How I'm using story-telling and real-life chat (not Chat GPT) to tackle my phone addiction - and a bit on schools and the English class system, too
This time in Texas is helping me shape new activities and rituals into family life, which is keeping me sane, but also helping me tackle the ongoing effects of rampant phone addiction
A few days ago I had a long conversation with my friend Liz Rogers about screen time and human connection, as I rode passenger in her big red pick-up while she drove out to her ranch, a couple of hours from where we’re staying in Alpine, west Texas. Liz has a sticker on the back of her pick-up which reads Keep The Lonely Places Lonely; I understand that impulse, the need to keep something secret, not to splash everything on to Instagram, but at the same time it makes me smile, as Liz is the most gregarious and sociable person I’ve ever met.
I was introduced to her by my old friend Janna, who I’d returned to Texas to see, last autumn. Alpine is the small town close to one of the ranches I worked on in my twenties, and the place I’ve now returned to several times since moving to America, and where I’m spending the summer with the children. “You gotta come meet Liz,” Janna said, on that first trip back to Alpine last year, so we piled into Janna’s pick-up, drove twenty minutes from Alpine, through the mountains and desert to the town of Marfa. When I lived in Texas in my twenties, Marfa was a quiet little cow-town, best known for the mysterious lights that sometime appear on the horizon just outside town’s limits. Back then, my clearest memory of Marfa was driving out there with Janna and a handful of friends, to watch the lights and drink beer on her tail-gate. Nothing much else happened in Marfa, or at least, didn’t seem to.
Actually, at that time, in the late nineties, stuff was happening there, since minimalist artist Donald Judd had moved to Marfa in 1971, after becoming inspired by the desert landscape of Baja California; by 1979 Judd had bought land on a disused military base that by 1986 would become the world-renowned art collection, the Chinati Foundation, where a permanent collection of Judd’s work sits alongside work by John Chamberlain and light scuplture Dan Flavin. Last week, I walked through two huge artillery sheds housing his most famous work, an untitled piece of one hundred aluminium boxes, the size of kitchen cabinets, but all slightly different internal dimension. It’s a breathtaking piece of work, it’s location in the artillery shed, surrounded by high windows that look out onto the desert and mountains around Marfa as essential to the way it communicates space and light as the boxes themselves.
I’m slightly embarrassed that all this was actually happening in 1997, when I lived here and yet was oblivious to it. Perhaps this is because I wasn’t really thinking about art, since my mind was on other things like cowboys and horses and rodeos, but it was also probably because the internet wasn’t a part of life, at all, at that time. What was happening in Marfa was completely separate from what was happening in Alpine, twenty minutes down the road, and the invisible thread of the internet didn’t connect them.
I remember returning to England from Texas in 1999, and seeing billboards which had these strange letters before the name of every business - www. This change happened in a tangible way when I was living in Texas and I remember asking friends, when I moved back to England, what does www mean? Of course the internet existed before then, but it was at the edges of life, and it certainly did not run like a power cable through the centre of it, short-circuiting and eclipsing real life, as it feels to do now. I’d occasionally used it at university, which I graduated from before moving to Texas, and I think academics were the first people to really make the world wide web part of their daily life. When we graduated from uni, a few of my friends moved to London to try to capitalise on what was called the dot.com bubble, but to most of us it was an aberration. This changed rapidly in the late nineties, as we all know.
Being back in Texas now has brought me up against the way the world wide web - how quaint does that sound? Almost lyrical - dominates so much of our lives, and I wanted to write about the way phones are such a big part of this. I’m trying so hard to be less dependent on my phone, and not always managing it, but I’m also trying to be a bit kinder on myself about it. Changing the habit of continually picking it up will take some time, but I think that at least continuing to try to do this is what matters. I used to smoke a packet of Marlborough Lights a day, and then some more (imagine! it seems inconceivable now!) and giving up took multiple attempts. Ditto, alcohol. I tried to stop lots of times before I actually managed it. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to “give up” my phone because of the way I need it to make so much of my life function, but I’m determined to stop the mindless scrolling. I’m also trying - trying - to model slightly better behaviour around my phone with the kids, and I’m sharing below my thoughts on all this, as well as something we’ve been doing as a family, inspired by parts of Texan life, to bring us together to talk, rather than gorge on screens. As you know, my writing often takes in a lot of the stuff I’m thinking about at the moment, and writing about conversation and language also took me down the state/private school debate, so there’s on my thoughts on that in here too.