on screen-free time, dedicated attention, and doing one thing at a time
a trip to fresno, december 27-31
I came to Fresno to try to center myself and get away from screens for four days. I’m trying something new: putting my phone away, completely, aka the opposite of what I typically do, which is reactively reach for my phone any moment there’s a lull. It’s gotten to the point that I pay for other apps to curb this habit – one to block my use during set times, another to make me wait when I try to open certain apps, asking me if I’m sure that’s what I want to be doing.
That’s all to say I spend too much time on screens, and I know this. Mostly on my phone, but also on my laptop, external monitor, and really any screen that can show a web browser on it. I’m not proud of this – it’s embarrassing to be so tied to devices – but it’s true, and I want to be better about it.
To quell that instinctual pull towards my adult pacifiers, I’ve come to Fresno with a load of books, records, and a journal. I’m trying to make this time feel rejuvenating without overly focusing on making this time rejuvenating. Kind of a “making plans to not make plans” ethos – to focus on how I feel.
I tend to live in my head. Not in the introverted sense but in the “thinking versus feeling” sense. I process information quickly, speak quickly, and I don’t always realize when my breaths are getting shorter and my pulse rises. I’ve received the advice to work on being more attuned to my physical self, how I feel in my body versus what I’m thinking in my head. So that’s part of what I’ll do here. And also, working on not being so outcome-oriented. I’m realizing that doing nothing can be a lot to keep track of.
“It's been a few consecutive hell of a years” (atmosphere, traveling forever)
I first imagined this time in a Thoreau-esque cabin, and ended up in Fresno largely as a result of an Airbnb algorithm for beautifully designed homes in California. The hi-fi audio system with a record player and the clawfoot bathtub sealed it for me. This house was built in the early 1900s by a married couple – two doctors – and the woman was one of the first American female doctors. So the house has good bones and, as I learned from the house handbook, a modern update in 2016.
There are myriad reasons I’m here aside from going screen-free and thinking through them is a big part of this time. Honest self-reflection and life assessment never come easily, but they certainly beat the alternative. I have an Erykah Badu song – I think it’s a cover I heard a few times five or six years ago – stuck in my head. A minimal, hypnotic beat, and her voice comes in, saying “I’ve been going through it all. I’ve been going through it all. I’ve been going through it all.”
My days here start with an early wake-up, a shower, drinking a lot of water, and journaling. I watch the sun come up around the velvet shades. I write without stopping or editing and think about what it would mean to appreciate the process over the output. Sometimes I think I’m doing this, but am still drawn to keeping track of things. I drink bone broth and read a lot. Being away from my phone is easier than I thought it would be. Focusing on how I’m feeling and not what I’ve accomplished that day, that morning, that hour, is much less natural.
I’ve been reading a lot here – 2 or 3 books a day (there it is again), but trying not to place value on the number of books read. I haven’t felt this way reading in a long time – at home, I read, but it feels like something I should do. Not to say I don’t enjoy it, but choosing to read - choosing to do anything - because it’s what you most want to be doing, right now, takes on a different air. It reminds me of being a kid on summer vacation.
At some point, I walk or drive to the coffee shop each morning. One of the only times I speak each day is ordering. The activity at the coffee shop is frenetic in a way that’s both familiar and a little jarring – the pop music over the speakers (a producer borrowed a synth pack from a Flo-Rida song), the teenagers home from college recounting their new lives to each other (making them sound a bit more exciting than they are), the ensemble of beans being ground, the hiss of the espresso machine, and the steam release. I notice how easily the gateway drug of observation pulls me into distraction as my stable state.
Each day I nap in the afternoon, listen to records in the evening, and take a bath and drink tea before bed. I keep post-its for tidbits I want to remember. Doing a single thing at a time feels really good, like the right thing: both what I want to be doing and what I will want to have done. Reading a book, listening to an album, writing, but doing one thing at a time, with dedicated attention.
