/deleting the apps for the nth time/
what happens when not in the supersensorium
twitter, instagram and linkedin were shown the door from my phone for the i-cant-even-recollect-how-many-times-ive-done-this time. the friction-less experience of being plunged into the supersensorium from wee movements of the fingers is perhaps the defining activity of our current times, and too much is waxed and waned on the perils (and rarely the merits though they do exist) of this forever and often frequented temptation. it is a tussle i have fought, like most of us, for years.
this isn’t about how i have lost these battles. for often, i have won quite handsomely. i’ve been able to yoink the apps away from the contours of my daily consciousness and then, quite happily and for months at a time, go about life with more presence, with more - ah i have moments in the metro or driving back in the passenger seat from the gym or a break from the daily grind - i do not need to entangle myself with the psychic musings of the schizo borderline collective, no i am happy to sit with myself and my thoughts and steep into the wondrous nuclear energy of Being. Dasein without reels, as some German philosopher said.
i often go back to the apps, with a practical reason masquerading itself - ah i must shoot out a ask like a beacon into my socialsphere. this is fine and good, after all, the apps can be serendipity forcefields, crossing paths with fellow co-journeyers from another time. but then the quicksand occurs - something gives within. i stay. i watch a few reels. i scroll some tweets. i preen my linkedin. and i return. again and again. multiple times a day. the quick breezes through become rutted into unconscious muscle memory pits.
soon, one begins to wonder. what do i do in the hour long cab drive back from the airport? surely there is nothing that interesting in the interior of one’s head. i’m in here all the time - what could i possibly occupy myself with - for a whole hour??
as a child i often played in imaginary worlds for hours and hours. i’d devise elaborate battles between objects in my room, epic battles between the crayons and the markers, duels worthy of legends. once IPL fever hit, the game became cricket matches, with a toy wooden bat, a metal marble, and sheets of paper detailing scintillating tourneys. a child’s attention is perhaps the most fickle, quick to dart and move on to the next thing. yet it can also be the most encompassing - the absorption of late-night bedtime breaks with a gameboy huddled under the bedsheet. in those moments alone in my bedroom, i was content.
alison gopnik talks about attention and growing up as a movement from lantern consciousness to spotlight consciousness. we go from an untrained predictive coder casting our attention to everything around us to the pointed predictor with a spotlight honing in on specifics. yet, what happens when the spotlight is replaced with a dim glow?
to exist without the apps polluting one’s mindspace is perhaps one of the most effective ways to go super saiyan. but - this is too utilitarian - let us not merely engage in the productisation of the self. no, to refuse to allow the apps to infiltrate your psyche, is to allow oneself to truly go deep, to dig into the recesses of the core of one’s most intimate yet most embodied purpose, the fullest representation of the variegated facets of one’s multihued self, the richness of one’s most mundane relationships - to be a son, to be a brother, to be a partner, to be a friend, to be a leader - to enable the mud and dog licks to truly be felt in qualia that knows no prediction - this is what can be possible and is simple reality, if only one stops before picking up a 200 odd grams of shiny metal and glass.
ive deleted the apps and i dont want them back for a while.
So resonantly beautiful <3