A hand-written pilgrimage: Ode to the shattered laptop screen.
I’m handwriting this week’s post. Through moments of irony, I managed to drop my laptop on a hard slate floor and shatter the screen, making it completely unusable.
The shattering occurred moments before I declared to my family that I couldn’t prioritise spending time with my kids making them a pre-promised cacao smoothie, because I just had to finish downloading my photos off my phone.
I owe some context, because usually I would catch myself out on getting sucked into a tech bubble and be quick to recalibrate to what’s real – my children and their needs first.
We are doing a #DigitalDetoxJuly in the Sovereign Mams Community App. My non-negotiable for this month was to finally finish downloading the 30,000 wedding, honeymoon, pregnancy, birth, baby and first birthday photos off my phone. You know, those kinds of photos you can’t really afford to lose when your kid drops your phone in the bath one day because they just needed a boat. I want them downloaded safely onto multiple hard-drives. And I want them off the Cloud and out of the hands of Big Tech. Ideally printed into Photobooks.
But this process hasn’t been straightforward.
The blasted bloody Cloud (as we would say in Australian) is always mid uploading everything to “save storage”. Hence, it’s been a painful and seemingly impossible feat to do this.
My photos are continuously floating around in Space on the bandwidth highways suffocating our dear planet Earth, rather than being easily downloadable onto a simple hard disk.
I have found the experience of getting my photos off my phone requiring more mental determination than the time I wrote a First Class Masters Thesis, whilst working full time at an NGO, whilst running a volunteer non-profit, whilst sitting on an National NGO Board. Blah. A big, dense time in my life. This has felt tolerably similar.
Tech. Insert yuck face emoji. It’ll come back to that bit.
But first I felt called to reflect on the more immediate experience I’m having: My aching hand. Unpracticed in writing in this way.
It was 16 year ago I sat my first Law School exam, where we were expected to hand write 10-15 pages per hour (over a 3 hour exam) of pure intellectually compelling and comprehensible content. 30-45 pages. Bam.
My brain just doesn’t work this way anymore. My hand doesn’t flow effortlessly in neat cursive, balancing both speed and readability, with little errors, ^ added bits, or crossed out bits.
My writing is in this moment is clunky, messy, lacking coherence.
Perhaps I could have voice recorded this instead and paid a VA to type it up. That’s how the kids do it these days, isn’t it?
I felt called to write, this time.
But the tone is different when I write like this, than when I write on my laptop. And it’s definitely different to when I voice memo, instead of write.
I know I’ll have to type this up eventually.
Perhaps at the library later in the week. I wonder how much I’ll edit? Perhaps I’ll preserve it, exactly as it is. For kicks. Or maybe I’ll sit down and re-write the entire thing from scratch, using this as the foundational draft and seed that it can grow from. I’ll re-write it in words designed for screens, rather than paper.
My hand cannot keep up with my brain. I write much slower than I think.
This is not journaling. This is more similar to my Law School musings. There is content here I want to share and I need it to make sense to someone else. Perhaps even be entertaining. At least, maybe, insightful.
It’s taken me who-knows-how-long to write what feels a simple fleeting thought. All of this written, until now, has simply been a simple fleeting thought, lasting less than a millisecond in my brain. How am I to convey and lucidly articulate the other thousand thoughts I’ve had since? All those cars sitting in my parking lot for later.
That said, I’m slowing reaching a flow state with this as I approach the bottom of my second page. There is more joy. Less crossing of words and self re-organising of ideas. My writing is becoming less readable, more scribble, though.
Okay. Shall we resume to the point of this week’s post?
I shared this (above) because it’s deeply poignant to my experience of destroying my laptop and the ultimate reasons and motivations for my Digital Detox goals… and the irony of my tech use when the big event occurred.
You see, over the last few years, with the rise of Transhumanism / AI, I have become, to a certain degree, alarmed about the future of Tech and the role of it my life, and my children’s future. In more recent times I have made some big decisions about what I plan to do about it.
Which lines I am going to draw in the sand.
In essence, my goal is to unwind from the grips and pervasiveness tech (the oligopoly of Big Tech in particular) has on my life.
Keeping in mind, I was born into a unique point in history. My early childhood, until the crucial age of 7, as I’ve discussed the significance of before in other posts, was basically tech-free. But by about the age of 10, I had already learnt to code. I grew up as part of the first generation of teenagers who preferred communicating behind screens after school (oh hello old friends, MSN and AOL), and I was the first generation of Australians to have a Facebook account, when it was just reserved for Ivy League Universities to stalk crushes and organise parties, not yet available to the wider public.
