On Luddism.

 I've been thinking a lot lately about the appeal of living a life that's less dependent on my phone. I have my phone set up to go into do not disturb mode for all of Saturday each week, and while I do think it has somewhat curbed my desire to waste hours of my free day scrolling mindlessly, it's still not as effective as I'd like it to be. Yesterday I tried turning my phone off for the day, but I didn't last that long because I ended up wanting to listen to my audiobook. While I had my phone off though, I worked on some hand sewing and facetimed some friends. When I mentioned to them that I'd turned my phone off for the day one was like "But you facetimed us!" Which is true, though I started the call from my laptop (which is actually a much easier way to facetime, in my opinion, because you the screen/camera holds itself up and you're free to do whatever you want with your hands and not worry about your phone tipping over mid-conversation). 

Anyway, it occurred to me after the fact that when I say I want to use my phone less I'm not at all talking about cutting back on actual communication (whether it be facetime, voice calls, or just text messages) with my friends and family. It's the mindless suck of scrolling aimlessly, of opening the same few apps for a dopamine hit of more-new-fresh information every ten minutes. And I definitely do that. I'm pretty sure we all do that. It's truly baffling how fixated we've become, as an entire culture, with checking into our tiny little boxes of virtual reality. And sure, technology makes it way easier to plan face-to-face time with real people. But you have to actually make the effort to use it to that end. 

When I say I want to use my phone less, the desire has nothing to do with the communication functions of telephones. What I actually mean is that I want to spend less time looking at my pocket computer. I remember when I was probably five or six years old my dad told my sister and I that by the time we were in college they'd have computers you could hold in your hand. We thought it was hilarious and crazy sounding and I remember feeling like that sounded like some insanely distant future technology. Which, admittedly, to a five year old college is about twelve years away and that is unimaginably far in the future. But lo and behold, iPhones came out when I was still in high school, so we did in fact have handheld computers when I was in college.

Some days I want to get a flip phone. So much of what I want access to with a smartphone can be accessed through a laptop which, at least for me, is a fundamentally less addictive piece of technology. Can I still get sucked into hours of scrolling online on my laptop? Absolutely yes. But I'm less likely to do it with regularity because it's not riding in my back pocket with me at all times. I get lost in laptop rabbit holes once a week (or two or even three) instead of multiple times per day. But then I think about how the things I do use my iPhone for are really really helpful: I use google maps multiple times every day; I listen to hundreds of audiobooks each year for free on the Libby app; I use my phone to play the sound of crashing waves for 45 minutes while I fall asleep each night and use it as an alarm each morning; I can do all my banking from an app and need only my fingerprint to get into it, which eliminates the need to memorize a zillion different passwords. 

A smartphone is incredibly useful. I just wish I were better at not squandering time using it for things I don't care at all about. I did a decent job staying off my phone this weekend. Instead, I spent a significant amount of time sewing different projects (hand sewed most of a tote bag that I bought supplies for while in Maine over Christmas and finally put a patch onto my torn duvet cover) and even spent three and a half hours today hanging out with my friend while I sewed up a kaftan for her out of a lovely fabric I found recently. It felt really good to start and finish an entire project in an afternoon, and it also felt really lovely to chat with her about life and what's been going on with both of us lately. I also read a significant amount of the library book I have checked out right now and went for a walk in the sunshine both days. It feels good to spend my weekend doing something refreshing, something that adds value to my quality of life. I think it's fine to occasionally waste many hours scrolling through endless feeds but I don't want it to be a defining benchmark of my life. I don't think any of us do. Yet we all too often collectively fritter away our precious time. 

My screen time reports say that I usually spend between 4 and 5 hours a day on my phone. That's...a lot. It's more than I want. I think that casual usage adds up over time so I would be totally fine with two hours a day. But it turns out that you can spend two hours a day checking the time and weather and playing the daily NYT games and answering actually important texts that have to do with work and checking the route for the stop you need to make on the way home from work and all sorts of other little mindless and necessary tasks. All the things that we actually need (ish...does anyone NEED a smartphone?) our phones for. So what am I doing on there for the extra two to three hours each day? Apparently a lot of Google maps, actually, if my screen time report is to be believed. But also a lot of other random garbage.

I passed this sidewalk art on my walk yesterday. 

