I want to get off my fucking phone

My phone has shaped my desire structures, through sheer force of repetition.

It’s not even really ‘desire’ anymore that it manipulates, it’s something more mundane. Habit. Impulse. The electrical twitch down my arm that reaches for the phone on my nightstand. Even when I’ve dutifully turned it off and tucked it away in a drawer. 

It can never be far enough away. 

It can never be turned off enough.

It will always return, somehow here in my hand again. 

Know what? I am so sick of the internet. I am so sick of ‘takes’, of articles that are nothing more than extended headlines, of headlines that are just bad poetry. Jokes without punchlines. References to other headlines.

Is it ‘meta’ or are we all just painfully self-conscious? 

If my twitter feed were sentient it would be profoundly depressed. All judgement and catastrophic thinking and internal snark. And now twitter is dead. I dread what next. 

Clementine Morrigan writes…

“I remember when we wrote poems. I remember when it wasn’t called ‘content’. I remember when I used to feel alive.”

I am a malcontent. I want to make mal-content. Words that infect the network with real feelings.

(Or is that just more content?)

Simpler. I’ll stay out of that whitewater altogether. I'll write in pockets of the internet that most won’t ever find. My words langouring in rock pools, for a few quiet explorers when the tide is just right.

And then here I am back on my phone. 

No purpose in mind. ‘Just browsing, thanks’.

I don’t actually read the news anymore, or social media. A very deliberate choice to try to calm my (very) nervous system. I’ve managed to stay off both for months, but the craving for information remained.

Any information will do. Weather reports and pollen counts, even if I’m not planning to leave the house. Score updates of sports I no longer watch, because the actual games just make me antsy and I end up back on my phone again. 

I pick up my phone. 

I pick up my phone. 

It doesn’t matter what my question was, or if I didn’t even have one. The fix I need is the searching itself.

Sometimes I just swipe between the different pages of apps. Scrolling the very possibility of information.

Feeding more and more information to a mind that can’t feel full enough. And at the same time feeding the network with my data, teaching it to better capture my time and attention with every click. Mutual conditioning. 

Fuck it’s so boring. And I can’t seem to stop. 

Writing helps. 

I am so sick of content. I am sick of consuming media that asks nothing of me other than that I keep coming back. 

I want to write, and read, and participate in making meaning again. I want to write in the margins of my books just for me. I want to lend books to friends and find out months later what they thought and felt or if they even read them.

I want to get off my fucking phone.