My iPhone is a barrier to my creativity.
I don’t blame the phone or the world of social media it connects me to. I blame myself. Our smart phones are tools after all. They began as digital Swiss Army knives. Phones that could play music and access email seemed so useful. Today of course, they’re more than that. They’ve become our personal assistants and the narrators of our lives, broadcasting our movements and thoughts to the world.
There are a lot of reasons why phone and computer overuse is a problem. Digital overload can be bad for our well-being and our relationships. In Thrive, Arianna Huffington devotes a chapter to this topic. In the current issue of Outside, writer David Roberts describes the negative effects that digital overload had on his own life. He estimated that between his phone, computer, and TV, he spent 12 hours a day staring at screens. This eventually led him to the drastic decision to “unplug” for an entire year. (This was a person who depended on the internet for his job. Before he unplugged, he tweeted an average of 50 times per day.) Then of course, there’s this video that went viral last year that further underscores our collective digital addiction.
In my own experience, my digital dependence also has negative effects on my creativity. The online world can consume a lot of my time and brainpower when I let it. As I wrote earlier, my phone fills the pauses in my life. It distracts me from the present. It leads me down unexpected rabbit trails. Instead of doing something creative, I often stare at my phone or computer, scrolling through superfluous information that serves no immediate purpose in my life.
A lot of people have suggestions for how to cut back on our digital dependency but I have yet to hear someone make this point: Simply unplugging isn’t the answer. Untangling also has to be a part of the process. Because as technology has advanced, my phone has taken on more and more tasks in my life. One of the primary reasons “unplugging” is hard is that my phone does so many things for me. It’s my alarm clock, metereologist, recipe box, navigator, grocery list, budget tracker. Some of these functions are incredibly helpful. I’d much rather use a phone app when planning a road trip than calculate distances on a paper map. But the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve found there are simple tasks I can take away from my phone that may restore balance to this area of my life.
In the next couple of months, I’m going to make some small but significant changes to my digital habits. I’m trying them one by one and will write about them here. Some of my changes may sound extreme, as if I’m becoming a digital monastic. But at this point, that doesn’t sound so bad. Unplugging more frequently is the goal. But untangling makes unplugging easier.
