Black and white, revisited
Two years ago, I wrote about grayscaling my phone as a way of nudging myself to spend less time on it:
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.
I still have a black-and-white phone, and I still prefer it, but this week I discovered another level of digital color management. Did you know you can grayscale your computer?
I tried it out after much of my lingering malaise was diagnosed as post-COVID vestibular dysfunction. Screens have been making me feel especially dizzy and sick for a while, which has not been great for my career. I’m getting better thanks to the dinkiest physical therapy exercises you can imagine (nodding! shrugging! turning around!), but I’m also trying out different ways of reading and writing on a screen in hopes of finding one I can sustain for more than 10 minutes at a time.
I’m writing this in Scrivener composition mode, which takes up the whole screen, in dark mode and grayscale. The background is black; the text is a medium gray. It feels calm and gentle instead of harsh and glaring. I’m not getting a weird headache or the inescapable urge to nap. It doesn’t fully solve my screen-induced dizziness, but it’s pretty close.
Surprisingly, however, grayscaling my computer has the opposite effect of grayscaling my phone. A black-and-white phone screen makes whatever’s on it feel less real. A black-and-white computer screen makes its contents feel more real, as least when it comes to text. It doesn’t look like paper at all, but maybe grayscale dials down the screen’s sensory input to a point where it subconsciously feels more like paper? It definitely feels more absorbing, more steady, more concrete.
Grayscaling my phone made me want to spend less time looking at it. Grayscaling my computer is making it possible to spend more time working on the screen. I can’t in good conscience recommend that to everyone. Only you know if it’s a good idea to make your computer more inviting and less exhausting. Right now, though, it’s just what I need.