Chapter 8: Start A Conversation
10 Insights from the Super Connected Tour: Rebalancing Digital & Analogue Life. Tool Eight in the 'Super Connected Toolkit': Start A Conversation
“Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.”
- Johann Hari
There a couple of key songs on the album that really underlined my own addiction to digital media and screens. The first was Everything Entertains, written during a period when I had really turned into one of those Steve Cutts illustrations. I caught myself lying on my bed surrounded by remote controls, an iPhone, an iPad, a laptop and the TV was on. I wrote it in that position, in a moment of realisation. And it’s the same moment of realisation for the character I play when I’m acting on stage in the live show. But when I wrote it, I’d realised I had turned everything in my life into entertainment. Suddenly everything could become a shareable stimulant for any of us who had a smartphone. The other key song actually lived up to it’s name on the tour.
I wrote the song ‘Start A Conversation’ at the lowest point of that depression, in the middle of 2016. I wrote it to be my last song for my last ever last performance. I was so disconnected and desperate for people to answer the phone, or ring mine.
Don’t you wanna sing along with me?
Johann Hari’s theories about solitude and lonliness, really resonated with me. To some extent, I would never have begun exploring Super Connected if I hadn’t gone from living in Soho for 20 years, to suddenly living alone in the middle of a place where I had no community.
The move was the loneliest time of my life, but I transformed that isolation by making the Super Connected film with all the amazing people who came to help.
But after building new relationships with the people I am closest to today and drowning in the conversations we’d started, I still had a huge block in my wellbeing.
I couldn’t start a conversation with myself
We did literally start conversations when we began the Super Connected shows. And certainly more than is usual in a public space these days. A lot of that was because we all had our phones locked in pouches. But the song has lots of meanings - it’s also about having a conversation with ourself. On our own. If we can.
It’s that part of ourselves that sometimes needs to be alone, to hear our own feelings and let the changes we are facing become fully absorbed into our being. In my endless reaching out to the world through my work, I forgot to reach in to my self as well.
Because being alone often means doing something on our phones. Searching the answer, watching a video, hunting for knowledge, messaging someone etc.
The experience of being in our own mind and body and letting thoughts arrive (and leave) is an experience that helps to develop our creative self. But it’s hard to do.
It’s how I grew up, and creatively, it’s still what helps me function today. But in recent years, I have struggled to just stop and be with myself without grabbing the iPhone or continuing to produce whatever I can fill the gaps in with.
When I did manage it, I could wonder, imagine, problem solve and sometimes find an answer with ingenuity instead of Google. But it takes practice and a lot of planning, if like me, you are prone to go down the next rabbit hole and take your mind off what you are doing and where you are.
I believe Digital Media is more addictive than Class A drugs. But it’s not a visible addiction because unlike Class A drugs, you can consume digital media and there are no physical symptoms, you don’t lose your job, you don’t turn to crime and you don’t need to sneak around in shame. No, the hours spent consuming digital media chip away at the one thing in our collective history that none of us are experts in.
the human spirit.
I genuinely believe meeting with our own spirit is often blocked by our phones. And I lived with 100 Buddhist monks, I didn’t become one. I’m as DIY in my spiritual journey as the next layperson. Which make me feel like I am always messing with some part of myself that I don’t fully understand, if I am head-deep in Digital Media.
So, I’ve been practicing wherever possible since the shows, to start a conversation with myself, as well as other people. Instead of just swiping into the digital space and filling my eyeballs with everything (I think) I want to see. I’ve tried many methods.
But the most helpful one was moving to the Light Phone.
Musician and Filmmaker Tim Arnold has researched screen addiction and social media’s effects on mental health since 2017, culminating in the critically acclaimed album, film and theatre show, Super Connected - Nihal Arthanayake, BBC 5 LIVE
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