The return of the late night doomscroll

My phone relapse

I refreshed my Instagram feed, an incessant motion of swiping my thumb down for the home page to reload even though the train I’m on is passing through Victoria Harbour and the reception wouldn’t reach my phone for another two minutes. My mind was racing through the tasks I needed to get done at work. I needed to send an article draft to my boss. I’ve got a coffee meeting with a non-profit. Oh look, it’s Moo Deng. My internet went back on and my nose stayed 20cm away from my phone as I autopilot the walk from the train station to my desk, where I placed it to charge and switched to the flurry of emails showing up in my inbox as it loaded.

Ugh this is all too much. Why can’t the messages just stop coming in? As I waited for my Outlook to fully download all the new emails, I grabbed my phone again and opened WhatsApp. Gosh I still need to reply to a friend from two weeks ago.

This was my mornings looked like. After nine months of keeping my phone out of the bedroom, I relapsed.

I spent a lot of my August in bed, sniffling with a cold I couldn’t shake off. My meds could only get me to a certain state of drowsiness, but not enough to lull me back to sleep. I rolled around in bed and gazed at the living room table.

There it was. My phone that has been shunned from the soft comforters. Could this be the time I do some mindless scrolling?

I was sick, I reasoned. I could cut myself some slack. I got up and picked up my phone, put on my favorite fountain pen podcast, and fell asleep within ten minutes.

Turns out having the phone in bed is helpful after all. The doctors did say that I have to sleep more to recover. So maybe I’ll continue doing this… just until I get better.

Continue I did. Last night when I went to the bathroom at 2AM and instead of falling back asleep, I grabbed the phone that was next to my pillow and instinctually opened up Instagram.

What have I done?

Every night I scroll through a technicolor series of short-form content that vie for a few more milliseconds of my consciousness, even though it’s been a full month after I had gotten better. A sped-up timelapse of a plein air painting. A cucumber salad recipe. A penguin reenactment of The Lion King opening.

The distractive frenzy bled into my mornings. After I woke up, I immediately reached for my phone to check what new messages I received in the past eight hours. A stark opposite from the calm I used to have when I spent my first morning hour offline and instead made pour-over coffee, filled in my morning pages with the equally slow and mindful fountain pen, and joked around with Jin.

This was not a surprise. Since my phone was with me at night, it was right next to me when I woke up the next morning. The frenzy rippled into my days too, my hands reaching for my phone screen up to 168 times a day. I replied to texts while walking to and from the office bathroom until someone said “Morning!” to my manager who had been trailing closely behind me, waiting to see if I would notice him. I had been fully sucked into that gross digital-centric cycle again.

The signs that my attention span has dwindled into almost nothing were pretty evident. I didn’t finish my coffee before 7:30AM anymore, which is when I usually left for work. I struggled to fill out my morning pages, flipping through Instagram after every two sentences. When I felt bored, I’d cycle through my messaging apps — WhatsApp, Discord, Gmail, Instagram, Slack — and would go back to WhatsApp again to see if anything new came in in the last three seconds. 

I tried justifying to myself that I was busier and needed some downtime anyway. It’s not like I’ve been living less of a life. I’m deep into writing a book, training for Hyrox, taking up new leadership roles, and still working my full-time job.

But this is not when I should be more lax. If anything, I should be even more disciplined with my phone use because I needed rest at night that was not cut short by an hour of mindless scrolling. The smartphone is a tool, not a device to get brain dopa hits. I should be using the tool for purposes that add value to my life, such as jotting down notes for an essay idea. Since the phone was now introducing a pattern of distraction into my days, I needed to limit my use again.

There was no easing out of having my phone in my bedroom, so at 9PM I charged it in the living room and picked a new exciting novel to read. Right before I closed my Instagram app for the day, a friend posted about a new book she read, a space opera romance called The Proposal. I bought the ebook and loaded it on my Kindle instead. The first page unfolded with the protagonist talking to a “you” character about a new plane-like object that “earth-borns” are obsessed with. I fell asleep within two pages.

Thank you to friends who stopped this essay from going in distracted directions: Linart Seprioto, Sarah Jane, Priya Nain, John Min, Mak, Michael Dean.

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Update log:

• 📘 Finished reading The Proposal by Bae Myung-hoon. Love a good sci-fi space setting.

• 🌧️ Painted in the rain at Alowyn Gardens. That was the first time I furiously made brush strokes to finish a sketch before the rainwater decimated the water-soluble gouache painting. Core memory with my Melbourne-based painting friends.

• 💃 Went to a show featuring the season 16 finalists of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Nymphia Wind, Sapphira Cristál, and Plane Jane. I legitimately recall the meet & greet minute in my head every few hours and just stupidly smile by myself.

• 🎞️ Have started to ask for TIFFs instead of JPEGs when scanning my film photos. Hi-res bangers, here we come.

• ⚔️ Had my first friendship conflict in… 10+ years? I’ve been so conflict-avoidant that I’ve let things slide with friends this past decade. My best friend very kindly spoke to me head on.

• ✍️ The last run of Write of Passage has started. I’m back as editor and will be diving into these essays real soon.

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