Black and white
This newsletter has been a Four Thousand Weeks fan account for a bit now, and I’m sticking with the theme this week, sort of. I say “sort of” because I’m not writing about the challenging but accessible philosophy at its heart, or any of its mind-expanding examples about how to value experiences we’ve been trained to overlook. It’s not a quick-fix book, thank god…and yet here I am writing about perhaps the one quick fix it offers, in a single paragraph in the appendix. I’d heard about and dismissed this technique before, but for some reason when I read it in Four Thousand Weeks I was immediately compelled to try it, and I’ve liked it more than I expected, and for different reasons.
The technique is grayscaling your phone, so the screen appears in black and white. Oliver Burkeman suggests it as part of “making your devices as boring as possible.” I think the first time I heard about grayscaling was like two years after I got a smartphone, so the idea has been around for a while. It didn’t appeal. For intervening in a sometimes-annoying-but-not-actually-worrisome relationship with my phone, it sounded like simultaneously too much and not enough, somehow. But now that I’ve tried it, I have to say, I love it. If you’ve heard about grayscaling and never taken the plunge, maybe this recommendation will be the one to push you over the edge, as Burkeman’s did for me.
For me, it’s not exactly that grayscaling makes my phone feel boring. It’s that it makes whatever’s on the screen feel less real. It draws a sharp line between the world around me, in color, and the digital portal I’m looking at, in black and white. It’s a constant reminder that physical space and phone space are two different things, and one deserves more attention than the other.
Relatedly, having a black-and-white phone also turns down the emotional response it’s able to provoke. I can see notification bubbles on the app icons, but they aren’t rendered in emergency red. Sad or disturbing photos don’t demand my attention or worm their way into my brain. (Maybe this isn’t a moral good, but we all have to get through our days.) I feel less engaged, and therefore less manipulated. In that way, it’s been similar to switching to Tweetbot for Twitter, with its chronological feed, invisible metrics, and blessed lack of false urgency.
Best of all, grayscaling is reversible. It takes more than a second but far less than a minute to switch back and forth. (On my iPhone, it’s Settings > Accessibility > Display and Text Size > Color Filters.) I mostly turn on colors for taking pictures of anything besides a grocery list or looking at a photo someone sent me. I’m not on Instagram or Facebook, so this happens maybe a couple of times a week. Google Maps also benefits from color, if you need more than a general impression of world geography (which, honestly, I usually don’t). Today I turned on colors to play Wordle, though I usually do that on my computer.
The point is, black and white isn’t all or nothing. It’s flexible, more so than most digital attention interventions. Digital color becomes a tool you can decide to use on a moment-to-moment basis, rather than a literal default setting. When I turn on colors now, I find it overwhelming and race through whatever I need to do so I can get back to the peace of grayscale. Grayscaling isn’t a cure for phone overuse by any means; I can still consume a lot of empty content on there in black and white, especially when I’m feeling antsy or uncomfortable for other reasons. It’s just a simple and not-so-subtle reminder of where life’s vibrancy actually lies.