My relationship with technology

I struggle in my relationship with technology. One of my biggest issues in this relationship is one of mindless overuse: I find myself gravitating towards my devices when I wake up, before bed, and during the hours between. And even though I know that this way of using my technology is unhealthy, I find the allure hard to avoid. This somehow leads to a situation where I simultaneously feel like I have too much to do and also have a certain emptiness with how I’ve filled my day. In the past I’ve tried a lot of different things. I’m not sure many have worked. This weekend I figured I’d start a series of experiments to see if I can take control of this relationship. And I figured I’d also do a bit of a retrospective on what I’ve tried in the past—what has worked, and what hasn’t. This post outlines these problems, what I’ve tried, and current experiments I’m running.

On Friday I sat down and physically—on paper—wrote out the problems I’ve been thinking about lately. These were (1) that I use the internet unnecessarily first thing when I wake up in the morning, (2) that I mindlessly use my tablet to kill time, (3) that I mindlessly use my tablet in bed, and (4) that there’s certain sites I gravitate towards—Reddit and Youtube—that don’t really give me much in return.

My first opportunity to experiment was Friday evening. I’d usually bring my tablet with me to bed and watch videos and browse reddit without much intentionality. I decided to simply not bring my tablet with me to bed. While ideally I’d read or do something else meaningful in place of tablet scrolling, I allowed myself to bring my Switch instead. One could certainly argue that playing video games in bed is not that much of an improvement, but I believe it’s still a much more intentional and stimulating use of time.

Waking up the the next morning I was happy with how the bedroom experiment went. Before bed I didn’t have a lot of the aimless anxieties of the world pop up (politics, general online anger) that disrupted my pre-sleep routine. Gaming—at least within the relatively chill games that I play—was sufficiently stimulating while also not being (for me at least) an addicting treadmill. I decided that I should do this again later that night and continue this part of the experiment. While this part of the experiment went well, the morning part of the experiment didn’t start as smoothly.

Part of my job as the first to wake up in the morning is to take the dog on a walk. As the first thing I do each morning, it’s actually a really great start to the day. I don’t bother to look at my phone or bring it with me on these walks so it’s a gentle introduction to the day. After the walk, however, Pudding always wants to play. And it’s hard to avoid wanting to cohabitate that space with the internet while I wait for him to fetch his toy. I found myself reverting to these bad habits and browsing the web while intermittently throwing his toy. I knew I was breaking my experiment here and cut myself off relatively quickly (10-15 minutes or so). I’ll try again tomorrow. I think I’ll have to figure out what exactly I should replace this mindless time with. Alternatively, how do I train my brain that it’s okay not to fill that space with something else?

The rest of Saturday was actually super uneventful from a technology perspective and it was easy to avoid too much mindless browsing. I still did this some, but it was managed and on my stationary computer in my office. I filled my day with so many non-internet things that it was easy not to be connected and to waste time on the web. In the morning I did lawn work and in the second half of the day we went out to a nice dinner and then had a game night with friends. At no point during that did I feel the need to use devices. The only downside here was that after a late night of games I needed something to transition myself to bed. It felt natural to revert back to browsing the web, and I did for a few minutes. My alternative that I had set the prior day would have felt like a continuation of the game night. Again this reminds me that I need options for how I can spend my time, not just one thing.

The second morning of this experiment was similar to the first. I think that it’s hard when I’m tired and still waking up to have the needed self control. I’ll need to give this particular challenging part of my day a bit of thought. The rest of Sunday went as smoothly as Saturday did. Filling my day with meaningful activities made it easy to not care what was going on in the internet.

Overall I’d describe the weekend as a partial success. Even with some areas where I still find it hard to control my internet usage, I still greatly enjoyed the intentionality and experimental nature of this weekend. The retrospective nature of the weekend in writing this post as I went was also great and I think could help me to continue to brainstorm and work through this. If I had to sum up a couple of learnings from this weekend I think I’d condense it to two: (1) Without having something to replace my time with, I’ll fall back to the easy thing to do and browse the web and (2) that it will require some effort to be comfortable not doing things. I’ll definitely continue trying not to bring the internet to my bedroom and will see if I can incrementally change my relationship with the internet with future experiments. And hopefully I’ll be back with another post like this soon.