I don’t want to be one of those people who comes back from some experience and starts prosletyzing to any audience, willing or unwilling. I find those people grating. But the lack of ‘phone as an option’ does make dedicated attention much easier than it’s ever been in recent memory.
At the risk of being one of those grating people: the hours we spend on devices are conveniently tracked by those very devices, but I’m struck by how much time it seems I got back – if I had to guess, I’d have said 2-3x as much time as the device says. The switching costs between tasks, the constant partial focus, the illusion of doing something by achieving some micro goal on a phone: these feel like at least as much a thief of our time as the actual measurement of time the screen’s on.
I write down each book I finish and album I listen to. I’m enjoying the acts of reading and listening, but it still feels like something would be lost by not keeping track. What is it about making lists and chronicling? Where’s this habit come from? Is it inherently a negative trait, or ego that makes it seem important to me? Would anything change if I didn’t keep track?
The time isn’t always peaceful and relaxing. There’s a lot I have to think about, and my thoughts still drift towards how to measure things I’m doing or solutionize things in my life. “Heavy boots,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s turn of phrase from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, always stuck with me and comes to mind often now. I feel it the most in the evenings, usually when listening to records. I’m too in it to tell where it is on the spectrum of catharsis to ruminating, but it does feel necessary in those moments.
Listening to music and doing nothing else – listening as the one thing at that time, feels especially indulgent. As a kid, I used to lie on my bedroom floor and listen to a new album from start to finish, imagining the artist writing it, performing it, tweaking it, and recording it. How it fit into the story of them I knew already. Then decades went by when music was by default backgrounded – in the car, at parties, making dinner. It’s the soundtrack to some other experience but very rarely the experience. Even concerts are visual spectacles. I’ve missed listening to music as just listening to music.
These are the books I read and albums I listened to in that living room in Fresno, December 27-31, 2023:
albums:
lykke li - so sad so sexy
kanye west- 808s & heartbreaks
brand new - the devil and god are raging inside me
the streets - a grand don't come for free
mac miller - circles
bloc party - weekend in the city
jack's mannequin - everything in transit
the xx - xx
incubus - morning view
frank ocean - blonde
books:
man's search for meaning, victor frankl
the thief of always, clive barker
the science of happily ever after, ty tashiro
the good enough job, simone stolzoff
letters to a young poet, rainer maria rilke
sexing the cherry, jeanette winterson
the guest, emma cline
everything all at once, steph catudal
the obstacle is the way, ryan holliday
exhalation, ted chiangI think there’s a low-level latent background fear many of us have of life switching on to auto-pilot without us realizing it, that we’re not actually driving towards a place we want to go, but are headed that way as a series of defaults strung together. Where things just happen in sequence and we react to them, and look up one day and realize we’ve become bit parts in the stories of our own lives. I remember a song title from a mid-2000s Warped Tour band: The Frightening Reality of the Fact That We Will All Have to Grow Up and Settle Down One Day, and that title seems like a cousin to this feeling.
Coming here felt important to take a look at how much of life over the last bit has been reacting versus acting, what’s working and what’s not, and where to give attention and where to offer space. What I can affect within my locus of control and what’s outside of it. I didn’t come to Fresno expecting all the answers or to leave with an epiphany. And of course I didn’t.
But I am a little bit better at living in a physical feeling, so there’s that. And I was able to think deeply for longer than I had for awhile, and sit in a feeling and gently remind myself not to solutionize. I appreciate parts of who I am that come out without a phone and have a more clear-eyed view of my worst tendencies that having a phone brings out in me.
I felt healthier in some ways, and also missed people and sharing ideas, feeling like I’m part of something and not just a solipsistic container working through concepts alone. It’s too easy to fall into navel-gazing and to start arranging mental furniture in your mind’s echo chamber when you’re not around thoughtful people and testing your ideas and assumptions.
It wasn’t all purely relaxing or all difficult work, and it satisfied the hope I have for any experience: to enjoy it while in it and be glad to have done it looking back.
