Quieting the Collective

Once every few years I want to learn to be a better watercolorist— it wouldn’t be hard to be better, I mainly enjoy watching colors bloom in puddles on thick French paper and make delicious cascading washes of my favorite hues. My artist friend Catherine has also been learning watercolors, so I invited her over so we could paint together on January 20^th.

I didn’t want anything ugly locked in my psyche, I didn’t want to feel frustration, grief, or anger, so I planned to be offline for the day, painting with Catherine. We talked about our holidays, our families, we laughed, made coffees, both a little giddy at the promised snow storm coming toward us. Catherine was explaining things she had learned about herself as an artist while studying this new medium for her. In a lull, these words came fluttering out of my mouth.

“I’m painting to avoid writing.”

Catherine stopped, her paintbrush midair, her eyebrows shot up. So did mine! I wasn’t sure where this sudden truth came from.

I am a full time caregiver to my mom, who has a “touch of dementia,” and a plethora of other fun things that make life difficult for her and in turn for me, but part of her routine is the news. That night I asked her if she could forgo watching TV, I didn’t even want the sounds of it to filter in from the other room while I made dinner. It had been a really nice day creating, laughing, talking; there was a certain bliss in the ignorance, a little cocoon of quietude.

When Tuesday dawned and I realized I didn’t want to look at my phone, an avoidance I’d already been feeling for a couple months. I’d removed social media, but we all know it’s still there lingering in the background, like a siren’s song. I learned (ironically from a post on Threads) to change my phone to grayscale and found that made an immense difference in my interaction with the device itself. And the last year had been an exhausting one, the election cycle absurd, and soul sapping. The cacophony of voices calling for rationality, and warning of our despotic future was loud, but fruitless. I needed a shift. I think we all felt it.

When I mentioned this to a former student, Busy, who is now a mindfulness teacher in the Canary Islands, she agreed how beneficial it is to have this “digital detox,” and recommend the book Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, by Johann Hari. Within the day I had borrowed the book from our library, by day 2 I was telling everyone and anyone about it, and by day 4, my little Luddite heart grew three sizes.

The more I learned in Hari’s book, I’d see parallels in my life as each day I made a conscious decision to stay away not just from social media, and the news, but the internet in general. One day I realized I’d been painting for an hour with no interruptions, Hari describes it as “flow.” I hadn’t felt that in a while.

And then I started writing again.

I got back into my daily routine of coffee and morning pages (three written pages long hand), then more journaling, or pages of “brilliant” thoughts when the edible kicks in. I wrote long overdue emails, and letters to friends. Yes, letters; the kind that take hours to write and you really wished wouldn’t take quite so long to reach their destination.

I’ve always written in a journal, it’s my way of processing thoughts, events, emotions— it’s therapeutic and depending on your tastes in notebooks, costs less than seeing a therapist. (Not as effective, seek help from a professional if and when you can.) Even as a young kid— an only child, I would write, as if to keep my own company. Without this time to write, nay, to think, the feeling of being unmoored and scattered comes sweeping in. And the more I stayed in the cocoon, the more I realized I needed to embrace the quietude and get back to writing. For my sanity.

After about a week offline I got a call from a friend who wondered why I hadn’t sent him dumb stuff lately and noticed things he’d sent on Instagram were backing up. I explained that I was unplugging, and told him about the Hari book. We talked on the phone for half an hour like the kids from the 80s we are. I mentioned it again to another friend who responded with, “I haven’t read a book in 8 years!” [Insert eye roll with, “Duuuude, that’s the point”] Then a cousin called, he wanted to talk about social media, algorithms he’d been facing lately and the constant barrage of bad news. This was all feeling synchronous and timely.

Too often we don’t really communicate, we send memes and news stories back and forth, screen shots of pithy tweets, and cat videos aplenty. We don’t read books, we watch TikTok or YouTube in short bursts— apparently all our attention span can handle. Some people can’t even watch a movie without looking at their phones, or getting distracted or bored. Hari’s book explores why and what we can do about it.

Part of it is our connection to technology, our sleep patterns, the model of surveillance capital, its built in addiction, but really so much of it is the connection to our devices that allow the clamor of outside world. It’s not just constant scroll of photos and videos on Instagram, the constant refreshing of Bluesky, Threads, Spoutible, all the podcasts, the news notifications (really BBC, we need to have a talk about what “breaking news” is), then when when you add an administration whose actual modus operandi is to overwhelm the system with traumatic, illegal actions, it’s easy to feel an urgency to be plugged in all the time. All of it feeds our brains until it’s a dangerous cocktail of 21st Century chaos in there.

(Trust me, I do see the irony, here I am asking you to take time from your day to read my thoughts.)

But that first day painting with Catherine was my Day 1 in an attempt to take back my time, my focus. I’m not the only one, I know so many that deleted social media and taken a step away from it all. For some of us, we were forced out: Elon ruined a platform that literally was instrumental in helping democracies, the take over and its dismantling was by design, don’t ever think it wasn’t. Zuck has always been gross, I means his site started as a system to rank how attractive women on campus were. Now he’s full on kissing the ring of tyranny (and that’s not a metaphor for a certain asshole, but maybe it should be?) And when he came out with his little video there was a mass exodus and with good reason.

This is what we need: people to reclaim their time. Their focus. Their thoughts. Our lives.

This is where I start.

Welcome to my Substack. Let’s go on a journey.

I’m driving and I have no idea where we’re going but I’m sure it’ll be fun.