There is something revelatory about reaching into your pocket at around six thirty in the evening, maybe just before dinner by the river, or on a bus ride home, and seeing your phone, that you have owned for maybe two years at this point and which is starting to go a bit on the battery, still idling in the mid-seventy percents. Normally by now you have spent hours on a noxious combination of social media, word games and pornography, flowing and chopping between the three like some avant-garde jazzman of content. Instead, the day has been occupied - not occupied incidentally by work or dithering, no call to stare at the streams of content. Occupied by actual and intentional activities, the fulfilling kind that you had forgotten you were capable of doing for a whole day, or even starting before noon. A whole day! You got up early, relatively speaking. You went to a gallery. You had a good lunch. You did not think even once about non-fungible tokens, literary beef or video updates from the Cornish Seal Sanctuary. The realisation that you still have this capability can be a genuinely refreshing one when you have let it slip for so long.
Catchphrase seems to be on television a lot at the moment.
There are apps I do not think I can delete. Twitter and Instagram have become too important to certain social and parasocial relationships. I think we - myself and my mutuals - have a bit of a dependency on the automatic presence of others in our phones. I think that is okay, in the same way it is okay to have depression or anxiety. It is okay that I reach for conversations already in flow online, or someone else showing their pedestrian activities, when I feel a little down or a little nervous. It is a kind of coping mechanism and not a particularly harmful one. Many people have much less healthy relationships with the lives of others as presented by social media, but I have found that a strict policy of not following influencers can go a long way.
I’ve found myself watching an awful lot of Catchphrase.
There are apps that I am absolutely certain I can delete. I have deleted Goodreads - my account now entirely private as a personal archive should I ever want to access it as a source for some kind of short story or research into myself. That reasoning has kept a lot of digital material around in my life, on websites and hard drives, and I am fairly sure it will come up eventually. But, for now, the app is gone from my phone, and I no longer use it to track my reading.
Goodreads never really did track my reading - I gained nothing from it other than a sense of crushing guilt by the lack of full, front-to-back manuscripts read in a year. Anything not individually-bound, anything in a magazine or online, became a waste of time so far as the metrics would be concerned and my sense of what constitutes worthwhile activity was warped by this. As my recent commitment to a New Yorker tote bag will demonstrate, I have gone in a different direction. Goodreads is one notification I no longer have any interest in receiving.
I’m getting quite good at Catchphrase.
TikTok fits into another category. It is uselessly compulsive, it has implanted itself in my brain as a source of whichever chemical is produced when I can see a pangolin nestled in newspaper, or a resident of the Cornish Seal Sanctuary on the mend. It has latched onto the part of my brain that does not wait for me to send the signal before it moves my thumbs, swiping into the app before I remember why I unlocked my phone in the first place. I have deleted it for now, but I do not think I can keep it deleted precisely because it does not serve me - it gives me a framework for my failure to produce, for any sinking of my mood, and allows me to blame a genuinely guilty corporation for hours spent on my phone.
It’s ‘run for your money’, you fucking idiots.
There is this hierarchy, in my head, of leisure activities. They are ordered according to the extent to which they serve to enrich me, against the possibility that my time spent on them is just something conveniently numbing. Twitter and Instagram feel more like tools and manage to escape this kind of self-reflection. Daytime television quizzes are amongst the numbing influences, evening quizzes move towards enrichment. Reading whatever celebrity news article comes up on my Google homepage is an attempt to obliterate the conscious mind, while reading the literary fiction of Roberto Bolaño is pure, concrete enrichment. Netflix sits somewhere on the bad end of the middle, while MUBI lords it over the extreme end of enrichment. Your own sense of the spectrum will vary.
Wait, adverts - what were we watching?
This, importantly, is an Overton window; I recognise the position of any given application or piece of media along this spectrum in the moment of consumption - or, in the case of TikTok, after two hours of unplanned, continuous consumption - according to the other objects being measured along the spectrum. That means that my assessment can instinctually change as new pieces join the line, not realising until later how my values have shifted. Only Connect, stretching my brain and competing with a housemate, makes Tipping Point seem like an absurd waste of my time. That is a neutral movement - it does not really matter which quiz is on the television. What is more the question is how I began to feel that Tipping Point might be a reasonable activity in the first place. What was it that prevented Tipping Point reruns from feeling like rock bottom? For that, we have TikTok. In 2020, when TikTok became something significant, it stretched the Overton window as far as it can go. Because TikTok is such an unprofound waste of time, it makes the merest sliver of enrichment seem like a feast by comparison. Because accidentally spending a large amount of time on it is so viscerally shameful, television - with its clear structures and specified lengths - feels deeply valuable in comparison. I end up watching so much of The Chase because the alternative is not pursuing an interest or engaging with a hobby. The new low is scrolling on TikTok and it makes The Chase look like a high.
No idea, missed that one - look at this, though. The seals.
There is something particularly depressing about waking up on the sofa at around six thirty in the evening, maybe just as your housemates get home or as the television gets loud, and rummaging through the piled blanket for your phone, that you have owned for maybe two years at this point and which is starting to go a bit on the battery, still idling in the mid-seventies percent. You remember that this is because you put it back on to charge after a morning spent late in the duvet watching videos, took a few hours to be awake and fell back to sleep in front of a quiz. You think it might be time to delete TikTok, but for some reason open it instead.
What time is it?
It is a cycle that is hard to break.