A screen-free Monday evening

The silence stretches many seconds

Retiring for the night: my phone, my earbuds, and my laptop (not pictured).

The first thing I always do when I arrive at home is to turn on my laptop and play a YouTube video. In college, the dorm room was quiet when my roommate wasn’t around, so I filled the silence with vloggers and influencers talking to cameras in their own rooms and surroundings.

But I carried that habit with me, even when I moved in with my partner. When she was watching Selling Sunset or playing Persona 5 on her Playstation, I’d saunter back to my laptop, my black wireless Beats Studio Buds jammed into my ears so that I could be entertained by something. When I’m cooking, I go through the Simpsons catalog, which is quite the yellow beast because I’m only on season 12. When I’m cleaning the flat, it’s a Cathrin Manning vlog or a fountain pen video podcast from Goulet Pens.

I don’t sit and watch the whole video, but I’m addicted to background audio.

My world is rarely quiet. My podcast queue ranges from Beautiful/Anonymous by Chris Gethard to Pivot by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway to Staying Up with Cammie Scott and

Taryn Arnold

. These conversations are the soundtrack to my walks to the subway, harmonizing with the station’s frequent warnings: please stand back from the platform doors. I feel the urge to constantly absorb new information, to continuously learn something new. I needed to be constantly entertained.

Something funny happened when I started meditating two months ago. The practice is only 10 minutes at a time, and I’m still barely halfway through the 30-day introductory course on Sam Harris’s Waking Up app. I learned that I didn’t mind slowing down. I also might like… silence? But not too much of it. Maybe like 2-3 minutes of it? 10 minutes is very long.

But the funniest thing of them all is I started to feel overwhelmed when listening to my usual podcasts. Maybe the right word is overstimulated? The episodes played at the usual 1.75x speed, making me a very shabby podfaster, but suddenly the host was speaking too fast. I slowed it down. But there were too many ideas bouncing around between my ears so I pushed pause.

I switched to Spotify, because the songs I love to listen to, in its chorus and repetitions, meant that I wasn’t consuming anything new and therefore would feel less overwhelmed? But I still felt like the songs were too loud, too noisy. I first turned down the volume, then I ditched my Buds altogether. I listened to the sounds of the street instead. I listened to yelling in the sidewalks and Cantonese expletives and rapid traffic light signal sounds and impatient car horns. I listened to the beep when I tapped my metro card and the turnstiles swooshing, the subway system keeping track of foot traffic. But that is outside, where I am in the company of 8 million other people in Hong Kong. 

Inside my own flat is a different story. Inside my head, during the 2-3 minutes of silence during my guided meditations, it’s long and scary.

I am afraid of the silence. I’m scared of hearing myself think, even though I think all the time and I write what I think. I feel anxious when thinking in isolation for a prolonged period. I hear people feel serenity when the world is quiet. Instead, I feel restless in muted solitude. There’s a whole world ready for me, but I am not there. I am not present enough.

Inspired by

Alex Dobrenko`

going offline, I decided that my Monday evening after work would be screen-free, including no music or podcasts. Or at least till 9… I have to make it less daunting to myself somehow. Instead of watching a video during dinner, I’ll continue reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. The novel follows Sam and Sadie, two friends who grew up together and became game creators. It’s the most immersive book I’ve read in a long time, so it’ll be 9 before I know it.

I arrive home at 6, finishing up some text conversations with friends by the door before tossing my phone, screen-down, on the bed. I walk over to my laptop, placed squarely in the middle of the flat. Isn’t it weird that it’s called a laptop but it lives permanently on our dining table, tethered to a monitor with an HDMI cable? After banishing it to the time-out corner, I recognize how big the table actually is. This table that quadruples as my journaling spot, my painting desk, my board game base… This IKEA expandable/foldable table serves so many purposes and I have permanently chided a sizeable real estate of it to my laptop to play some YouTube video in the background.

Time is moving slowly without screens and when no songs or videos are playing to mark the passing of time. I’ve been scribbling on my notepad and am taking my time with it too, letting my brown ink dry before flipping the page. But only 23 minutes have passed. I know this because I am making rice for dinner and the cooker needs 40 minutes. The timer says it has 17 more minutes to go. I’m hungry and in the silence, I can hear both my stomach and the boiling water.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a quiet evening before, maybe ever in my life. The house I grew up in always had somebody else present. My parents would always have the TV on, set to Winnie the Pooh when I was two and then Friends as I got older. When I moved out, I filled the silence with music and videos from my laptop. How did people used to do it? I imagine folks in medieval peasant-like fashion, with worn out clothes waiting for time to tick by the candle-light. Why is this the image in my head, I wonder. The silence stretches out many seconds.

But then I realize I can’t read and eat at the same time. I’m having an Indonesian dish, and I usually eat those with my hands because that’s how I had them growing up. There goes my evening strategy. I may have to resort to ~mindful eating~.

