It always starts the same way. The hands of time turn and reach the point in the week where capitalism declares me free for two measly days. It doesn’t free me; I’m just freed enough. “There is more than one kind of freedom, Freedom to and freedom from.”, goes a quote from Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. I have freedom to exist and do as I please (or so I think) but I’m not free from society’s expectation to exist in a specific way. And then there’s the restlessness, snuggled in-between the two, barely concealed, poking at the surface. It asks, “What are we doing?”. It’s not the existential kind; It’s shallow, looking only at the next 48 hours, demanding a quick fix in an age of instant gratification.

The weekend brings with it an irresistible urge to step out, with an intensity that surprises me. This urge isn’t the whim of a child, one that can be fooled and misled by a stroll in the park and pointing to things. No, it must be satiated with effort. A change of scene. A change of clothes. A cup of coffee, a catch-up, an activity, an event. The whole shebang.

Things were not so before Covid. In fact, I was content staying in. I relished it. I got a kick out of cancelling plans. I was always doing something, out of the eye of most. It is not the same now. After spending close to two years home, I, the flagbearer of solitude and someone who always put the company of a good book over the company of an average person, had to concede the importance of that overused phrase, social animal. So, I try to be one for 48 hours every week, under the watchful eye of capitalism.

It’s a Sisyphean task, planning the weekend. At no point, I must clarify, is any of this for social media. I know the thought would have loomed in your mind by now, conditioned as we are to please the algorithmic gods with data from our lives. My appeasement is mostly for myself and for those whom I meet. And sometimes, when I choose to spend a day by myself, feeling the eyes of others on me when I sit in a café alone, reading or writing or daydreaming, in that moment, the appeasement is all mine. You see, this animal can only be social within reasonable limits.

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It’s tempting to blame Covid for my spurt in stepping out and I can make a convincing case for feeling robbed of my life over the last few years, and so can you, undoubtedly. Were I not deprived of the possibility of stepping out, I may not have felt the urge to do so. But that’s too simplistic. Because even when I was home, it’s not as though I was doing nothing. I did nothing worthwhile but that’s just semantics.

Years ago, I wrote a trumped up, satirical article on my and my generation’s dependence on technology, The Eternal Exhaustion of the Overstimulated Mind. (I was never one for trite titles). I can admit those mysterious weekends I spent home, away from the eyes of others, vaguely resembled the one described within it. I realize that home or out, weekend or weekday, Covid or not, what plagues me is the desire to be doing something.

In the Australian comedy, Please Like Me, Arnold, in a moment of hurt and anger screams at Josh, telling him he’d never be happy because he had a ‘pathological quest for stimulus’. Arnold may have been speaking to me across the digital screen and the physical barrier of time.

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I don’t do well when left idle. When alone and with nothing to do, I end up on the precipice of a downward mental spiral. I wouldn’t recommend it. I need to be occupied to subconsciously stave off this spiral. It has nothing to do with productivity. I do not buy into its optimizing calculus that reduces human life to a mechanistic function. In fact, I nurse a desire for aimlessness. The thought of wastingtime does not worry me. In the larger scheme of things, I am being wasted every second. Might as well make time experience the same. I don’t harbour grand plans, or grand in the material way that can only relate to buying bigger, better, costlier things in an endless loop. To help me find comfort in aimlessness and simplicity, I went running to books, per usual.

John Williams’ Stoner is a book about a literature professor who lives and dies without leaving any mark on the people around him. The book keeps emphasizing upon the un-remarkableness of this man who time won’t even show the courtesy of remembering. It is primarily about the dignity of a simple life but what I took from it was the humility within a life full of action but little to show for. It’s a celebration of the ordinary without evoking pity or condescension.

Annie Ernaux takes this idea a step further and flips the narrative in her fantastic memoir, The Years, where she makes her voice, the voice of a generation that grew up in France in the 1940s. She writes in the first-person plural, Nous, inviting millions into a life that saw a lot happen even if the people themselves weren’t at the forefront bringing the change. No matter how pivotal or insignificant, all of us, ordinary or not, will live through a version of history that is unique to us. We are history.

Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger takes this thread and zooms in on her protagonist, Claudia, who, on her deathbed, dares to rewrite history as how she sees it. Claudia does not have much to show in life, a recurring theme if you’ve picked up on this, but she has the audacity to think that not only can her personal life reconcile with History, the history that is the textbook narrative of mankind, but it’s also worthy of documentation.

What I understood from reading them was that it was impossible to avoid having to do things. That I shouldn’t criticize a need for stimulus. In fact, one of the biggest complaints we have with books, shows, movies, or even people, is when we see them think and talk but not do anything. “Nothing happened”, we bemoan. Thus, action or a need to be acting on something is not the villain of this piece.

