Unplugged and Cleaning

The first thing I noticed was the eraser. The little cheap one. The kind you get from the discount bin at the end of the aisle at Officeworks, with the red-and-white cardboard squarepants.

It had been sitting on the edge of my kitchen table for a month or two. I hadn’t noticed it.

I use that kitchen table all the time. To eat. To drink. To snack. To answer emails, skim world news, and fall into tik-tok loops on adjacent browser tabs. I’m on that kitchen table just about every day, and yet I had missed that little eraser. 

I only noticed the eraser on Monday afternoon, while having lunch, because, for the first time in forever, I wasn’t doing any of those other things.  For the first time, I was just eating lunch. Eating lunch and looking around; noticing the little eraser that had been there for weeks. Maybe months.

This was the first day of my self-imposed Media Deprivation Week. My plan was to avoid virtually all forms of media for a full seven days. 

No TV. No radio. No books. No news websites. No Youtube. 

And I would do it all while working a job in the media, helping produce a daily news podcast, which is, by almost any definition, a form of media. A form of media which I wasn’t allowed to consume: no podcasts either.

The idea came to me from the book The Artist’s Way, a schlocky, Oprah’s-Book-Club-type self-improvement classic from the 1990s, designed to help you channel your creative forces and lead a more artistic life. 

The Big Idea of the book is that we all have these little, playful kids inside of us who want to create, but who have been stifled and paralysed into inaction by the non-little, non-playful parts of ourselves. 

The Thing Most People Remember About the Book are the Morning Pages, three pages of stream-of-consciousness journaling you’re meant to do, first thing every day. 

The book also suggested an idea called a Reading Deprivation Week, where you avoid all books, newspapers, magazines—the major sources of distraction and procrastination for someone living in the mid-1990s—for seven days.

It’s been more than 30 years since The Artist’s Way was published and I’m afraid more drastic measures are needed. Reading Deprivation might not be nearly enough to keep anyone away from distraction. The mere written word is but one of the fronts in the battle for our attention.

Hence the need for total Media Deprivation. Which is what I did.

Here are some things I learned after 168 hours without media:

Nature abhors a vacuum; so does your brain

If you take an activity away from your life, you’re going to want to replace it with another one. For me, early on in the week, that meant a lot of cleaning. 

Washing dishes. Doing laundry. Tidying and re-organising the kitchen pantry. 

Organising the clear polypropylene storage box in the corner of the bedroom; the one with the unmatched tools and the loose cables; the spare Ikea parts; the discount batteries; the glue gun and the staple gun and the liquid nails; the rolls of tape: clear tape, masking tape, packing tape, sellotape, the tape measures; that wireless modem you bought that time you were on the road for a couple of weeks and you (wisely) did not trust the wifi in the hotels and airbnbs along the way; the cable tester; the candles. Um… candles? What was up with the candles?

Once things are clean and tidy and all the low-hanging home maintenance fruit has been plucked from the attentional tree, you need something else to fill your time. 

Cooking is a good option. It’s fairly time-consuming, it feels productive, and it veers into actual creative work, which is the ultimate goal of the experience. I’d like to say I got very creative in the kitchen and whipped up some fancy fusion dish. But since I couldn’t look up any new recipes, all I had were my old regular rotation of simple home-cooked dinners: my Japanese chicken curry, my vaguely Mediterranean couscous salad and turkey bowls, my turmeric chicken and Chinese broccoli. 

Cooking kills some time. And eating kills a little more time. And then, luckily, both acts produce dirty dishes that can again be washed, killing even more time.

But there’s only so much cooking and cleaning one can do. At some point you have to occupy yourself in other ways, and that’s when the truly creative acts start happening. 

For me, after a couple of days, that meant opening up a watercolour set and painting a picture of a Fender P-Bass. It meant walking to the nearby creek to make some ambient field recordings. It meant writing emails to old friends and planning catch-up video calls.

And it meant lots and lots of music.

Even “good” media can be junk media 

Okay, I lied. I didn’t forgo every kind of media during my week of deprivation. Music was allowed. I could listen to as much music as I wanted. 

