On Daydreaming
A few weeks ago, my friend Karen was telling to me about a book she was reading and we started talking about daydreaming. Or really, our lack thereof.
Chapter fourteen in You’re Not Listening by Kate Murphy talks about how now in anxious or idle moments people reach for their phones and we’re addicted to distraction.1 Our attention spans have dropped significantly, we no longer get bored, we don’t have periods of “uninterrupted musing”, and we’re losing our ability to daydream.
If you’re alive and awake as we round the corner into 2024, this will not be news to you. For me, this was just another example of a severe problem I have not been courageous enough to truly reckon with. But this point about daydreaming made me curious— when was the last time I daydreamed?
I know I get sucked into my phone way too often: I intend to spend a few minutes enjoying reels on Instagram and before I know it I’ve said, “Okay, just one more” so many times that it has been forty-five minutes.2 I don’t spend almost a single minute not doing something. If I’m not on one screen or another, I’m out running an errand, going to class, meeting someone for coffee, or listening to music or a podcast while I do something else. When was the last time I was bored? Have I ever just stared out my window for 15 minutes? When was the last time I let myself just sit in silence without thinking too hard?
As a kid, I would get excited to sleep because it was uninterrupted time to transport myself into another world. In the day(night?)dream I remember most, I would picture something like the Big Time Rush apartment and run myself through scenarios of playing with my friends in that room as if I lived there. It was an easy trick to fall asleep fast, but there I was at 23, trying to imagine literally any fun or sweet scenario to fast-track myself to sleep and I couldn’t do it. Every 30 seconds or so I’d catch myself in a critical thought or I’d hang myself up on the memory of something embarrassing I’d said or did that only I remembered.
You’re Not Listening doesn’t give any practical tips for how to daydream— that point is pretty minor in the context of the chapter.
But the chapter in You’re Not Listening makes points that speak to others (Specifically I’m thinking of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing and Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism.) examining our chronically-online-yet-disconnected-contemporary-lives: we know too much about each other and we’re not designed to be taking in this much information all of the time, we settle for superficial conversations with others because we show superficial interest in them (for deeper interest in our phones and media), and we need more quiet time, more bored time, and more actually-do-nothing time.
I just started reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron which encourages readers to develop a daily creative practice that includes consistent dedication to writing three pages of uninterrupted stream-of-consciousness writing first thing in the morning. Cameron calls these “Morning Pages” and says the point is to flush out all of our critical and worried heady-gunk (I made this word up) so we can have an easier time getting into a creative flow when we sit down to practice our art.
I’ve been trying to practice daydreaming before bed and I’m slowly getting better at it. How ridiculously difficult it is just to get your inner critic out of the way just to have a safe place to daydream!
On Two-Step Verification
Just when I thought Duo authentication couldn’t get any more annoying, they made an update that makes you type in a three digit code every time you log in instead of just clicking a button!
I’ve been mad about dual authentication methods for years— I know they’re important and probably for the best, but my god, having to use my phone every time I need to log into anything I need for school or work just about sends me into a rampage every day.
My little iPhone 13 mini does everything. Even if I wanted to go somewhere without it, I’d probably have anxiety about it, and now I really can’t go anywhere without it. Not even to the school library to do my homework without the distraction of my phone or personal devices.
In undergrad, one of the institute's on campus dedicated to vocational reflection sponsored a day of activities that encouraged you to go without using your phone. It sounds easy enough, especially when you’re living somewhere walkable and you know you’re going to run into just about everyone you’d want to talk to just by way of heading to the dining hall or sitting down in the library. But I could barely get through the expectations of my school day— I couldn’t even log into my school email without my phone!
Sometimes I pick up my phone to pass the authentication, but then I get distracted by a text or some other notification and before I know it I’m ten videos deep into a doomscroll headlock. Some days I want to do something drastic like delete all my social media or switch to a dumb phone to force myself out of engagement with the attention economy and defibrillate my attention span and creativity.
But there’s no good answer when I can’t do my work without putting three numbers into an app on a different device and all my cards and passes are on my phone and I’m a woman who runs during the quiet parts of the day.
For now I’ll settle on blaming all my issues with phone addiction and distraction on the pervasiveness of dual authenticators.
On Community
I’m still at the age where many of my friends operate on an academic schedule. And that’s especially good for me because I’ll be in school for 5 and 1/2 more years and then for the rest of my life as a professor. But I love the weeks in between semesters or right around the middle when we all have breaks because it draws all my friends from home together.
I am lucky to have a handful of friends I have now known for a good chunk of my life (and I’ve recently reconnected with a few from middle school), and though we don’t talk all the time, in these middle moments when we catch up it feels as if we pick right up where we left off.
There is one good thing about social media here: a big part of this ability to pick right back up is because we see each other online. So even if we do not have all of the details, and if only through likes, comments, and story replies, it feels like we’re present in each other’s lives.
And this is a presence. I should be more intentional about recognizing the reality that so much of our community exists online. But it is not, and should not be the only community we center in our lives, and it likely can’t be the most fulfilling by nature.
Lots of my friends from home are in their first or second years post-college and many have moved back to our hometown. It is interesting to see the ways in which my friends have built connections with friends who come from different communities and chapters in my life and intersect in a landscape that is familiar to me (by nature of the people who are present and the physical space they occupy) but that I am not physically present for.
My friends have gotten good at doing the small-town community thing. Themed dinners, holiday celebrations, big and small expressions of gratitude, silent book clubs, lots of coffee dates— always intentional, always open to everyone, always reclaiming the kind of Southern values that are worth being proud of.
And they keep me in community with them— extending invitations for gatherings when I am home, checking in on me, writing me letters, sending me stickers, telling me about books they think I’d like. It is always very touching.
I’m going on a year and a half of not being a South Carolina resident. Just as I felt settled in one community (while I was aching for home), I am going through the bittersweet process of finding my sense of belonging somewhere new.
I was talking with my friend Claire the other day about this— how I almost hoped the end of my PhD would circle my life back home so I could be somewhere familiar, comfortable, and where I had a solid community. Claire is figuring out next steps in their life— considering moving somewhere new, adjusting to life back in our hometown after college, finding and investing in community somewhere familiar yet unfamiliar.
We talked about how our sense of what really mattered had shifted. We used to think about life transitions as needing to be moving to the next big city to do the next big thing, but really what was most important was having a solid sense of community and belonging wherever you are. And that can feel harder to craft from scratch as time goes on.
Where we might’ve turned our noses up at the thought of settling down back home as adults when we were teenagers, now home didn’t feel like such a bad idea.
If you’re interested in reading this book or just the chapter, I downloaded the full text through Libby using my Greenville library card. They had, like, 10 copies available when I downloaded it an hour ago, so you can probably get it without a wait.
I deleted TikTok at the beginning of the year for this reason, and still have not kicked this habit because I just found another way to indulge in mindless scrolling.
ive also been wanting to get back into some form of journaling. the morning brain dump sounds like a good way to restart!!
home isnt such a bad idea!