What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Doom scroll?
When I was in my mid-twenties, I spent a lot of time head-down in the notes section of my phone. Despite wanting to be someone who hand wrote things in journals, the practicality and ease of typing mostly won out – save for a few half-heartedly started Moleskines that I can, now, barely decipher.
This morning, I started going through the old notes in my phone in an attempt to reorganize. What I found nearly broke my heart. It was filled with lists of all the things I had wanted to do – films I wanted to see, classic books I wanted to read, hobbies I wanted to try, languages I wanted to learn, places I wanted to travel. There were little snippets of my writing that I was actually impressed with – a level of prose that I haven’t been able to replicate since. There were notes for a project that I had wanted to take on during my years living in New York. I called it “Decades,” and I had mapped out books, films, and documentaries from each decade in New York. I had hoped to immerse myself fully in each decade so I could immerse myself fully in the city that I felt so insanely lucky to be living in.
Is it shame or sadness that I feel about abandoning nearly all of these dreams? I really try hard not to engage in regret, but as I sit here, half a decade later, it’s hard to deny how ashamed I am that instead of finally cracking open Shakespeare, signing up for that French course, or watching The Godfather (I know, I know), I spent hours and hours scrolling on Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, or other apps that make up the black hole that is my phone.
I don’t have the heart to do the math – to look through my “average time spent” totals on my iPhone and try to estimate how much time I wasted. It’s especially heartbreaking to think of those precious years I spent in the city – before I started a family, when time felt infinite. Because time was infinite, of course. Just like when you’re in your early twenties and your body feels invincible – when you’re in your mid-twenties, time hasn’t started breathing down your neck yet .
As I was looking back on this time I wondered, how did I go so quickly from conjuring up these lists and goals, from inventing a personal project and mapping out how to achieve it, to abandoning it all? My relationship with technology wasn’t exactly healthy before I moved to NYC. It did seem, though, that there was a shift. Did something change with how I consumed social media in those years?
I did a bit of research and, lo and behold, in 2016, the year that I turned 26 and moved to New York, Instagram changed their feed from a chronological feed to an algorithmic feed. An algorithmic feed designed to suck the user in. Then, in 2018, the year I turned 28, Instagram began sharing accounts you don’t follow in your feed, keeping you in the app longer and longer.
I had a basic grasp of how the algorithm and other tech features are designed to suck you in, but Johann Hari, in Stolen Focus, expanded my knowledge:
“When Facebook (and all the others) decide what you see in your news feed, there are many thousands of things they could show you. So they have written a piece of code to automatically decide what you will see. There are all sorts of algorithms they could use – ways they could decide what you should see, and the order in which you should see them…The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen. That’s it. Remember: the more time you look, the more money they make. So the algorithm is always weighted toward figuring out what will keep you looking, and pumping more and more of that onto your screen to keep you from putting down your phone.”
He continues…
“These sites get to know what makes you tick, in very specific ways – they learn what you like to look at, what excites you, what angers you, what enrages you. They learn your personal triggers – what specifically, will distract you. This means that they can drill into your attention. Whenever you are tempted to put your phone down, the site keeps drip-feeding you the kind of material that it has learned from your past behavior, keeps you scrolling.”
In another part of the book, Johann quotes Tristan Harris, an American technology ethicist from his 2019 Senate testimony on the topic Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms. Tristan says: “You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.”
When I think back to my time in the city, I do remember there was one place that I read and wrote the most: the subway train – a place where there is no cell service, where tech companies can’t reach you.
My relationship with my phone, with social media, has always been a bit uneasy. My career before kids was demanding. I had one of those jobs where you get emails as early as 6 am and as late as midnight, and you are expected to reply with haste. One where calculating your hours worked divided into your salary makes you realize that you get paid less than minimum wage, disguised as a lucrative salary. I hated that I could be reached anywhere and everywhere. Work emergency, fire drill, all hands on deck, “I need this asap”, “Can you turn this around tonight? :)”, “Just one more quick revision”. I frequently day dreamed of a future where I could trade my iPhone in for an old-school flip phone. I was envious of workers from older generations who genuinely could not be reached after hours, who left the office, their desktop computer, their landline phone, their overbearing boss – all of it – at 5 PM.
And yet, this job fueled me. I thrived in the chaos. I did reply to every after-hours email immediately. I relished in squashing the fire drills, in being there reliably for my clients when they needed me. I felt pride because I was good at it. Even though it was eating me alive.
After my second baby was born, in my early 30’s, I left my career to focus on my kids. In the months leading up to my son’s birth, I felt giddy – like I was walking towards the light at the end of the tunnel. I was excited about his arrival, of course, but I was thrilled to be retiring. This was my chance! Goodbye email app. Adios iPhone addiction. Maybe I can finally get that flip phone. The only problem is Spotify. Well, and Maps. And what if I need to Google something? Check my bank balance? And what am I going to do during all the late night feeds and never ending contact naps? Just daydream?
Somehow, then, my relationship with my phone worsened. If the algorithm change of 2016 ramped up my addiction and the addition of new accounts to my feed in 2018 fueled it, then having nothing to do on my phone but scroll, in 2021, brought me to my knees. I would open Instagram and within five minutes think “why am I here?” only to get stuck there for an hour. I downloaded Libby and read endless books (65 that first year at home with my kids), yet still, my time spent mindlessly scrolling on social media was staggering. Home alone with two tiny humans, my loneliness grew, but my source to the adult world – my phone – only added to my anxiety and depression.
I can’t remember where I first read the Mary Oliver poem that triggered a small shift in my mindset. I’ll quote the whole poem for you.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?- Mary Oliver
Those last two lines are so powerful to me – the reminder of our fleeting lives is so visceral. I despise the version of myself who wastes so much of this precious life engaging in an act so mind-numbing, an act that adds minuscule value.
And here is where there is hope. There is still time for me. I’m not dead yet. I can retrain my brain. If all goes well, I still have decades left to read Shakespeare, to watch all the Godfathers, maybe to turn some of that early writing into something I’m proud of. I want to fill my one, wild and precious life with books and films and art and travel and people – people in real life, not in a box on my phone.
The hope for that life fuels me on this journey.
So what will you do with this one wild and precious life?