Time is perhaps the most fundamental of all categories of capitalist reality. Time is the metric of concrete labor and is the root of all concepts deriving from value: price, profit, interest, wages, and so on. Time may be a physical thing, but our relationship with time is historically determined. Speed-up and time-saturation are intrinsic to life under capitalism.

There are many trite examples of this dynamic with time. Your boss wants you to work faster. You want to walk faster to get where you’re going. You sacrifice an hour of sleep to cram in one more episode before bed. You stop reading books. You skip a phone call with family because you are too busy.

The more life we pack in to 24 hours, the less we are able to focus on any given moment.

In order to reclaim your attention span, it is necessary to think seriously about what claims your attention, regardless of what social norms or capitalist marketing attempt to tell you is normal. You must be intentional and self-critical about your own routines, behaviors, and environment so that you can create a healthy space for yourself.

This is something I have been working on for myself for… idk, a few years, and I plan to gradually share what I’ve learned. I’ll do one tip at a time so as not to overwhelm.

Tip #1: Calm your device display

I mean the physical device hardware. Make it boring. It is designed to trigger your dopamine, so you have to hamstring those features on purpose:

  • Desaturate the colors. Nature does not produce the incredibly bright colors of an LED-based display. Your little monke brain is being melted. Both iOS and Android have accessibility settings to apply a monochrome filter to the display, which has the effect of toning down the color saturation. Goal: colors should look muted, similar to a color e-ink display.
  • Use the dimmest possible setting.
  • Reduce the frame rate as low as possible. No higher than 60 fps. Ideal is an e-reader refresh rate.
  • Use a simple solid-color wallpaper. Make it boring instead of eye-catching or emotionally stimulating (e.g. a family member)

Next time, I’ll talk about the “push philosophy” used by your devices and how you can push back.