I rode at the front of the wave of the infiltration of the Web into daily lives.
Plus, I was an innovator, and always enjoyed pioneering the next “new” thing, tech and systems. I liked being first. I like creating new templates.
Tech has been an enormous part of my existence at every point in my evolution, except for, thankfully, the most important - my formative years.
And knowing the impact of this, we have a fairly devout “no-tech/ screens before 7” approach in our own parenting. The evidence is overwhelming on the impact of child development, that no one could ever convince me otherwise.
But don’t worry, dear readers, my children already know how to swipe and zoom with their fingers and all that just by watching the entire world around them do it. They aren’t going to get left behind.
Further on this, I’ve just finished the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, as part of the Sovereign Mamas Community App Book Club. I have begun to understand why I have come to to a point in my life where I feel I need to draw a line (nay, trench!) into the sand when it comes to the role of tech in my life.
My brain has unequivocally been shaped by tech. Especially over the last decade as the world has only sped up in this way. Which is why it was so startling for me to reflect on my current state (and lack) of hand-writing and simultaneous mental processing abilities.
Very human experiences are becoming harder.
Even the way we read – screens vs. paper – it activates different parts of the brain. Can you guess which one enhances focus, knowledge retention, empathy, cognitive processing abilities, creativity and overall IQ? Hint: it’s not screens.
Scrolling – especially the “infinite scroll” (this is a real patented thing by the way) – has changed the World and changed our brains.
But moreover, the hardest pill for me to swallow was when I grasped the concept of Surveillance Capitalism.
Which I’m guessing less than 1% of you reading this will even know what that is, the impact it has and what it means for you. I’ll save that for another post, though. I do not have enough hand-power to touch it today.
Learning about it, though, was the moment I said Right! It’s time for me to become properly informed and to tidy up my tech and data.
To take back control over the aspects of my life that I am constantly leeched, like a bucket riddled with holes. My lifeforce has been pouring out without me even knowing. My freedom, my ability for choice, free will and my energetic sovereignty.
The next book in the Book Club, by the way will be The Loop by Jacob Ward. On exactly this topic – our loss of choice, thanks to tech.
Getting my photos off the web, off my devices, off the Cloud, has bee an important part of that process.
Except…
Now this is where the spiritual irony kicks in…
This process has actually required me to spend MORE time engaging with tech.
Which is the antithesis of my highest vision, my goals, of living a very real, spiritual, sovereign human existence (opposed to a transhuman one).
I have had to spend hours, days, weeks, finding + learning about all the ways I have lost my humanly freedom to tech.. and find the solutions.
Which is essentially pioneering an entirely new template for living in 2022.
It’s no small thing.
We can’t go backwards, we must go forwards.
But even reverting to a first gen iPod, with no Bluetooth (because EMF’s) where you can own music because you purchased it (Limewire is now an NFT platform btw – I already checked – you tech nerds will get that), instead of paying pittance to artists via Spotify (as if I wasn’t considering using Limewire 2 minutes ago, lolz), feels ANCIENT.
Long sentence there. Sorry about that.
But an iPod is not actually ancient. It’s an iPod? Can we take a minute to zoom out here…
I digress. Again.
Today, before I accidentally trashed my MacBook on the floor, I was sucked into a tech vortex determined to find some work around for the issue I was facing downloading the remaining 10,000 photos I had left.
One of the values I try to live by in my life is that I avoid “once this happens, then I will…” sort of talk. The when’s, ifs, one day mantras.
All we have is now.
I don’t like to put conditions on my life. Especially when it comes to my kids.
I don’t want to find myself one day regretting I chose something “more important” (I mean that in an artificial sense of scrolling, not like a survival single-mum-has-to-work-to-pay-bills-sense) than just being with them in these crucial early childhood years.
Especially when the trade off is me staring blankly at a screen for their childhood.
But today, in angst and frustration (with tech), I just wanted it done.
I consciously decided that I needed to finish this photo-downloading thing, so it would be finally over-and-done-with and I could move on. (Psst, my higher self knows I could have moved on energetically even if it wasn’t finished). But you know how it feels sometimes… Wanting to desperately leave something in the past that you compromise your integrity or values to make it so?!
LIES.
I was lying to myself about the importance of this. I knew it. There was no real rush?
Rush is artificial.
And of course I would not be happier because this was complete. I was stuck in a loop. A tech, when this, then that, loop.
