Weekly Blog 8 - Fifty shades of grey

In another attempt to distance myself from my phone, I changed the display to grayscale yesterday as an experiment. The idea is that the phone will look less appetising with no bright colours - and so far it seems that it is working. It’s more effort to identify the relevant icons, and pictures and videos look bland in comparison to what they were before. At the same time I like the aesthetics, everything in my phone being toned down and made otherworldly. It’s very soothing in a way. I’m not seeing red notifications demanding for my attention, and the digital world in grayscale actually makes the real world look more colourful, if it makes any sense.

I will try it for a week and report back if it actually manages to reduce screen time. In all truthfulness I don’t think my screen time is too much out of control, since I had cut out social media a couple of years back and my main vices are Japanese dramas and a tad too many refreshes of The Guardian as my main doom scrolling platform.

My main problem with the phone is how it muddies up my mental clarity, especially during times when it is muddy to begin with and I am trying to get myself out of it. I particularly dislike how it takes over, for instance, when I’ve just arrived home from work, exhausted from the day. There is some time before dinner, and I could do any number of useful things, or simply do nothing at all.

But I take out my phone and I’m just flipping through different apps, trying to get some sort of fulfilment or stimulation, I’m not sure what. Before I know it, I’ve lost the remaining drips of executive function that I had, and sometimes the only way to stop myself from lying around incapacitated by my phone is to completely turn it off. I continue lying there for a few minutes, completely disoriented and berating myself for letting this happen, yet again. Not my best moments.

This grayscale thing feels promising. We’ll see.

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Work was really busy this week (and unfortunately, is only going to get busier), and I self-soothed by finishing James Clear’s Atomic Habits. A semblance of control. Getting some inspiration on how to rebuild some of my broken routines and habits, to make them even better than before. I have a list of things to implement, an example of which is the grayscale phone, but I won’t bore you with more details.

The main goal is not so much to be more productive, but to minimise stress as best as I can. Lose phone, clean more, create an environment where I can get into creative mode with no friction. And most importantly, protect my mental clarity to not fall into any anxiety vortex, and maintain the ability to disengage from overwhelm to be able to rest well.

I’ll also be rereading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, which I finished in Kindle format during my leave. I got a physical copy last week and look forward to going through it again to merge some of the ideas with Atomic Habits (something along the lines of building in habits that reflect the realities of our finite lives and the importance of living well). Then I think I’m done with the self-help genre.

The next pile of books that I have, and am eager to dig into, is a stack of art books that I acquired from a second-hand bookshop in Brussels (and lugged all the way back to KL). I have one on Picasso and one on Klimt, a couple on techniques (one on art materials, and one on drawing hands), and a last one titled “But is it art?” (Which makes me laugh, the seriousness of it!). These will hopefully move me into the mind space of drawing and creating again.

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And so here we are, in July already. The rest of the year looms in front of me like a mirage in the desert, and I need to keep focus to keep going forward. One thing that I’ve been thinking about these days is how brittle and fragile life is, and how one curve ball from the left field can derail all the best laid plans that we have. But what can we do? Just, keep focus, and keep going forward, until the moment when none of what we've planned means anything - then I suppose we can stop.