It's clearly a relic from the early pandemic days, but it feels still relevant in some ways. There are so many people that I can't wait to hug again. My family, my far away friends. It's not a bad sentiment for regular life, but it was such a fervent desire back when it seemed such a remote possibility. I thought about how nobody is doing street art to express how badly they want to hug the general public anymore. How specific to that one global cultural moment that piece of graffiti was. How it feels a little bit like a time capsule that expressed the longing of the entire planet. Then I thought about the cultural things that feel normal and universal right now and someday might feel extremely dated and 2020s specific. I really hope using our phones all the time is one of the things that falls to the wayside. I'm sure some folks will continue to use them constantly forever, but I hope there is a widespread shift from thinking of our phones as an extension of our bodies (I am absolutely speaking of myself here) to thinking of them as a tool for occasional use to make it easier to live our lives in the here and now. Maybe someday. 

On Warmth.

I've spent a lot of time over the past week thinking about being warm. Mostly because it has been Texas cold for the past couple weeks, by which I mean it's dropped below freezing most nights and I've been wearing lots of layers for highs in the 40s. But some of the days had highs below freezing, too, which is objectively quite cold. So I spent a lot of time harrumphing about that and how I left the North to escape winter so I don't know what the hell Texas is trying to do. Then again, I'll think to myself, a week or two of winter is exactly what I'm looking for- particularly when the "cold" weather is still in the 40s most days. So while I don't enjoy feeling cold, it is overall fairly acceptable to me. 

There was even one freak day this week that was almost 80 degrees and I ate my lunch outside in a tank top and took the kids to a park to run around after school. I am a big fan of tank top weather in January. And then the next day it dropped back down, and while the coming week should be warmer, it's also supposed to be extremely rainy. So. You win some you lose some, I guess. 

But today I was out in pretty cold weather and drizzle to participate in a rally/march in support of Palestine and Yemen. It was a bit chaotic and also miserable weather to be out in and I kept thinking to myself that I was absolutely allowed to bail on the march and head back to my car and my warm, dry house. And each time I thought this, I immediately thought of the people living in these places who don't have homes any more because they've been bombed out. Who don't have families to commiserate with, who don't have any more of their winter clothes, who have lost everything. And a few hours of discomfort while warmth and safety await me afterwards seem like the least I can sacrifice. 

I've never had a problem with paying taxes, because to me taxes feel like a subscription fee for participating in society and help ensure that the people who need help are helped. I realize that taxes fund many more things than just aide, but it's how I like to frame it for myself so that I feel good about them. These days, however, the knowledge that my tax money is currently funding bombs and death weigh really heavily on me. I don't want to be complicit in this brutality. I don't want this blood on my hands. And my heart breaks for the people who are living fragmented lives right now at the hands of my government's corruption. 

As I thought about staying warm, I remembered this piece Neil Gaiman wrote based on crowdsourced information about what being warm means to people. He did it as part of fundraising to help Syrian refugees a few years ago, and it is equally powerful in light of Palestine and Yemen today. (Incidentally, one of the most powerful books I read in 2023 was As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh, which is about a young woman living through the recent terror in Syria, working at the hospital in her city as a pharmacist because even though she only finished one year of pharmacist school she was the most qualified person left, and grappling with whether to flee on a refugee boat or stay and keep helping people there. Absolutely heartbreaking and horrific and easily the book I would point to if anyone wanted to get an idea of what the people of Gaza are going through right now, when every single one of their hospitals have been bombed.) 

I have little new to add about this genocide.  But I will say again that I find it repugnant and am consistently disappointed by how little is changing or improving as the atrocities pile up in the middle east. I hope that wherever you're reading this, you're warm and know where your next meal is coming from. And I hope that someday soon the people left in Palestine will have this security too.

What Counts As Genocide?

 I regularly attend a lot of monthly book clubs. Like, six (or more) each month. It might actually be too many, but it's fun to see all the different groups of people, so I will likely stick with them all for a while. I attended one on Wednesday where we read "The Lost Year" by Katherine Marsh. The book is a middle grade story that follows three narrators; a boy living through quarantine in 2020 with his mother and great-grandmother, who is 100 years old and was a Ukrainian refugee during the Holodomor. In case you didn't know (as I didn't), the Holodomor was the great Ukrainian famine in 1932-33, which was orchestrated by the USSR government and killed millions of people in Ukraine. The other two narrators in the book are cousins living in Brooklyn, NY and Kyiv, Ukraine during the timeframe of the Holodomor, one of whom is the grandmother in the present-time narration. 

