized two things:
- My relationship with technology and digital content was making me more exhausted
- I had more time and space to think about my own ideas when I turned my technology off
When I walked the camino, I made sure to give myself as much mental space as I could. No music or podcasts while I was walking, no social media and minimal texting during the trip, and staying off my phone as much as possible. Although I connected with my fellow travelers, I had a good amount of time as a solo traveler to think and write. I was really able to follow my thoughts down rabbit holes instead of observing them from a distance while they whizzed past.
Before I left, I was overwhelmed by all the content going into my brain, professional, social, entertainment, and otherwise. I can’t be the only one who feels overwhelmed by the amount of stuff our brains typically process on a daily basis. The more time we spend processing these external stimuli, the less we are able to listen to the voice in our own heads.
Many of us who love to read are familiar with the phrase “The Author’s Voice.” As readers, we can only “hear” the author’s voice after the author themself has heard it (duh). What’s not so obvious is that we are not spending enough time with our inner voices—so how are we supposed to write, or create anything for that matter? Whether it’s art, a business, or just a better way to live our lives?
Last year, I read Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Her main thesis was that without space and time to create, women couldn’t create great works of art. To support this, she used a thought experiment in which Shakespeare had a sister who was equally talented but saddled with the responsibilities and gender roles typical of a woman in that time. For a modern day reader, it isn’t hard to make the argument that many minority groups lack the resources Woolf was talking about when she was writing about women in the early 20th century. As I reflected further, however, I thought that the same could be said about most people with access to digital technologies that draw our attention away from creating.
I made a promise to myself to continue to make more space for my inner voice after coming back from my Camino. I’ve stopped walking around like the people in Fahrenheit 451 with their “Seashell ear-thimbles” and instead entertain myself with my thoughts. I try not to have a screen open while I eat, and definitely not within the first hour of getting up in the morning. What I’ve found is the frantic thoughts, which used to be blips on my radar that concerned obligations, intrusive thoughts, snack cravings, and other haphazard notions, turned into fuller sentences and bigger ideas. They are spoken by the same voice that dictates when I write; I was making sense of my experience without needing to sit down and grab a pen and paper.
In the moments you have in the shower or just before you go to sleep, the space in between your screens and streams, there’s some good stuff. Buddha (or someone invoking his good name) said that “enlightenment is the space between your thoughts”. Most of us with smartphones or chronic internet access have shrunk the space for thoughts themselves. What’s the solution? I’ll come up with it soon after trading in my iPhone for a Nokia.
