How to January

Also: new essay series coming shortly

Here comes January! Oh, January. How I loathe thee.

At some point in our history we collectively decided to really intensify January’s natural loathsomeness by making it a month dedicated to punishing ourselves. For years January was the time for dieting, and I assume it still is in some quarters even though diet culture has rightly got itself a bad rap in recent years. But if the January diet has had its day, now Dry January and Veganuary are having theirs.

To be clear, I don’t think it’s a bad thing to cut out alcohol or animal products, I just think there’s an unpleasantly puritanical energy about doing it for the month of January. It’s like we have to atone for the sinful indulgence of December by imposing scarcity on our lives, even though January (in this corner of the northern hemisphere at least) is already devoid of light, warmth, sunshine, greenery, twinkliness, public holidays and good cheer, which I personally find to be quite enough scarcity already.

The most loathsome January of all time, you will recall, was in 2021, during the second major lockdown of the pandemic. All I did that month was drag myself from bed to desk to sofa and occasionally go for long, bleak and possibly illegal walks around a grey, empty city. A year later, when everything was open again, I decided I was going to do The Artist’s Way. In case you are unfamiliar with The Artist’s Way, it’s a sort of self-help course designed to nourish your creativity by getting you to write morning pages, answer questions about very random aspects of your childhood, and — the best bit — take yourself on weekly solo ‘artist dates’.¹

All of this had the unintentional but happy effect of making that January as unlike the last as it was possible to be. Even though the book insists your artist dates do not need to be expensive, I decided I’d rather take the route of nearly bankrupting myself, and it was entirely worth it. I went to the theatre, the opera, the cinema, that travelling Titanic exhibition, the V&A, Dennis Severs’ House (for the pedantic: yes, it extended into February). It wasn’t just the perfect antidote to that previous, most loathsome of Januarys, but to January as a concept. It taught me the secret to a bearable January, and it’s very simple: you just have to make sure you’re adding things to your life instead of taking things away.

So now this is my rule. In January 2023 I observed the rule by doing a meditation challenge at the London Buddhist Centre. This January, I will be observing the rule by attending a weekly folk singing workshop at Cecil Sharp House in Camden (I know, niche). I don’t think it really matters what you do. The important thing is that you think of it as a way to make January less grim, rather than as a means of turning your entire life around — that way there’s no sense of obligation, and if/when it fizzles out, you don’t have to feel guilty about it.

That said, I’m not against the impulse to turn over a new leaf at the beginning of the year. I just think that if you feel that impulse, it is kinder and more sustainable and much more fun to lean into it by asking ‘what new, nice thing should I start doing?’ instead of ‘what old, bad thing should I cut out?’

Substack plans afoot

How’s this for a segue! Another nice, new thing I’m going to try in January and beyond is a new Substack essay series. It’s going to be about screens and minds. Not screens and mental health, per se (though that might come into it) but the broader effects of our ubiquitous screens on our thoughts, behaviours and emotions. By ‘our’ I really mean ‘my’, because I’m not any kind of expert and only have my own experience to go on, but hopefully you’ll find something relatable in it. And by ‘screens’ I mostly mean smartphones, but I don’t want to rule out writing about other kinds of screen too.

For about as long as I’ve had a smartphone, I’ve struggled with my relationship to it. I never wanted to get one in the first place, and held out for a while after they became a thing. I was eventually persuaded in 2013, ahead of a solo backpacking trip, because my folks didn’t love the idea of me crossing Argentina by myself with nothing but a £15 Nokia dumbphone to assist me. I thought I’d dispense with the smartphone once the trip was done, but they have this way of making themselves essential. Now, of course, I can’t contemplate the idea of going anywhere without one.

In 2017, four years after that trip, I bought a notebook seemingly for the sole purpose of venting about the hold my phone had over me. On the first page I wrote in it:

I do worry about what screens do to your brain. The immediate effects are palpable, unsatisfying: the dull headache, the tired eyes, the empty feeling of time slipping away, the anxiety, the self-loathing.

And then, on the next page:

That sense of numbness, the slight headache — what if it takes the gleam off life forever? Already it seems to dull the sharp edges. A haven from effort is always beckoning.

I would love, six (!!) years after writing the above, to be able to say I’ve managed to cultivate a healthy relationship with my phone, that it definitely does not dull the sharp edges any more and that I don’t still fear it will take the gleam off life forever. But I can’t say that. It’s a constant struggle. The ‘haven from effort’ is always there, tempting me with bright colours and funny videos in empty moments or when I’m faced with an uninspiring or difficult task. I don’t slavishly scroll for a scary number of hours per week because I want to. But such is the hold it has.

I first got interested in mindfulness, and subsequently Buddhism, because I thought it might help me develop a relationship with my phone where it served me, instead of the reverse. Spoiler alert: it absolutely hasn’t worked. I remain convinced that the only way to have a healthy relationship with a smartphone, for me at least, is not to have one at all. But it’s got to the point now where I no longer have that option. It’s not just that it would be highly inconvenient to be without one, it’s that my work has imposed various two-step security procedures where you can’t log in to this or that system without verifying your identity via a smartphone app. If I got rid of my smartphone, I literally would not be able to do my job.

So if you can’t beat it… write about it, I suppose. I’m going to try and dig into what my phone is actually doing to me, in hopes that I can reappropriate some of those lost hours and turn them into something useful. It’s going to be a very loose series, which I’ll add to as and when I get the notion, but the first one is coming next week.

‘Til then, and in the meantime wishing you all a very happy new year,

Kx

PS. I wanted to make a dedicated place to put the posts in my Screens and Minds series so I’ve organised The Babbling Brook website properly. There are different sections now and all posts are browsable by theme. It’s ever so exciting. Have a look!

PPS. Your regular reminder that if you like my writing you can support it by buying my book or sharing The Babbling Brook far and wide.

1. The best in-a-nutshell description of The Artist’s Way I’ve ever read is by

Jess Pan

, who calls it as ‘an extremely woo woo book on creativity that is the perfect book to read if you feel insecure or vulnerable about your creativity. It’s like a warm hug saying, “It’s okay. You got this. You can do this. Maybe creativity is God or maybe it is a little ghost. Go take yourself on little dates and write in this journal and you can talk to your little ghost, too.” It is kind of magical.’