To me, music never feels like a distraction. Music is edifying, inspiring, a source of joy. Why deny myself, especially since one of my creative goals for the week was to put the finishing touches on an EP of original music I had been working on for months? I would have to listen to different types of music as I mixed and mastered my own anyway, so why add unnecessary hurdles in my path?

Whenever I was doing the cleaning, cooking, and organising, I knew I could at least have some music in the background, which definitely helped deal with the boredom and low-grade anxiety that would build at times.

The surprising thing that happened was that the music I started listening to was different from what I’d usually put on. 

Gone were my usual playlists of sad dad rock—a term that, while inaccurate in my case, since I’m neither a dad nor feel particularly sad, does capture a very recognisable brand of mid-tempo alternative rock that peaked in the 2000s with bands like the National and Wilco, both of whom I love and coincidentally will be seeing live in a few weeks—instead, I found myself reaching for artists and genres that I had either not listened to for years or had been meaning to check out but never got around to: Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman, JS Bach, Björk, bossa nova, Sunn O))), French chanson.

I was also less impatient with the music I was absorbing. I was allowing full albums to play through, instead of skipping to the songs I knew. And since I couldn’t google the consensus classics from an unfamiliar artist, I had to just pick an album based on the artwork, or the title, or whatever tickled my fancy. The same way I would've done before the internet was around.   

And I loved that. 

Now I just hope I’ve managed to trick the Spotify algorithm into believing my tastes are more eclectic, so I can continue this new, more varied diet.

If you can’t spot the distraction after an hour away from the app, then you are the distraction

I feel that most people these days are aware of how toxic social media is. After The Social Dilemma, we know the effect it has on us, and how consciously it has been designed to make us addicted. Instagram, Twitter, TikTok—we all have our poison, and we all ingest it knowingly, albeit reluctantly.

But we don’t often think about messaging apps the same way. The Whatsapps, LINEs and Telegrams of this world.

We think, “Oh Facebook? Yeah, that’s evil shit that warps teenage minds, topples democratic governments and MAGAfies grandparents. But WhatsApp? No, no, no… that’s just how I chat with my friends and keep up with my family!”

But if you’ve ever been part of a group chat, you have to admit that they can be just as distracting, time-consuming and infuriating as Facebook or Twitter. 

That’s why I had to minimise my use of messaging during the Media Deprivation Week. I couldn’t avoid it altogether, in case of emergencies or if someone close to me really needed something, but I made a rule that I would only check my messages three times a day, and then only respond to what was strictly necessary.

To my surprise, what I discovered was that in the friend group chat that I consider the most frivolous and distracting—the one full of sports highlights, comedy clips and silly tweets—I didn’t actually get many messages. Which led me to a humbling realisation:

I was the distraction in the group. 

I was the one who initiated most of the trivial interactions throughout the day, to which the others responded, ensuring the cycle of frivolity continued.

I was the problem I had been trying to solve.

Did I endure ten days of sitting pain for nothing?

Five years ago, I went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat for the first time, in Chiba, Japan. It was a gruelling experience at times, but, as is the case with many people, it felt transformative. It inspired me to reassess my life, it spurred me to make changes, and it taught me about the nature of my mind. 

(I also ended up emailing all my exes as soon as I was out, because… well, I’m not sure why, really. I guess it made sense at the time.)

I attended a second retreat a couple of years ago, this time in Australia, and even wrote a blog post about the experience. 

The problem, however, is that I haven’t been able to keep a regular meditation practice since then. And if you don’t meditate regularly, the benefits you get from the retreat quickly fade away. 

The one question I’ve asked myself both times is how much of the benefit of the retreat comes from the meditation, and how much from the isolation. 

Is it about the hours and hours of sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to focus on your breath and your bodily sensations? Or is it simply about being outside the city, away from all your distractions, with no access to a phone, a computer or a book? (In other words, in a state of media deprivation).

I’m not sure if I can answer that question. 

But at least I know one thing: I don’t need to go on a 10-day retreat to notice the little eraser on the edge of my table.