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What I’ve chosen to villainize is the illusion of control that my phone lets me believe I have. Either at home or when I’m out and about, I used to feel that my quest for stimulus was just that. My quest. I was choosing to entertain or distract myself, as needed. I can’t help but feel that even this flimsy solace is being snatched from me by the world, or those who run it. I can no longer do it without being cued into it.

We have created a culture of consumption so overpowering that it has begun to bleed into corpulence. We’ve made it impossible to live without having our minds pulled every which way. There’s always something to lull you into distraction – a show, a movie, some news, some book, a fad, a person, a place. What I wish to argue is that by making us passive consumers, it takes away our agency to choose. We are now told what we think we need, relentlessly, 24×7. The world may be my oyster, but I don’t remember ordering oyster and who said I was hungry this moment?

The logical thing would be to dissociate, to step away, but how can I do that without rewiring almost every other component of my life? Even if I remove all notifications, turn off marketing prompts, and keep the applications on my phone to a bare minimum, I STILL end up receiving advertisements and emails and messages. I don’t have it in me to become a technological ascetic so I cannot renounce my phone and go back to landlines. It may sound charming and nostalgic to relive the life within my childhood albums but when even logging into my work requires the use of a phone application, or traveling anywhere within the city is a convenience owing to technology, I cannot amputate my phone from my life. I hate to admit it, but it is a phantom limb now.

Months ago, dissatisfied with how much I had begun to spend my day on my phone and effectively doing things with a limp illusion of self-control, I read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. It did the trick; the way quick fixes do. Enthused by the tips, and they were good tips, I set about reclaiming my time and my control over being uselessly stimulated. With the hours I scavenged, I set about doing things that I felt I didn’t have time for. It turns out there’s only so much French you can practice or non-fiction you can read or a run you can take before you require the mindless ambient noise of a sitcom running, even if it’s a re-run and you can quote it off the top of your head.

All complaints accounted, I can deal with overstimulation. Understimulation is what scares me. I think back to primary and middle school when we were made to sit on ratty, smelly rugs with questionable hygiene, asked to close our eyes, and meditate. I know now that was a transparent attempt by the teacher to find a minute’s peace but even so, I never got the hang of it. As we’d open our eyes, red and sleepy, the teacher would ask us if we felt calm, if our minds went blank. Most would nod. I never experienced it. I cannot recall a single time in my life when I had zero thoughts swirling in my cranium. At the very least, there’s always some tune playing, like elevator music. The closest I’ve come is the sense of slumber that strikes if you have a glass of wine after a long day, and even so, in that half-asleep-half-alert state, there comes a point, like when you have a fever, when your mind mixes reality with dream and creates a hallucinatory spectre. Burdened with my hyperactive mind, I am impressed and mildly resentful of those who can meditate or claim to.

There’s a Guardian article by Johann Hari, “Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen”. He argues that this frayed attention and restless switching between tasks is an engineered social construct, and one that cannot be reclaimed with individual tweaks. I can read Digital Minimalism and apply those takeaways as much as I want but eventually, I will slip up and the temptation of technological platforms will be there to lure me back. Even writing this essay, I have opened YouTube an embarrassing number of times, refreshing the ‘Suggested’ page in hopes of a 10-minute distraction, a reflex action that I’m afraid doesn’t even register sometimes.

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But you see, none of these concerns bother me when I am out browsing books or catching up with friends or spending a lazy day with my family. If I am absorbed in any human experience, I forget my phone. If it’s not an emergency, it can wait. I have annoyed a few people with how lackadaisical my digital self becomes over the weekend, but I realize I have stumbled upon an epiphany.

I reassess my restlessness. My rush to step out every weekend stems not from feeding some fidgety nook of my being. It is, in fact, some part of me telling me to step away from the trap of technology. Owing to my job, my weekends are the only time when I am away from my phone and engaged in a human experience. Those 48 hours are when I speak and make eye contact and laugh and look at the sky and take ambling walks and sit in parks under the sun and hug friends and make small talk. It’s when I speak to cab drivers and baristas and pass sincere if quick smiles to strangers. It’s when I bump into people accidentally and observe what people are wearing and glance at the food on the next table. It’s when I feel like a person again. For 48 hours every week, I get to forget my phone, unless I click a picture or make a payment. That is the root of my restlessness.

When my weekend plans fall through, like they did today, I find myself itching to do something because I know the alternative. It’s within arm’s length and it will suck my hours. Anything but the phone. I’m now inching towards the conclusion of this essay and there are hours to go before the day ends. I could have been out for dinner tonight, but it didn’t materialize. Instead, I wallow in the waters of my mind and oar my way through scraps to make sense of myself. I look to my whiteboard and see chores to be done. I look on my bedside and see two of my current reads, eared with bookmarks. I look at this screen and realize I have a couple of rounds of editing to do. I see my phone out of arm’s reach, flipped upside down, quiet for the day. I feel I have outsmarted it today. But there’s tomorrow, and next week, and the next, and the next, and the next…

The quest for stimulus continues.