I read my first anti-anti-technology piece on Wired this morning (tl;dr “I switched to a flip-phone and hated it”). It had nothing enlightening to say, feeling like it was written by a young person whose friends all wanted him to do digital things so he abandoned the exercise for them.
That’s always the trend, though: one looks inspired when saying something contrary. Now that there’s a movement toward questioning the prevalence of technology in our lives and suggesting we increase our analogue-time, of course the smarter-than-though naysayer line will be “Meh, technology is fun and useful.”
Sure, it is. But if we pay attention, we all feel this other thing in our gut, this heaviness, a malignant brain-food hangover, and that’s not going away.
I want to invest in my analogue life this year. I was doing really well there for a while, listening to music and jamming out in my head, drawing for myself when I had spare time, but over the holidays I fell back sometimes — not always — into a pattern of escaping into the digital, of not knowing what to do with free time.
It’s most difficult when I don’t have a lot of spare time, when a small space of time opens up in-between other commitments, and changing gears quickly would be a challenge. The solution may be to figure out beforehand what else I could do (both work and play), so I’m not entering an empty space and trying to find direction at the same time.