The choice I needed to be making instead was what I wanted to create. Not what I didn’t want to have anymore.
Focusing on the actions of a non-digital life. Picking up the phone to call (instead of texting). Old School address books. Pen and paper writing. Living the life I want. Community. Intimacy. Nature. Connection. Going to the bank, rather than Apple paying. Simple thing.
Not perpetuating this whole going-tech-free thing, with more tech.
I was fooling myself in this moment.
I was starting to replace my Phone (which I have stopped using for the most part except for its purposes of calling and texting), with my laptop. I was still seeking the hook. Disguising the addiction with excuses.
I recognise due to the decades of programming I’ve received from using tech, there is going to be some kind of addiction-breaking process in re-wiring my brain as I wean away from a life gripped by tech.
Shattering my laptop was an important step in shattering my soul.
I needed this shake-up.
I needed to stop.
It released another layer in me.
My laptop smashing has not stressed me. It was funny, really. Even in the moment. Instantly I just looked at my husband and shrugged with a knowingness of the irony. It brought about relief and immediate awareness to what I already knew, but didn’t want to see.
My devices are meaningless.
I’ve learnt to deal with data and device grief many times over the decades. When you lose something precious, knowing you’ll never get it back. It’s happened a few times. Stolen camera after my 18th Solo Trip around Aus (of which I have no evidence of except my memories). Smashed laptop (the O.G.) losing all my photos from moving to Brazil when I was 21. Snapped SD card after an organic underwater photoshoot with Eagle Rays with my husband on an island in California.
Life goes on. It’s no less rich.
Truthfully, the less photos I take, the more memories I have. As I stop outsourcing my memory to my devices. Real memories. My brain deciding what’s truly important. Rather than my Camera Roll.
It’s all part of the journey to becoming nothing.
Remembering.
Recalibrating.
Simpler.
Less.
Not-instant.
I’m now on page 9. I’ve been writing for over an hour. A lot slower than the old days. But the muscle memory is coming back, albeit a little flabby.
I’m not sure once my laptop is fixed if I will continue to write by paper after this. In light of all I’ve said in this post, I know I probably should. But I find something therapeutic and deeply joyful about clacking away on a keyboard. Reminiscing of my old travel blog days.
Which by the way, I just dug one up and converted to an e-book before I delete it forever. You’re welcome to sneak a final glance at it: AcrossEveryOcean
I find writing harder. Perhaps because long form hand-writing like this was only reserved for exams. There is a different energy behind it. Perhaps this process will complete the cycle for me. The everythingness to nothingness of my life.
I will sit with it.
The goal is not be a puritan. It is just to be pure and true to my soul. What sparks joy deeply from a place of free will. I’m not anti-tech.
I am going to look forward to the week ahead not being able to use tech. I look forward to practicing patience and being unavailable in different ways.
* * *
The time has come to type this up.
Now, I’m sitting in the Library as I said I would.
Which, by the way, the library is a brilliant place to work. It’s beautiful here. The smell of the free coffee machine beside me, the sun shining in through the window, the deliciousness of all the books around me I’m hungry to read, the old school feeling of pulling all-nighters in the “Med Labs” in my University days, and the general quietness and focus.
I have forgotten the hand-ache I had, and I’m feeling called to try this process out again next week. Hand-write in my stolen moments at home. Sit down and focus at the library.
I’ve also received news this morning my Laptop is irreparable.
Which in some ways is even more ironic, because right now I’m feeling grateful for the Cloud that I’m trying to erase from my life, as I can still access everything on my laptop via the Cloud.
A new laptop is in the mail already. It feels fickle, meaningless.
I like it that it feels meaningless, though.
I don’t want tech to have meaning to me.
I happy to say that I didn’t end up changing much. A few little edits. You got the real hand-written deal here. But I wrote more than I thought I did (I didn’t really know how 10 hand-written pages would convert to typed). And I type slower than I remember too. It’s taken me quite a while to type this up.
I had to leave the library mid-typing, go get my kids from my husband who had to go to work, and come back with them.
This second part has been a little more distracted. Trying to type with my kids “enjoying” the library. Luckily I ran into a friend, who has been admiringly patient and enjoyed a simple afternoon reading books to my children. How’s that for real life and community. My cup feels fuller because of it.
On that note, I don’t have time to edit this for typos or make sure it makes some semblance of sense. I’m getting notifications I only have 15minutes left today on the library computers.
Just here to type it up and hit send.
Because that’s what I’ve promised you. Realness.
And that’s what you’ve got.