Cellular Obsession

I don’t know anybody who doesn’t suffer some degree of addiction to their phone. Technology addiction is one of those problems everybody keeps talking about but which seems impossible to get a handle on. I’ve noticed that I have a tingling feeling in my left elbow when I’m using phone, and I’ve realised that this is most likely the result of overuse, and the way I hold my phone, with its base resting on my little finger so I have my other hand free to function. For some reason, more than the feeling of brain rot, the headache I get when I use my phone too late at night, or the flitting, anxious energy and the synthetic promise of human connection generated by Instagram and dating apps, it is this tingling feeling, that makes me feel most horrified by the turn my relationship with technology has taken: too much phone use is causing actual damage to my ulnar nerve, which is the nerve that travels from the neck down through the elbow to the pinky finger and is responsible for controlling movement and sensation in forearm, hand and fingers.

I don’t think this damage is new, I noticed years ago in the gym that I find it harder to grip onto a barbell with my left hand than with my right. A weakness in grip, as well as that tingling sensation and the jamming up in the side of the neck, is a symptom of ulnar nerve compression. What is new, though, is the tingling sensation, which occurs on both sides — most likely a symptom of laptop use and a job that requires hours spent typing — but is much stronger on the left. I know that it’s got worse because my job as a writer requires me to spend time promoting myself on social media, and I can pinpoint the precise time — last spring when I was having to make a concerted effort to be more active on social media and to anxiously anticipate every notification — when I first started experiencing that jammed-up sensation in the left side of my neck and the tingling that now makes me feel, whenever I move to pick up my phone, that I am actually pumping poison into my body.

I know I’m not alone in this one. But neither am I convinced that anybody is coming to save us. Governments appear entirely incapable of regulating with anything approaching the lightning pace of the developments and permutations of the social media algorithms, which are as effective as the most sophisticated gambling machine or intoxicant in their manipulation of brain chemistry. Democratic sovereignty is fast-vanishing under the influence of technocrats. And the more occupied, incapacitated and bloated we are by technology use, the more power is drained from democratic processes and straight into Elon Musk’s bunker. In the face of such impotence, of course we want to distract ourselves, and of course we want to soothe the angst of economic instability by the furnishing of our personal brands. And this impulse, by the way, doesn’t just apply to influencers or artists or freelancers (recently I spoke to a friend about the spike of professional and personal inadequacy I experience every time I open Instagram, and this friend, who works for an established and very corporate organisation and who I assumed would be protected from the chronic anxieties about personal branding that afflict freelancers, told me that she has the same experience every time she opens LinkedIn) but to anybody and everybody who requires an income in order to survive, and who is even peripherally aware that their economic stability is dependent on their conduct as a piece of human capital worthy of notice and investment.

So, what to do? How to protect my ulnar nerve and my sense of self worth? How to even look at or think about this stuff without experiencing the deep knot of despair about the way the world seems to be developing, about how the promise of global progress seems to have congealed into something that looks a lot more like destruction, about the chronic instability that now awaits? Get a job in tech? Maybe. Personally, I’d rather fucking not. Take up knitting as a means of reducing phone time? Honestly, it’s not a bad idea. I’ve been spending evenings listening to audiobooks and doing SuDoku in a book my mum bought me for Christmas a couple of years ago. I’ve been repotting my plants and trying to read just a tiny bit more, doing more yoga and doing exercises that release the pressure around my poor little nerve. Trying to connect myself to place a little more, to the things I consume and how they got here and the reasons I consume them, and a little less to that intangible, fizzing web of energy that sends sparks out through my fingers and back through my arms up my neck and straight into my brain. One of the things I’ve found most effective is lying on a yoga mat with a rolled up blanket under my chest and my arms spread wide. The rolled up blanket is enough to reverse that hunched spinal posture that technology use demands, and I like to imagine ink running out the tips of my fingers and into the ground — all the emails and messages and words I’ve written, all the typing and tapping and swiping — draining out of my body and into the floor.

If that all sounds a little useless or earnest or frankly weird in the circumstances, I can assure you that it works. And this is more than just self-preservation. It’s the withdrawal of attention, which has of course has been turned by big tech into capital. Pulling that attention down from the intangible, intoxicating realm of the internet and into the place you actually inhabit is a form of power, especially if it’s not just you doing it but the people around you. And especially if you’re doing something that connects you with the reciprocity, the constant processes of giving and receiving into the spaces you inhabit that is obscured by the abstractions and dislocations of technology, then that’s something really valuable because it will change the way you consume, both digitally and materially. And if even reading about somebody potting plants instead of using the internet makes you feel bad about yourself please do remember I’ve managed to give myself nerve damage and have absolutely zero claim to superior willpower. But maybe also do a SuDoku.

With love

Rosie xxxx