Please Give Me Back My Brain

You know how it goes: you work a blue collar job. You get there at 8, work two hours, refill your coffee mug for a third time, and head outside with your book. It's a fantastic fall-like day in between punishing heatwaves—you're even wearing a flannel today—and you have 15 minutes to yourself. You sit on the bench, the warmth of the morning sun gently baking your face, but it feels good, like you can sense the difference between tanning and burning and this is tanning. You put your book on your lap. But first, you're going to want to look at your phone. Nevermind that you spent most of your work day catching up on your social media feeds and messages—you have to look again, just to be sure you didn't miss anything.

And it's right there: a notification. It's an Instagram DM. A cat video. Of course you're going to watch it; it's going to be short, it's going to be silly. You give it a laugh react. Then you hit the app's back arrow, which brings you to your DM inbox. From here you can go one of several ways: you can press the close button on your phone, let it go dark, and put it down; you can press the home button, see if there is anything else you need to do on your phone before you open up that book in your lap; or you can hit the back arrow once more, bringing you to your Instagram feed, which is what you choose to do.

And when you get there you see one of your favorite comic artists has posted a new piece. It's great! You love the bizarre way he draws heads. Then you scroll down, just for a second. And then because of how your brain is wired, you click on the first Instagram Story in that row of heads at the top, with the intent soon being to look at every new one, no matter how little of your focus you give to each, because you just want to see all the little pink circles disappear. It takes a long time to get through them all, and even as you go through, new ones pop up, because the people you follow are always making content.

Then your phone alarm goes off. Because you fear you will become so engrossed in your book that you will read past your break time, you set it for 15 minutes. The thing, though, is that you didn't become too lost in your book that your phone alarm shocked you back to real life. In fact, you didn’t even open up the book in the first place. It was merely a coaster for your coffee, which you also didn't touch for the entirety of that break. You go back in, annoyed.

The same thing happens again later, at lunch. This time you read a couple paragraphs, but it's hard to keep this book physically open while eating. So, you look at your phone instead, using the thick book as a phone stand. You finish eating after 18 minutes but you're too far into the phone thing now to switch back. You rationalize that you've only got 10 minutes to read now, so why bother starting. You switch between Instagram and Facebook, email, back to Instagram, which leads to Threads, and now you're scrolling through a morass of the least meaningful sentences you've ever read. But you can't stop. You need to see what the dumb people are saying, and you need to see what the dumber people are saying in response. The next 15 minute break it's the same as before.

It makes you so mad at yourself. It happens again the next day. You get mad again. After a few days of this you take those stupid apps off your phone. You can check your stuff on the computer when you get home. Any DM or notification is likely to not be an emergency, so you're fine to wait several hours.

Now you can finally read your book! You get distracted by text messages here and there, but those are quick and there is down time enough in between each one so that you can read a few pages. You also take walks when it's nice out and you do some writing, too! You go home and check the computer, catch up with as much as you can, and go on with the rest of your evening, checking once or twice more before bed.

But then you need to post something. You're gigging! And you need to let the world know about the gig! But the Instagram website won't let you post. You can post it just to Facebook but that's not going to have as wide of a reach. So after those few days you re-install the app and upload your post. You're going to have to post a gig reminder as a Story in a few days, so you leave the app on the phone, because it's less of a hassle (admittedly minor either way) than deleting and restoring it.

And then you get right back in the habit, because that's what these things are designed to do. And another month or two goes by until you get frustrated again, repeating the whole process. It's not just stealing your time on work breaks, either. It's stealing your attention at home, at the table during meals, on the bus or train, on the toilet. Creativity thrives within the bored mind but you refuse to let your mind get bored for longer than five seconds, even while engaged in a creative act!

This isn’t good. You consider yourself a creative person, an artist, a consumer of art, but this wheel that somehow keeps changing but also is exactly the same and compels you to keep looking at it doesn’t let you do the things you actually want to do. Sure, there is self control, but you don’t have much of that. The social media feeds are good for letting people know about your gigs and projects (and for letting you know about others’ gigs), but if you’re too zonked to produce, then what work is there even going to be to promote?

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I’m done with them all.

It’s a precarious balance mentally, for me at least, but I think not being bombarded by images and information is worth the loss of connection in that casual way that Instagram and Facebook provide (Twitter was always less about connection and more about following the chatter and gossip of the literature world anyway, but I’ve been out of that Fascist Hellscape for a year and a half). I’ll miss stuff, certainly, but it’s not like I’m going to everything anyway. And info about my gigs and projects, records, books, etc. won’t be as available, but the people that would want to find out about it will find it somehow anyway.

I’ve quit and rejoined Instagram and Facebook, along with a few other services a few times in the past decade and a half; I would always come back for promotional reasons. I figured I could do one of these instead. It’ll mostly be gig and project announcements, with an occasional piece like this if I feel like it, sent irregularly and sporadically. I’m hoping it can scratch the itch of needing to let people know about what I’m doing.

Until we meet again! (In your notifications, where it says “JeffSchroeck02 is now following you”)

Thanks for reading.

GIGS:

09/01/24
Cinco De Mayo Restaurant
New Brunswick, NJ
(Playing guitar for Civic Mimic!)