Get Off Your Phone February

Day 1: Find your footing, and explaining how this newsletter will assist you this (short) month

A simple delight is the beginning of anything being on a weekend day, and I’m not so fussy as to require it to only be Sunday. Saturday—TWO whole slow mornings to journal or clean up or settle in—in some ways is my preference of starting, and it is with both simple and great delight that I welcome you to year two of Get Off Your Phone February (and for the explicitly inclined, GTFO Your Phone February).

Before you save this or spin it away as another digital detox program, HOLD on. I, your kind but transparent dictator (you are in MY digital home right now, including the domain—I officially own it!) have failed my own set of digital minimalism detoxes mindfulness 75 hard of challenges. While I applaud those more steely than myself, this month will not be a rigid challenge, mostly as I myself would fail it. Instead, this will be a month long exploration, day by day, into our relationships our screens, media, avoidance habits, and self-compassion.

As always, I am interested in holding two truths at once, or two conflicting beauties: We are good, innately AND we have the capacity to grow or see things about our lives or selves that need to change. BOTH, all the time. Our brains do not like us holding paradoxes, as it requires further thought and nuance than a one time, set rule. But a practice of building nuance and the ability to tolerate complexity seems exactly like what we need right now.

The Map Ahead of Us: What You Need to Know

Any time someone offers you advice or a challenge, I believe it’s best practice to offer you as much transparency into it as possible. It’s best when we have choice-ful-ness in our lives, and that includes in the tone and format of the content we imbibe, even as a non-clinical, lifestyle newsletter (which you’re in right now).

For this challenge, I want your frame to be that of going on a nice, easy hike. We have a map (overall values of this project, day to day prompts, tracking), we have our internal compasses to guide us each in case the map doesn’t predict something, and we are doing this together. Along the way, if we want to stop and enjoy the view, explore a second path, or squat down to look at an interesting plant or bug, we will. We can have a place we are going AND we can enjoy and notice things along the way.

For this project, you can expect there to be 28 prompts over the coming month. Some emails will have only one prompt which I want you to stay on longer, or which I think looking at some research may be helpful. Other ones may have a couple prompts. There will be around 3-4 letters from me to you all each week, and we also will be chatting about this process in our Substack Chat (which is free, and open to all, and an excellent and inspiring source of accountability). On the paid end, as subscribers know, I offer 50% of my writing for free, entirely, after writing on TikTok for the last 3 years for free. Paid articles will have the first paragraph or so above the paywall, but I will not cause a lurch in the middle of an article by suddenly having it become paid. Paid subscribers receive all writing, and I’d love if you consider becoming paid to support my continued ability to have sustained attention for creating this community online.

My hope for all of us in this project is related to my love of winter, and my deepening sense that winter can be a season of interior vitality, or winter as a season of imagination. I often think of this as the term “winter mysticism”, and this is informed by many things but especially by my ongoing love of mythology and learning more and more about where my roots are from—Scotland and Ireland. If we take this last month of winter and view it as a time to deepen, there is real coherence in having space to do so by reducing the amount of attention social media takes from us.

In terms of screen use, I often find that what I most want to change is the almost compulsory nature of use. You know the feeling—it’s dark out at 5 pm, you’re tired from work, you need to do your dishes and eat leftovers you’re not enthused by, and you’ve been scrolling for an hour. You are no longer seeing anything interesting, but the feeling that enters your body when you think about getting up to clean or make dinner or text that friend back about going to the bookstore in an hour feels a whole lot like a small dose of dread. You are not enjoying the consumption any more, but the inertia you’d need to break to stop it also feels unpleasant. In a word, you are stuck.

For me, the point of this month is to reduce how often that happens in my life. I actually have no desire to someday root out all forms of social internet, though I am CLEARLY biased given that this has become a part time job for me. Mainly, I want to feel like the internet is the creative, informational, logistical, connective tool it was once meant to be. I do not want to continued to be mined by the tech oligarchs for attention. I don’t want to contribute to the fast fashion, fast food, fast-everything-at-all-costs-yes-even-the-life-of-our-planet-and-communities way of being. It’s against my personal values, and it’s frankly not very exciting, sexy, or even fun anymore.

We can change this, and still look at memes for 20 minutes a day. I have to believe this is possible, though certainly the technology gets better and better at fusing itself to us, and confusing us in our desires for consumption of humanity rather than participation in humanity. What I’ve come to now for two years in a row is the belief that I must at least try to continue to keep the relationship with screens in better balance. This, itself, is a practice of paying attention to our daily lives.

Finally, Day 1’s Prompt: Find Your Footing

Let’s begin slowly, as always. Today, I want you to simply notice where you are. Spend ten minutes today noticing what app you automatically go to when you sit to hang out on the couch. Notice how long you stay on it, but lightly. You are collecting data to figure out where you are, and where you’d like to go this month. Notice, today, how you feel after a session on your social media or media consumption place of choice. Rested? Relaxed? Inspired? Tired? Anxious? Numbed? Guilty? Again, I order you to do this as much as possible with curiosity instead of judgment towards yourself. We are doing an experiment, not a self-critique lashing. Shame will get us almost nowhere with this.

Resist the urge to do more than look around and see what we got. Resist the urge to make a sudden rigid set of rules to live by. Rules don’t work when they are not informed by your life and experience. That doesn’t mean we won’t work guidelines into this in coming days, but the sudden transformation urge is part of fast culture as well. We have time. Use just a little bit of it, kindly, today.

Take care, and I’ll see you in the chat and in your inbox tomorrow.

xx,

Margaret of Bad Art Every Day