Stuck on the Cloud

Letting my mind wander is not as pleasant as it used to be.

It's not that I think about death, exactly. It's that, when the world is quiet, the futility of the person that I am becomes painfully clear.

But, as an adult, I miss daydreaming. It’s not exactly that I don’t have time to daydream. It's that, during the times I would daydream, I’m usually scrolling on a smartphone. Lately, this is my response to quiet moments, and it has depressingly little to do with not wanting to feel bored. It has everything to do with tamping down the thoughts that come to me in the moments when the noise of the world goes away.

This is never more apparent than when I try to fall asleep. I have a vague recollection of that particular time in childhood as special, a nice break at the end of an over-scheduled day engineered by my parents and other all-powerful grown-ups, when I could let my mind wander until my eyes closed peacefully.

So, some nights, I say to myself, what would happen if I allowed myself to drift off, staring at the ceiling? Why don’t I do that anymore?

Then I try it. And I remember.

No sooner have I flicked off the light than my brain starts playing every wrong thing that has happened in the last twenty years. The mass of all these memories together causes a wrenching, bone-deep regret that I can change nothing, and frustration that I will never be strong or savvy enough to deal with "everyone else" or "them" or "The World" or whatever vague adversarial concept is plaguing me in that particular moment, the personification of which would likely laugh itself silly with the knowledge of me growing purple with rage.

And behind this rage remains the ever-present siren song:

This feeling would stop if you just picked up your phone.

At first I attributed this common experience to that most unhelpful of phenomena: that trying to make something occur, in this case, falling asleep, makes that very thing least likely to do so. But I've observed the same phenomenon during any moment devoid of sound: driving without the radio, for example, or on a walk without some podcast or audiobook playing in my ears. In that moment, every memory and feeling I push down during the course of an average busy day is released in a barrage of accusation concerning my ineffectuality as a person, against which I am powerless to do anything except cower, or cry, or grow tight with frustration.

The answer, certainly, is not to keep scrolling. Besides the feeling that we’ve all had of losing five hours of our finite life-time to something we can't remember, there’s the unpleasant, sightly bizarre feeling of resurfacing after we’ve spent a long time on a smartphone: when we pull ourselves away to rejoin real life, everything looks a little grey. After living for so long inside the hyper-saturated colors of our screens while being effortlessly pulled along by consistent novelty, we have to re-learn how to live.

It’s as if I were floating on a cloud just above a large city. From my bird's eye view, I am all-powerful and all-knowing. Navigating feels effortless and unrestrained. I can't really relate to the idiots on the ground, always taking their cars down unexpectedly-busy streets, or scurrying haplessly into dangerous alleys that, if they had my omniscience, they could have avoided entirely.

But when the cloud drops me in the middle of the city, the ground is uneven, and tall buildings surround me on all sides. At the same time, more painfully, I have to deal with the realization that, before the cloud, I used to navigate cities all the time, and remember how masterful and satisfying it felt to have such capability, and berate myself for having been so stupid as to have lost it.

There’s a kernel of hope hidden in the regret: I've always gone for walks, long before I had headphones.

I can do it again.

Last night, before I went to bed, I put my phone in another room to charge. Five minutes after turning off my light, I got up and retrieved it, lay down in the dark, and fell asleep with the blue tinge of the screen illuminating my big, stupid face.

I made it five minutes before getting back on my cloud.

Maybe next time will be better.