This book was heartbreaking, mostly because of its depiction of a human-made famine. For the most part, Ukrainians would have had enough food for their own survival, but the government wasn't allowing them to keep enough to survive. It calls to mind the more widely known Irish potato famine, where the British forced the Irish to give up what little food survived the potato blight to the point that they Irish weren't able to subsist on the food they had left. At one point in the book, a child gives a description of soldiers coming to demand food from her mother, insisting that they must have kept some hidden for themselves because they hadn't met their quota of contributions, all the while the mother and three children were clearly succumbing to starvation. It was brutal to read and I kept thinking, "Who could do this?!? Who could look at people so clearly malnourished and insist they were being selfish and withholding food meant for others??" 

But the reality is that stories like this are still happening. Look at the forced starvation happening in Gaza right now. Those people have no idea when food or supplies or relief will arrive because it's being withheld from them. This is the most immediate and obvious example in the current world, but another example I thought of while reading was a bit closer to home. 

Right now in Austin, the weather forecast says the temperatures will barely go above freezing for the next week. That's not crazy cold for other places, but it's pretty damn cold for here. Houses here weren't built for weather like this. Almost nobody has a basement and all of the plumbing is directly under the house and still above-ground. When the weather gets close to freezing we're supposed to leave all our faucets dripping to (hopefully) avoid frozen and burst pipes. But these inconveniences are nothing to what the unhoused population in the city faces. Just days ago homeless encampments were being swept out and trashed. What little these people have been able to accumulate for themselves is totally gone in mere hours. What will these folks do when the temperature is deathly cold? There are some resources available, like warming shelters, and the library is an often-used resource for people without homes- but the library will be closed today and tomorrow in observance of MLK day. So that option is unavailable to them during this critically cold time. It's scary.

I brought up homelessness as an example of socially acceptable genocide in our society, and I think it blew the mind of the librarian who runs that book club. Now, the technical definition of genocide according to the Oxford English Dictionary is "the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group." Perhaps disregard for people experiencing homelessness doesn't completely fit that definition, but it comes pretty close. Too close for comfort, in my opinion. I don't know how many panhandlers I drive pass each day, but I rarely give out money to them and I know I'm not alone in that. As "successful" members of society, we view these people as a blight, as an inconvenience, as dangerous, as any number of things but most especially as lesser than. These people, who exist on the fringes of society, are barely seen as human. We have collectively decided to overlook them in our daily routines and it often comes at the price of their lives. We look the other way when winter weather comes and kills these people. Or when they die of heat exhaustion in 115° temperatures in the summer. 

I'm not saying that it is each individual's burden to care for every person in need they see, but I do think it's important to address how, on a systemic level, we have deemed certain members of the population sub-human and refuse to give them access to life-saving resources. Because really, in America (or anywhere in the world) if people are dying because of cold or hunger it is because a choice has been made not to help them. There is absolutely no reason for those things to ever cause deaths here, let alone with regularity, and yet people will die in Austin in the next week because they couldn't find somewhere to be safe and warm to ride out the cold snap. People die every day because of preventable hunger. People keep dying in Gaza under Israeli occupation and we, as US citizens, are culpable. I'm not sure how we got to a point where we justify preventable death and even murder. I'm not sure why such cognitive dissonance exists around the value of human life. 

But what I do know is that some day, hopefully not too long in the future, it will be glaringly obvious that what's happening in Palestine right now is genocide. That what's happening there is inherently wrong and evil. And I suspect that someday within my own lifetime, young people who have to learn about this genocide through history lessons will wonder how people could possibly have been so callous about human pain and suffering and we'll have to chose to either face the reality of our decisions or double down on the cognitive dissonance (and based on American history, I wouldn't be shocked if we chose the latter). I know that when we consider how we might have behaved if witnessing the Holocaust or the American Civil Rights movement or any other well documented, state-sanctioned violence, we need only consider how we're reacting right now to human rights atrocities happening in Palestine. 

A Thought Experiment.

 Last year I stayed mostly off of Instagram. Instagram is still an annoyingly necessary source of information for meetups, gatherings, and events I want to go to, so I took the app off my phone and relegated my usage mostly to the occasions I was at my computer (though as the year wound down I found myself increasingly invested in checking up on different people and re-downloaded it for larger chunks of time). This year I want to explore my relationship with that app in a different way, so I'm taking a new approach; one photo from the week posted each Sunday for the entire year, and a coinciding blog post for those who check in here. (So, Nate Johnson. HI NATE! But mostly just for myself and for posterity.) 

