In my last post, I mentioned I was looking forward to seeing When Harry Met Sally on New years Eve. I knew I loved it but I didn’t realise quite how it was going to hit me this time. It hit me in its usual nostalgic wave of long coats and huge swingy cross body bags, romance, walking in parks, platonic loves, Harry Connick Jnr, typewriters, answerphones, dates and besties. But something deeper came over me and a few days later - as I was flicking through the whole Weekend section of the newspaper on a teeny weeny phone screen and found myself googling how much it would cost to have the Saturday papers delivered to my door, so I could read them like I used to - I firmly decided I wanted to go back to the nineties, via broadsheet and widescreen.
Maybe not back to the nineties, I’m not saying it was great to stand in a stinky phonebox covered in dubious postcards, asking the mum of a tardy friend if she’d left yet (and there were some societal issues that, believe it or not, were worse than today) - but to bring a little more 90s back into my life. Reading a newspaper on a phone is miserable. I knew it. But I’ve only just registered it with such contempt.
I hate my phone. I feel like I sleepwalked into a cult and I’ve just woken up. I want to opt out. I want to get off. Maybe it’s the spectre of AI, maybe it’s Musk sticking his oar into everything, but I suddenly want to jump up and write a Jerry McGuire style mission statement that would change lives.
As an artist, I’m expected to have a portfolio on Instagram and if I want to sell my work, it helps if I use it. Not many of my sales come from Insta, but I can’t deny how it opened doors, hot on the heels of Etsy. I am not anti-internet, by any stretch of the imagination. I would not be able to make and sell art in the way I do now without the internet.
My main issue is with my iphone. Picking it up and putting it down over and over again. It’s addiction. So I have to remove all the reasons there might be to pick up my phone. I essentially want to use it as a phone, a radio, a map, a clock, news, and photos. That’s it. Then maybe I’ll finally get past my bitty bitty bitty M.O. and my rather large abductor pollicis brevis on the right will match the left hand once again.
As I was writing this, Christabel Balfour’s post about deleting social media dropped into my inbox and apparently it’s a thing on Substack at the moment. I mean more of a thing than it usually is on New Year’s Day. She made a list of what she’s going to do and I have done same.
The first point is obviously to leave my phone in another room, instead of bringing it with me everywhere I go. This is cold turkey 101. I will hear it if it rings. It rarely does.
Put a 30 min timer on social media (which still seems too long). If I want to post on Insta, I will do it before midday, otherwise I can use desktop for Insta, Substack and Facebook. There will be zero time for scrolling.
Take Facebook off my phone. After my youngest leaves school I won’t need it at all any more. But I can’t get rid entirely, there are some helpful art groups I rely on. I don’t use Twitter anyway so no issue there.
Stop playing Wordle, Quordle, Octordle and The Missing Letter every day. Sure they’re good for my brain, but the everyday streak is unnecessary.
Read before bed.
Don’t listen to a podcast as soon as I wake up. Have some thinking space instead.
Get the Saturday paper delivered.
If you are a Gen Xer, you might enjoy this post by Freya India about Gen Z’s nostalgia for the 90s, a time they never knew.
And here are some of my other favourite 90s-videoshop-long-coat-typewriter movies.
Also anything by Nicole Holofcener, anything with Parker Posey and 90s adjacent Francis Ha.
Now I’m off to don a black polo neck, go to a cafe, listen to jazz and talk about unsuitable boys, while my friend chain smokes Marlboro Lights wearing this t’shirt.
P.S. if you’d like to go back to the 70s instead. This is the kind of delight you can find on BBC 4 (Omnibus: New York New York).
Ta-ra x
I really hope we are all at the point of jacking most of it in now. Says she writing this on her phone between work meetings. I’ve slowly been discarding phone habits and last year I read a whole 29 brilliant novels which became my bedtime habit after choosing to leave my phone outside my sleep space. Little things, but I’m getting there. Remember the almost analogue days of blogging? That’s how we met! Happy new year!