As I continue my self-racking of heart and mind to figure out why I hate smartphones and internet and screens so much, here’s one more reason I came up with and this one is not pretty. Kind of wish that I had stayed in the self-deluded dark and not figured this one out:
Once upon a time, a subconscious part of my own twisted mind must’ve realized that if it’s not possible for me to do something, that’s the best excuse for not having to do it. “Oh, I can’t go and check and fix and do all that for you now, I don’t have internet here.” “Oh, I didn’t see your email, I wasn’t at home.”
I can’t do that right now because I had to walk away from the tools.
I finally managed to track down this unknown impulse by thinking long and hard about just exactly why, as I’m trying out mods for Light Phone III, it’s so important for me to not be able to, for example, open browser or F-Droid or Termux on that thing. Like, I found myself uninstalling AntennaPod because of how it has an “open website” widget on podcasts that lets me, from there, access the open web. Other apps where I’m like “oh no from the help page or even log in screen I can break out into the open web so okay goodbye this app was good but I need to stay disconnected”. I had to ask myself why this mattered so much to me that I’m going through ridiculous hoops for it. And it’s two reasons. The biggest is that I just don’t want to spend all nights and all mornings online. It’s nice to do podcasts or audiobooks late at night as long as I then have to physically leave bed in the morning and get a tablet if I wanna go online, because I’ve found again and again that if I don’t, I’ll miss breakfast, I’ll miss the entire day. Or if I can go online in the middle of the night, I’ll wake up and do that. That’s right, the even bigger reason than my laziness is my lack of impulse control. Hmm, this essay is making me doubt my own awesomeness.
Secondary reason is the aforementioned shirking. Being offline as a way to get out of work. Apparently I have this hangup that “If I can do it, I’m gonna keep finding myself in situations where I ought to do it”. My conscious mind, my values, really do want to help and say yes, to the extent that my subconscious wants to protect myself by putting up these barriers. I’m not the type of person that can just easily say “no I don’t wanna” or “I’ll get to that later, I’m doing something else now” or “I’m gonna put it on airplane mode for a few hours”. But my other brain noped out for me, ahead of time, by making sure I don’t have internet in my pocket and that online is something I can and do walk away from.
Now, to pull back from the self-deprecation for three seconds and try to figure out how this kind of antisocial shirking-through-disconnection sometimes actually can be the responsible choice.
It might be the case that I can do stuff more efficiently and faster by using batching and a more appropriate and capable device like a bigger screen and a real keyboard. If I can reply to ten emails spread out over the day in a way that adds up to forty-five minutes total or even more due to context switching and mindset and resources and thumb-typing vs touch-typing, that’s an overall loss if I otherwise could’ve replied to them all in one half-an-hour window.
The batching can also foster a more responsible selection of duties making sure society gets the most out of my limited spoons. If more requests come in than I can handle, batching them can help me get enough of an overview to select the most worthwhile ones. (Uh, that’s not to say that I’m good at it yet and if I’ve missed some of y’all’s messages that’s more likely due to a mistake on my part than a deliberate deselection.)
Even if it can’t, the shirking might be a vital rest and recuperation and acknowledgment of limited bandwidth.
This is also interbraided with the other reasons for going offline, like my frustration with the mental ice age of the corporate-owned, appified society. Maybe I can’t explain why I don’t want to go on Facebook but if I physically can’t because I don’t have a smartphone with me, I don’t have to worry as much about the other person trying to convince me or bully me. Nope, sorry, I just literally can’t.