Do less...

Just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better

I hate my new iPhone.

I didn’t want to upgrade. And even then, I only ‘upgraded’ to a version already so outdated they don’t sell it in-store anymore. I just kept running out of storage, being the serial documenter that I am.

In the days preceding my decision, I surrendered to the paradox of choice with hallmark Libran precision — vacillating, justifying, and weighing up every pro and con only to end up right back where I started: not really wanting the upgrade. I researched YouTube IT-Guy comparison videos for an unhealthy amount of hours, all to make sure I wouldn’t compromise the way I experience the world. The softened, quiet way I’ve become used to viewing through the lens of now outpaced low-fi simple tech. But here I am — doing my best to stay open as I grow accustomed to the new interface, with its icons so cartoony and garish it feels like living inside an episode of Cocomelon. And the camera, oh the camera. It’s dizzying how sharp it can get. Colours are not just representative colours anymore, and how unnerving it is watching videos shot in 60fps where people and things move almost like they aren’t quite in real time - they are a hologram.

The way it sees just doesn’t feel like me.

It reminds me of earlier in the year when I went to the cinema to see Wuthering Heights with a bunch of girlfriends. Afterwards, as we stood in the foyer debriefing, one of the girls confessed that she couldn’t focus on the storyline at all. The whole time she’d just kept having thoughts about Australia, and fame, because they’d gone so hard on the ‘Margot & Jacob’ PR campaign before its premiere. They did too much?

In her book Kiku: The Japanese Art of Good Listening, Dr Haru Yamanda writes about what she calls Vocal Fingerprints. How every one of us has a unique way of speaking. But a crucial part of the uniqueness is how someone sounds — how we are interpreted on an energetic, invisible level through tone thereafter determines the way we are listened to and understood.

I don’t want Siri to suggest I start an unsolicited ‘automated check in’ habit to keep someone informed of my daily happenings. I want to use my own words.

I want to feel / look / sound like me.

New tech really doesn’t excite me very much. Maybe because I come from parents with a TV screen not much bigger than a laptop. Maybe because most of the money I save up for ‘fun spending’ is money saved to spend on travel — an elusive, intangible investment. However, as soon as I forayed into the world of iPhone agonising, the weight of the word ‘quality’ took on a new meaning. I desperately want quality…I’ll pay big bucks for quality! But not the ‘quality’ that is so rapaciously sought in our consumer society. I want the quality that feels so real it’s become rare - the ‘days of old’ kind. Last weekend, on a quiet and uneventful afternoon, I decided to try my efforts at creating a vision board. Which mostly just meant scrolling Pinterest for the first time in years. I would type words in the search bar to conjure up relevant imagery and feel my way through to whatever aligned with my hopes for these days. After a couple of goes, I began to notice a pattern: for every word I typed, Pinterest would offer up a predictive, improved suggestion that almost always just added the word ‘aesthetic’ to the end of it.

Friendship aesthetic
European aesthetic
Candlelit bath aesthetic
Dinner party aesthetic
Nature aesthetic

And almost always, the selection of photos left me uninspired. To reduce a full sense down to a representation, or ‘aesthetic’, is to lose it completely. To do too much is to cheat your very own life of its natural, unfolding and spontaneous revelation. In the words of one of my most poetic friends, “perfect is the opposite of feelings. I don’t want perfect, I want the glitch. Efficient is so unromantic.” In conversation over dinner on the balcony this past summer, another friend mused, “do you think we are living in the most unromantic time in history?” A prompt that had us engaged in an impassioned back and forth for the rest of the evening. And one that was later confirmed as I watched an interview with R&B singer Givēon, who said he’d asked ChatGPT to come up with an endearing nickname for a new girlfriend. This from a man who is a notorious maker of romance and sensuality. A king of smooth.

Maybe this is why I gravitate towards Greece. I love the Athens KTEL bus interchange with no screens displaying times and destinations. It’s chaotic and confusing. You take a wild guess and go to one of the many kiosk windows and hope for the best as you walk out with your small paper receipt. Or how so many of the business websites still feel like they belong to Web 1.0 and may as well have the dial-up internet tone playing in the background.

I like how much it slows me down. How much it makes me stop and really think about what I am asking for / requesting / doing. In our quest for ‘more and faster’ the element of surprise is being eradicated…. “We travel before we travel”, as that same poetic friend said. I always remember overhearing an American family as they stood outside an iconic Gaudi building in Barcelona, deliberating whether or not to go inside. “Shall we go in?” said one. “But did you check the reviews?” said another. Something so tempting, for sure. What with this battery powered assurance in our pockets at all times — regret-preventing, time-saving, self-validating. How could we ever go wrong?

But also, why not surprise ourselves in real time as we endeavour to figure it all out — and ourselves.

As beautiful Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue once shared, “a blank white piece of paper is the best mirror.” Because to sit still and witness raw words in analog form spilling from your dexterous little fingers will tell you more about what’s really going on than the latest and greatest advancement ever could.