: The phone as creativity sink
I have been on a bunch of long flights lately, and each time went in with the resolution that I would get some good thinking and writing done in the air. My claim to fame among corporate travelers (the lamest brag) is that I have never used inflight Wi-Fi, even though I think I can technically expense it. But with every flight the impulse to cave and just scroll lobste.rs or whatever grows stronger.
Here’s the thing: I used to get on a long flight and the ideas would just start flowing. I would bang out an outline of an essay or a music composition or a blog post, sometimes on paper, sometimes on my phone.
This doesn’t seem to happen as readily anymore. Have I become less disciplined? Nowadays, I sit on the flight and try to come up with ideas but keep drawing blanks. Oddly, when I feel the impulse to scroll a feed, I just open my phone and swipe back and forth between home screens and it somehow fulfills the same purpose. That’s kind of fucked up, right? I get more from the “fake” dopamine hit of dicking around on the phone to no end than from the thing that I ostensibly really want to do, i.e. write.
This brings me to a phenomenon I see in various hobby circles: People expressing guilt over having spent not enough time working on the hobby and too much time watching YouTube and scrolling feeds. This is ironic because, supposedly, a hobby is supposed to be enjoyable, so why do you have to force yourself to do it? Why not just declare YouTube your hobby instead so you can feel less guilty?
Part of the explanation must recognize that we have a tacit moral hierarchy about which hobbies are more or less virtuous. There is some level of social pressure to have at least one “healthy” hobby like exercise or crafts to balance “unhealthy” ones like, IDK, sports gambling.
If you were a dictator it would make sense to promote some hobbies over others for the sake of societal advancement or whatever but what reason, really, do we have for voluntarily self-flagellating ourselves over an Instagram habit? The fact that everyone feels like they should be doing more home cooking with fresh ingredients has not brought about that reality; instead we are still eating fast food and Postmates, but just feeling anxious and ashamed about it to boot.