Everywhere you look there seems to be advice to switch off your devices in an effort to find greater peace and balance in our lives, but what if the issue is not so much with the digital world itself but just the way we tend to use it?
I’m not in my house and I didn’t bring my phone with me so, as I go upstairs to the toilet, I grab a book from a pile to flick through while I’m having a sit-down wee, the only way to wee for the older gentleman.
It turns out that the tome I have selected contains a bunch of tired and tiresome advice about how to be more Zen which makes me feel anything but.
In advice for writing a popular newsletter, which I found when scrolling through my phone earlier in the day, Austin Kleon suggests ensuring that you’re writing something other people want to read (fair enough) and that anything you put out should pass what he calls the “so what?” test. I decide not to look at my work too closely.
I put the book aside and reflect on a week in which I bought a vinyl album for the first time in around twenty years.
The joy I felt at opening the gatefold and easing the record out of the inner sleeve adorned with the lyrics to all of the songs was indescribable.
Then I played it, start to finish, no skipping tracks, with patience all too absent most of the time, and felt better for it.
I wouldn’t have found the band concerned if it hadn’t been for the digital world. Just like I would never have discovered the novels of Kate Atkinson, the wonder of “no dig” vegetable gardening, found solutions to my early days sourdough disasters, and be kept in the loop with friends I no longer see but still think about often.
I would probably never have got around to buying a pressure cooker if it hadn’t been for the advice and inspiration from an Instagram account I only found because of George Egg’s Instagram account and his fondness for pimping mundane junk food with miraculous ingredients.
The first time I used the pressure cooker I made a soup which my daughter is staring into in the midst of a row with her boyfriend being conducted through text.
Juxtaposed with the best of the digital world I am watching the worst of it in the guise of young people who might sometimes have forgotten how to stick with something until it is resolved, assuming they were ever shown how to at all.
Later I find her upstairs lying on her bed scrolling through videos on TikTok which tends to be her “go-to” strategy when she isn’t watching episodes of “Friends” on repeat.
It would be easy to criticise this behaviour as a worthless waste of time but comfort is never worthless, digital or not, and I am not the arbiter of effective self-soothing no matter how experienced I am in working with it.
“You can see the bed I’ve dug over from here,” I tell her, peering through her window.
She lifts her head from her phone and looks down into the garden.
“What are you planting?”
“Some bamboo to stop the neighbours looking at me while I’m hanging out the washing, some Verbena “Bonariensis”, and some lavender “Heathcote” at the front.”
“You almost sound as if you know what you’re talking about.”
“I did some research online. It’s amazing what you can learn.”
She smiles, and we compare the number of goes it took each of us to complete “Wordle”.
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