Why, oh why, oh fucking why, do I find it so hard to avoid my phone? It seems I’ve just substituted in my iPad for the gap left by the deletion of all of my apps from my iPhone, as I pick it up and lie on my bed with it, playing three games of chess in a row or obsessively scrolling through the Financial Times or Substack. Yes, fair enough, that sounds pretentious, and it definitely isn’t as bad as TikTok or Youtube Shorts (for the record, the latter are just as lethal as the former), but it’s a serious problem and it’s pissing me off. In addition to this, or perhaps because of it, I just cannot bring myself to read. I really, really wanted to try and read the The Karamazov Brothers this year, but I just can’t find the motivation to pick it up, which is even more annoying, because I know if you wait for motivation you’ll be forever waiting etc, and the best thing to do is just pick it up and fucking read it, but there’s something stopping me, it’s like an allergic reaction to challenge, it feels as though as soon as something challenges me I just refuse to engage with it any further, like I’m offended that something dare to be difficult enough to actually require me to think. Why don’t I want to think? Why am I so scared of putting effort in, and why am I so scared of not doing things correctly that I’d rather not do them at all? Is there a wrong way to read The Karamazov Brothers? Perhaps it is the distraction of my iPhone or iPad, because even though the former is downstairs and completely out of reach (the latter lies across from me on my bed as I sit at my desk), I still just have an urge to check it. What if someone has sent me a text message? So fucking what! I can reply whenever I next check my phone, I know logically in my brain that there is no one in my life who requires my attention 24/7, yet still I cannot rid my mind of the compulsion to check it. I didn’t have this problem when I switched to the barbie phone temporarily, I couldn’t give a toss whether people had replied or not, mainly because I probably wouldn’t reply anyway because it was too fucking fiddly to type. I started this as a journal entry but it feels very much like I’m typing it as a blog piece, like I’m performing even though there is no one watching, which is something else that is annoying me recently, the question of authenticity, but that is another story entirely, so I won’t go into that right now, I just wish I could fucking relax a bit, I have classic music playing through my bloody headphones (Waltz Op. 69 No. 2) and even that doesn’t calm me down. Anyway, I think the point here is that I need to stop texting, like that is it, no more texting altogether, because when people text me and I then, even though I know I shouldn’t (I don’t want to and I try not to), I feel like I cannot help but wait for a reply, and whilst I am waiting for a reply I cannot focus my fucking mind on anything else at all, because I’m a brain rotted little bitch. Well, no I’m not, I’m a much better person than that, perhaps the word I am looking for is autistic, although I hate blaming everything on that too, so maybe we should just say that I am restless and anxious and texting exacerbates both of those things because I am constantly waiting for replies so maybe, rather than beating myself up for perfectly normal and unsurprising emotions (as I’ve written previously, texting is really fucking weird and abnormal and it’s insane how we’ve all just absorbed it without questioning it), I should perhaps just remove the thing that makes me feel things that I don’t want to, which is perfectly doable – I’ll just call people if I need them. Simple, really, is it not?