No more teleporting
It keeps creeping up on me.
I've realized I've been spending too much time again doing fuck-knows-what. Too much time on social media, too much time reading news, too much time reading emails, too much time listening to podcasts, too much time refreshing the same handful of apps over and over and over and over again. Basically, too much time dicking around.
This bothers me tremendously. It leads to this stupid toxic relationship with my phone.
No other device I use leads to this perception of wasted time. Not all of what I do on a phone is bad; it's my primary communication device, after all. But it's the in-between that annoys me so.
Manuel came up with a great analogy to explain this:
You know how it feels for me? You know when you're dealing with a faucet and you’re trying to find the right temperature and it’s cold, cold, cold, slightly warm and then you move the handle 1mm and it’s suddenly steaming hot? That’s the web for me right now. I can push it down to zero easily. But when I try to adjust it to the right temperature it’s blistering hot in no time.
I would have added that the water also tastes of chocolate. So we keep turning it to blistering temperatures, because it's so addictive.
But fuck that. I don't even like chocolate, so why do I do this?
So I made a deal with Manu.
For the next month, I will dial down all the teleporting to zero. I deleted all social media apps from my phone, as well as all apps with an infinite inbox (email, RSS feeds, Reddit). If it has pull to refresh, it's gone too (except the browser, but I may ask the dev of Quiche if there is a way to kill that feature).
Every Sunday, the two of us will post our screen time (with context) to our respective blogs.
There are a few things I want to do with the time I'm likely to get back.
I have the goal of reading one book more than last year (I read 53 books in 2025). I want to start sketching and drawing random things. There are a few topics I want to dig deeper into. I have this desire to create a campaign for my latest fascination, Dungeons and Dragons. And I want to write more, both here and on overkill.
We'll see where this leads.
All that said, if you want to reach me going forward, send me an email.
Update: I never explained where this term “teleporting” comes from. I stole it from Craig Mod. He wrote:
When I’m not talking, just walking (which is most of the time), I try to cultivate the most bored state of mind imaginable. A total void of stimulation beyond the immediate environment. My rules: No news, no social media, no podcasts, no music. No “teleporting,” you could say. The phone, the great teleportation device, the great murderer of boredom.
