Papering Over the Void
Last week I was on vacation, futzing with my goat pasture fence. It was too flipping hot and I continue to drag this forward. Dirt under the nails, sun on the neck, sweat dripping south of the small of my back. Breaks are mandatory. So every lull I’d tell myself: sit down, cool off, crack a can of the fizzy water, that tastes like somebody rinsed a tin can with lemon juice and pennies. I love the stuff.
Invariably I’d pick up whatever screen was closest. Phone, iPad, doesn’t matter. Idle hands do not discriminate.
Nothing needed my attention. Not a damned thing. That’s a problem. A few seconds into sitting on the porch, I’d get bored. YouTube, mostly. Scroll, search, chase something down a rabbit hole, put it down, pick it back up. YouTube sprints kept running long and “taking a break” turned into working on the fence.
The turn-off-notifications, delete-the-apps, take-your-damn-lunch-without-a-screen-lit advice is common knowledge. I’ve peddled this myself. It feels obvious. But in the end, it’s just more buttons to fiddle with. Optimizing to eliminate distraction is a wonderful distraction.
I don’t even get to blame the algorithm here, much as I’d love to. My YouTube’s home feed’s been kneecapped for a while. But. I just go hunting for exactly the flavour of brain candy I want with my own two thumbs. Klaus Kellerman and Tod Maffin. Kurzgesagt and Tale Foundry. Get ‘em in me. I’m like an alky rationalizing the hidden bottle in the cedar chest under the fancy special bedsheets. I just go get it myself, like an idiot with a search bar. Watch one video, and the next-up rail is ready to go. Sitting. Right. There.
Anyway.
Podcasts are usually how I tame my idle mind to avoid YouTube. Mark Manson, Hard Fork, Cal Newport. Whatever. They’re not necessarily some healthier choice, I won’t kid myself. It’s just that once I’ve listened to an episode, I’ve listened to it. I’ve kept actual news podcasts off that list. Wrong kind of candy.
Side note on Manson’s Solved series: go look up the playlist on YouTube or Spotify. Figure out what it’s about yourself rather than trusting my half-assed summary. Each episode runs about four hours, roughly monthly. Good mowing material, if your lawn eats four hours like mine.
Spoiler: Aristotle’s usually right about everything.
None of this is new of course. Years ago, before any of mind-warp algo-feed nonsense, I did the exact same thing by hand. Fire up Wikipedia, search something specific, follow the blue links for the better part of an hour. Never once ended up anywhere I meant to go. History of toilet paper. A three-a.m. detour into the nature of evil. Nobody’s algorithm to blame, just my own dumb curiosity.
Some days I’ll run out of the algo-Alpo feed entirely. Watched everything, searched everything. I got to the end of the Internet. Boom. So I’ll open my Fitbit app and just look at the numbers. Steps. Heart rate. Sleep score from three nights ago. Not tracking anything or learning anything. Just staring at numbers like they’ll magically tell me a different story.
It’s like I can’t stand to be alone in my own head for another thirty seconds, and my own health data is the closest hit available. Maybe that’s why we take our phone to the bathroom: to avoid our inner monologue.
To paper over the void.
It’s getting weirder now. A random thought crosses my mind, some half-formed question with no skin in the game, and a decade ago I’d just Google it and move on with life. Google saw a gateway drug and put AI-assisted answers at the top of the results. Now I catch myself opening a chatbot instead, typing the thought out like it’s a conversation, waiting on a reply to a question I never actually needed answered. I’ll happily burn twenty minutes pretending an half-baked thought deserved a dissertation. Worst side-quest ever.
Mark Manson’s pod was about Change in June. One idea sticks with me. He splits the self into three layers. Traits, mostly locked in by your forties, are not exactly up for negotiation. Adaptations, the habits and coping patterns you built as a kid to manage the uncomfortable, run on autopilot. And behaviours, the actual visible shit you do, are genuinely easy to change on purpose.
Most people try to fix the wrong layer. Throw willpower at a trait and you’re arm-wrestling the weather. Throw insight at an adaptation and you still do the thing anyway, because it was just a coping strategy all along.
That’s my phone. Deleting apps and disabling notifications are behaviour-layer fixes. But it doesn’t work because beeps and dings and red splotches were never the problem. The real juicy mechanism is an adaptation: a coping habit for not wanting to sit alone with my own thoughts. I can’t notification-nuke my way into facing the dark abyss of my brain, no matter how badly the productivity bros want that to be true. Best case, I can make it slightly more inconvenient, which buys me about four seconds.
I don’t have a fix for this. I have a working theory, which is smaller and dumber than it sounds. The phone’s not the villain here any more than a bottle or a slot machine. The object isn’t the point. And knowing that doesn’t change one damn thing. It might slow me down and I might catch myself. That’s not nothing.
This evening I’ll go mow for a couple hours with a podcast in one ear, and somewhere halfway through I’ll probably open YouTube, close it down right away, and then check the Fitbit app. You know, just to watch the numbers change.
