Hey everyone,
I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while now, but have been very distracted by life events such as getting off birth control for the first time in 10 (ten!) years, being and maintaining 100+(one-hundred-plus!) days of sobriety, and starting a new job (BORING, but true).
In the summer I found myself in a state of analysis paralysis. I fucking love typing that and saying that phrase, mostly because it makes me think of a Dr. Seuss book for 20-year-olds suffering from insane existential dread; Hop on Pop but for freaks. Analysis paralysis is, essentially, having too many choices and overthinking them so much you don’t make any choice at all. It’s wrapped up, to me, in privilege (I think of my immigrant grandparents who’ve had such little choice in their lives but maintain an aura of gratitude and happiness) and fueled by, to me, our phones.
In August, I was nearing the end of my summer job on the farm and freaking out daily about what I would do next. I left my desk job of 3.5 years in May to work on an organic vegetable farm, knowing full well that the new job would, of course, end once the leaves started to fall. With hope, I consulted my tarot cards, an attempt at clarity which only left me more confused on what to do next as I pulled just one card from the deck: the seven of cups.
The card’s meaning is explicit in the illustration: the overwhelming possibility of choice. It represented my situation so well that I edited an image of the card on my phone so that each cup was labeled with my OWN possible choices, such as “going back to school,” “working at a non-profit,” and, of course, written on the veiled figure, “something I haven’t even thought of yet.” The fear of making the wrong choice, picking the wrong cup to drink from, and then being STUCK with that choice - that cup - kept me in analysis paralysis.
Analysis paralysis (also called decision fatigue) is not new to this world. It’s something that’s been around as long as there have been choices to make. It’s actually comforting to me to think of a stained-glass glazier in medieval times freaking out because he doesn’t know WHICH of the hundreds of saints he should adorn on the church’s windows. Maybe it kept him up at night, too. But the difference between that 15th Century glazier and me (and you, reading this), is that he only knew of as many ways to live as he was told about and saw first-hand in his village. And what I think is so analysis-paralysis-causing about our phones is that we can literally see thousands of ways to live every single day on Instagram and TikTok. Within an hour of scrolling we see hundreds of people we know and people we don’t sharing their lives: where they’ve moved, what their job is like, what they did or didn’t eat for breakfast. Whether we like it or not, whether we’re conscious of it or not, that content seeps into our brains and stays there quietly, only making itself known when it comes time to make a choice and - instead of choosing - we find ourselves naval-gazing, which isn’t an accurate term because we’re not naval-gazing as much as we’re looking-at-our-phones-which-may-in-fact-be-held-to-our-navals.
I will literally spend an hour researching best breakfasts in Winnipeg on reddit, and then wonder why a bigger decision, like what to go back to school for, leaves me immobilized. I wonder how many of us, when we should be making a choice to move cities or break-up with someone or try a new thing, are not looking outward or inward but rather downward at our phones, hoping that some stranger on some corner of the internet has the perfect solution to our very specific problem. We think we might need to end a relationship but instead of reflecting by ourselves and/or reaching out to friends, we go on reels, our fingers lingering for too long on one video about attachment theory and then, all of the sudden, we DON’T actually need to breakup with our partner, we actually need to read 1,842 Instagram carousels & watch even more reels about how we can be less anxiously/avoidantly attached. We don’t go back to school, or move, or start a new hobby, we wait and while we wait we scroll and while we scroll we feel like the scrolling informs us about our choices when it actually keeps us from making one at all.
Our phones keep us locked in a state of analysis paralysis because seeing people constantly optimizing/upgrading/enhancing their lives online tells us that we too could be happier if we only lived in a different way, somewhere else, anywhere far enough away from this body, this life, right now. Where the 15th Century glazier knew he would live and die in the feudal system, destined to live a life that was pretty much pre-determined, modern-day capitalism presents us with the illusion of choice. There is a difference between option and choice. A choice is something we make - the very act of choosing transforms us from naval-gazer to Active Participant In Our Own Lives. An option exists, untethered, floating, to be potentially chosen but quite possibly never picked at all.
How, then, do we sharpen our agency? How, then, do we put down our phones and start to really choose? I think we start small (small is all) and gentle and soft. I think we pick books to read and restaurants to eat at without consulting the World Wide Web. I think we re-remember our built-in intuition by picking clothes to wear and food to eat based off what feels good in our body. I think the next time we have a small problem (like, say you’re playing Skyrim and can’t figure out a puzzle even tho you’ve been playing for awhile) we don’t immediately Google the answer, we try new things, make choices, and even make a NEW choice if it doesn’t seem to work.
In these small ways, we begin to make a root system for ourselves in our own lives. We re-remember that we’re supposed to love the people that are around to be loved, not the people that we might love if we only moved cities or got a different job. And none of this is to say that we don’t have choice, that it’s truly all an illusion, and that we are doomed to the pre-determined forces of late-stage capitalism (but also, if I’m pre-menstrual I might say SOME of that is true). I’m not saying we shouldn’t move cities and find new jobs and make new friends that we’ll love, I’m saying that there’s a difference between a full-body yes decision that comes from within, and a cerebral panic caused by our phones showing us so many different options that we can’t even live the life that right’s in front of us.
In May, during my one week off in between my desk job and the farm job, I was in such an intense state of panic on how to spend my time. I didn’t know how to relax, my nervous system felt wildly glitchy. I was so overwhelmed by the choice that I had made (to leave my safe job and work at a freaking farm) and the fact that I had to LIVE this choice. I remember talking to my roommate about how I didn’t know how to spend my week-off - my first week-off work in years. As an expert chiller who was off work at the time, I asked him how he figures out what to do every day. He said, “You just do what feels good in your body.” And he meant in this body, at this moment, right now.
I still struggle with a glitchy nervous system & chilling out. Sometimes I think about the fact that my brain hasn’t developed enough to actually handle all of the content I see on a daily basis. I’ve got a telegraph/little orphan holding a newspaper yelling “extra-extra-read-all-about-it!” brain in an iOS world. Maybe we all do.
I recently bought a flip phone, a Nokia 2780, from a kind man in the North End who had a Bugs Bunny sign nailed into a wooden post on his front porch. It’s working just fine. The goal, if anything, is to be with What Is more than What Is Not. And sometimes that means thinking before I go to sleep and not drifting off with my phone in my hand, reading the shampoo bottle while I pee and not scrolling through reels, looking inward & outward & only downwards if and ONLY IF there’s a bug that needs to be saved on the sidewalk and so I save his life and, in doing so, he saves mine, too.
To come: a reflection on a month with a flip phone.
For now: Learning to master T9 texting.
Thank you for reading. Love you.
