A writer’s life in black and white.
We’ve officially hit rainy season in Mexico City, it seems. Which coincided perfectly with last week’s experiment — life in greyscale. If you missed my previous love letter, I decided to remove color from my phone for a week in the hopes it might curb the time I spend on it.
Here’s what I discovered.
There were moments where real-life colors seemed so bright it was almost unbelievable. Raspberry red, mango yellow, green leaves really popped. It reminded me of the runner up to my 10 favorite books of all time. The Giver focuses on Jonas, a small boy living in a utopia that’s been stripped of everything that makes us human: emotion, memory, and color. He’s been chosen to fulfill a special role where he must hold his community’s memories. While in training for the position, he starts to see flashes of the rainbow — the flicker of a red apple peel, a glimmer of blue sky. Sort of how I felt.
I was almost 0% inclined to doom-scroll. As most of you know, Instagram is my downfall. Watching stories of friend’s trips to Greece (why is everyone in Greece?) somehow don’t “hit the same” in greyscale as they do in full color.
Unfortunately, I missed the photos of a friend who recently went to Ecuador, a trip I had been dying to stalk. On the bright side, now that he’s back, he’s going to show me the pictures over a cup of Ecuadorian coffee and chocolate. Score.
My average daily phone usage limit dropped 40 minutes. That’s really significant. Not sure what I was actually doing with those extra 40 minutes but, whatever it was, it was certainly better than scrolling.
Oh right, now I remember what I was doing with my additional time. Spying on my neighbor (very unexciting individual) and obsessively taking “artsy” photos in black and white.
It might have made me feel a little depressed, this greyscale experiment. That could also have to do with this week’s rainy, cloudy weather.
What stood out more than anything was the shocking pigment that burst forth when I turned the color back on. It’s totally unnatural, to which I’m sure you’re thinking, duh, but it’s uncomfortably bright. Hurts-my-eyes-bright. There’s no way these colors exist in nature. I’m looking for a way to lessen the density of hue, to no avail.
What have I learned from this? Not much I didn’t already know.
The phone is engineered to keep you looking at it and much of its addiction is, indeed, the color. It’s sad that we’ve gotten to this place. That a screen would be brighter, fuller, and more satisfying than the beauty of real life. But here we are.
I found the experiment fun, and I’m going to continue my swap to greyscale every other week for some time and see what happens.
Stop scrolling. Read my book instead.
With love,
Bethany