The major inspiration for this came from the instagram user @blakeoftoday, whom I discovered only a few weeks ago and who posts video recaps of "this week in fatherhood" and gives a beautifully composed synopsis of some of the highs (or lows) of his week. It is weirdly compelling, partly, I suspect, because he's invested in nice sound equipment and has a good voice for voiceovers, but also because he is insightful. He's reflecting each week on small moments of joy or growth or struggle that make up the mundane existence of everyday and which we so seldom spend time considering while trudging through our own daily routines. I wanted to set aside time for myself to reflect. To think each week about what has happened, how time has moved forward, ways that I feel I am changing or stagnating. Anything, really. So we'll see how this goes, I guess. 

This week, something I've been thinking a lot about is setting goals and intentions. Clearly I'm not alone in this. I think probably more people than not have at least some idea of habits or routines they decide they want to alter and use the new year as a catalyst for starting fresh. That being said, one of my favorite takes on New Year's Resolutions this year was a video of a man explaining that for most of history the "year" started in the spring, and that the gregorian calendar we use moved it to January as part of a way for the church to control people (I've forgotten the specific reasoning there, but honestly the guy who made the video readily admitted that he had heard this and hadn't bothered fact-checking it because regardless of whether it IS true, it feels true and that it enough for him. I feel the same way). In nature, winter is a time of hibernation. Animals are supposed to slow down, sleep more, conserve energy. Really, just survive. Yet the holiday season pushes us to produce, consume, celebrate, socialize! More, faster, better, happier! Then immediately, with the changing of the year, we force ourselves to try to make sweeping lifestyle changes. Become new people! It makes more natural sense to do this in the spring, in the time of new growth. 

And yet. I like the demarcation of the new year as a starting place. I like the introspection of one year coming to a close and a new year being full of possibility. Of course this could happen at any time of year! But culturally, our new year starts on January first. So I still make goals. Though I usually wait until January first to even start thinking about my goals for the year, and then a few weeks in (when most folks have abandoned their resolutions) I finalize a list for myself. 

Yesterday I stumbled upon the account of a hand-dyed yarn company. The yarn was so beautiful! It made me want to buy yarn! And then I noticed that the account had all these photos of beautiful yarns displayed, and very few photos of anything knit out of these yarns. Which, granted, is probably not their goal as a business, but it made me stop and think. I've often walked into a yarn store and just adored looking at all of the beautiful options available for purchase. In college I spent unknowable amounts of money on yarn (if I had to guess, probably at least a thousand dollars over the four years) that I bought without real plans of what I'd use it for; I just saw lovely yarn and wanted to own it. 

The same is true when I walk into fabric stores. Over the past couple years I've started exploring quilting as a creative endeavor and while I really like it and plan to continue, I've already accumulated an amount of fabric that it would take me years to make quilts out of. I actually prefer the aesthetic of quilts made with solid color fabrics, but when I walk into a fabric store I adore looking at all of the cute and beautiful and charming and clever prints and I want to buy them alllllll! (I *don't* buy them all, but I definitely still buy more than I have a real plan for.) I also get this feeling in bookstores; despite owning over one hundred books that I haven't even read yet, if I walk into a bookstore I will almost certainly walk out with at least one new book. I love walking into bookstores even on the rare occasions when I don't buy a new book- even just the feeling of walking into one is thrilling.

As I thought about all of this, I realized that part of the allure in all these stores that sell the individual pieces of my hobbies is the potential. Definitely part of what I love is the doing, the making, the process of creating something or the escape and journey of reading something. But there is a different, very real and separate, joy to walking into a place that holds all the potential for that enjoyment. Walking into a yarn/fabric/book store is stepping into a realm of possibility where there aren't any obligations. It's pure opportunity.  

And that's how I feel about the new year. There's magic in the possibility. A new year is not yet marred by any goals that didn't get accomplished in the year before; it's unadulterated potential for myself and the world around me. 

I've often wished I could own a bookstore. Or a bakery. Or any of these businesses that capture the feeling of bliss I get when walking into one. But then I remember that owning a business is a whole ordeal and not one that I'm particularly interested in. So, at least for now, I will save my excitement for stepping into the many businesses that I patronize to support my hobbies. And for the commencement of each new year, even if the date is arbitrary and misaligned with the natural seasonal time for new growth.