I always thought I was on top of my phone and screen addiction. I don’t have notifications for messages and set my phone on silent. But my face is always facing a screen or my ears are always plugged into something. Even at work, I’m constantly checking my emails and text messages. I don’t know how it became this bad.

It’s much easier to be present when friends are around. Conversations get fun, and once one person is off their phone, others tend to follow suit, too. Jokes and stories take up most of our time, and the screen does not belong.

But when I’m alone, with nobody to laugh with or nobody to tell stories to, the screens swallow me whole.

*

I finished dinner in about 30 minutes and realized that time is abundant because it isn’t even 8 yet. But I’m tired and all I want to do is turn my brain off and watch something.

I thought of the stand-up show Old Man and the Pool, where comedian Mike Birbiglia said: “I prioritize the thing that’ll keep me alive in the short-term over the thing that’ll keep me alive in the long-term. ‘Cause if I’m not alive in the short-term, I won’t be alive in the long-term.” In a similar vein, I can’t survive the long-term of my life if I don’t survive tonight.

Which, of course, is unreliable narrator dramatic storytelling, because I’ll most definitely survive tonight with or without a screen. And being not addicted to screens will work out for me in the long-term. But right now it is quiet and boring and I understand why people settle for pets and kids.

Around this time, I would usually wonder when my partner Jin will be home. She’s out for dinner with a friend and usually she’d text me when she’s making her way back but because I didn’t tell her about my experimental evening, there was no way I could find out. And I thought about people I made lunch and dinner plans with for tomorrow and how usually I confirm plans the night before but I can’t do that now so should I just assume the plans are on? Is this how plans are supposed to go?

I stop wondering and I settle into silence once more.

I continue to thumb through my novel when I hear the door unlock. I recognize the jingle in Jin’s keys and I welcome her home. She tells me about her friend and how the meal was and also some stories from work. I find that I am more interested in what she has to say tonight than on most days. Partially because I was bored so her stories are entertaining. But partially also because my mind is open and receptive. I normally am mentally elsewhere when she tells her stories and I know it’s a bad thing to do. But usually I’m so engrossed by what I was watching or listening to on my screens that I just wanted Jin’s stories to end so I can go back to my entertainment.

But not tonight. Tonight I like hearing her voice. And my gosh do I like the cheerful lull of her voice.

The time sped up to 8:27pm, the dialogue accelerating the time. At 9, I will type this draft on a Google doc.

But now, now is not the time. I am 33 minutes away from my self-imposed deadline. Now I will go back to Sam and Sadie and read in bed next to Jin watching Netflix. (She’s a teacher so she deserves to relax with maximum screens).

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is not presented chronologically. Author Gabrielle Zevin masterfully shuffled timelines. In my confusion to line the events up, I flip back to earlier chapters, my middle finger planted firmly on the current page and my thumbs rifting through the previous chapters. I haven’t been able to perform this action on a Kindle.

This screen-free evening was easier than I thought. Maybe I could do it once a week. Maybe I could work my way up to multiple times a week. The first two hours of silent solitude was hard but I didn’t cave into my phone nor my laptop so maybe I’ll give screen-free evenings another go?

After half an hour of reading, I feel my eyes droop and call it a night. Maybe people back in the days, the medieval ones with the off-white dresses and worn out clogs, slept better without screens too?

Right after I place a bookmark - my work name card - back in the book, I look at my phone’s lock screen. Some time in those two seconds of closing my book, my left hand grabbed my iPhone and tapped on the screen to wake it up. I stare at the time, 9:01PM, before realizing what I had done.

Thank you

Treeckster

,

CansaFis Foote

,

Diana Demco

, and Justine J for shaping this piece so quickly, and for encouraging me to try this stream-of-consciousness style of writing.

---

Update log:

• 📖 Reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (affiliate) by Gabrielle Zevin (page 418/482). I’m slowing down because I don’t want this book to end

• 🎢 Went to Disneyland (again), this time to see Arendelle. It was a magical summer snow day

• 📺 Watched Mike Birbiglia’s The Old Man & The Pool on Netflix. It’s funny, it’s serious, and it makes me want to watch all his other stuff

• 🥣 Caught up with a high school friend after 14 years. In some ways we have changed a lot. He lives in Sydney now, and I here. But we’ve always been writing buddies, so we just picked up where we left off

• 🎨 Started painting outdoors again. I felt nervous to touch a brush again after 1.5 months, but I eased up as soon as I laid colours onto coasters. Yep, I’m painting on wooden coasters for the rest of the year

• 👥 I joined a Hong Kong LGBTQ+ mentoring program as a mentee and was slightly disappointed when I saw the list of mentors. There aren’t many women, there aren’t many Asians, and amongst those that are, most are allies (surprise, surprise). I just wanna see more people like me. I want to know that people like me can be successful, too.