my mum doesn’t know how to turn on a laptop
and i think i'm jealous
When I sat next to my four-year-old second cousin in a car the other week, I was astonished that she knew how to access the games on my phone, play a game, skip ads and cancel a request to add the game to my home screen. Maybe this is normal for four-year-olds but I am never around children so I have no idea. But I was impressed.
I am, however, around my mother enough to know that she wouldn’t even know where to begin if it came to playing a game on my phone. Or, more realistically, send an email for example.
Sometimes, actually no, 90% of the time, this is infuriating. This is exactly the reason why I decided I would never become a teacher because I have next to no patience for this sort of thing. But as the world keeps turning towards AI and personal brands and curating content, I’ve come to realise that my mum has it good. Really good.
If you said algorithm to my mum, she’d think you were choking on something. “Alga- who??” she’d reply in her musical Caribbean accent. She’s living in a completely different world from the rest of us. In fact, she’s Barbie, it’s her world and we’re all just living in it, “obsessed with our phones” and “too concerned with other people’s perception of us” (I’m paraphrasing to avoid being triggered by these common refrains I’ve heard my entire life). But maybe she’s had it right all along. Her refusal to learn how to send an email or copy and paste a sentence has given her the freedom to live her life without even questioning whether she should start a TikTok account or how many likes a post will get.
Now, she is an extreme case. Of course it’s just a basic skill nowadays to know how to send an email or use Ctrl+C, and her age would predispose her not to be interested in every new iPhone that looks just like the one before anyway, but if it’s one thing this woman has it’s a full life.
If she’s not chatting with friends on the phone, she’s at the gym or she’s buying up everything in the reduced aisle at Tesco (it’s a bit of an issue but at least she has hobbies), or she’s rearranging something in her house, reading her religious books, going to fitness classes, going to events in the neighbourhood, the list goes on.
Yet I’ve spent the majority of the last four years watching YouTube? Making yet another Instagram account? Checking how many likes a picture got? Someone give me back my Nokia brick phone, NOW.
That doesn’t sound like a full life. And I know that now because I have consciously made the decision to try and live a fuller life. I even took it a step too far and had to miss out on seeing Pandora Sykes at Penguin because I had filled my calendar up a little too much. My introverted soul could do no more.
Since trying to fill up my life a little more, I've noticed that I've been using screens a little less—or at least in a more useful way. I used to spend entire days horizontal and staring at my laptop screen and I wouldn't feel good about it, yet I still continued to do so anyway. (This is similar to the way many people use social media now, making reels, planning posts, brainstorming content ideas, even when they simply don't want to. But for some reason, they feel like they have to. Where did that pressure come from? Why is it so hard to stop?)
Now if I'm horizontal and facing my laptop, it's because I've just come back from an entire day at an art gallery or hanging out with my friends or seeing a play. I'm tired but in the best way, and I need to recharge by turning my brain off for a little and watching cari cakes prance about in South Korea or a Jubilee debate on astrology. It no longer feels like something I'm doing to avoid something else but using something for its intended purpose—just to chill for a bit.
My mum has never and will never have that problem. She hasn't had to say to herself “Right, I've had enough of society gagging me with these colourful apps, I'm going to reach down my gullet and pull them out myself!” She's blissfully unaware of the work it takes to unplug and say no, I no longer have an Instagram account and I don't care if that means giving people I've just met my number is a little “forward”. She hasn't had that inner battle with herself, downloading apps to block other apps on her phone or using timers so she doesn’t accidentally do another thumb-scrolling workout for 3+ hours. She's living her best offline life and she has no idea.
What happened to blissful ignorance? There is an expectation now to know everything that is happening at all times, around the entire world! People are surprised when they ask me if I've seen that guy on TikTok who does the thing and I look at them like a blank sheet of paper and they look at me like I have a third eye. What's going on?
Our parents may be stuck in their ways but perhaps we could do with a bit of grounding ourselves. Maybe we could use a bit of that mud they’re stuck in to stop ourselves from chasing every new Thing online, every news update, every meme, every new post, every notification, every ad, every product.
My mum can be extremely stubborn and it's incredibly annoying but I know she's passed a bit of that on to me as well. So why not channel it into something good? I don't care how annoying it is that you have to screen-record memes for me because I don't have the app installed, my stick is staying firmly planted in the no social media apps mud.
Social media may seem like the oxygen we breathe nowadays but it isn't. You can be stubborn too. You can live in your own world just like my mum—and be a bit of an inconvenience—but be happy at the end of the day.
I wouldn't recommend refusing to learn any new (necessary!!) technologies that come our way, but be firm in what you don't want to give your time to anymore.
Be like my mum. Be happily clueless.
Hello lovely readers! I’m trying something new and moved my chatty bit towards the bottom of my posts. I think sometimes you just want to get stuck into a post you’ve found instead of reading the personal bits on top (which can sometimes get a bit lengthy here oops). How have you been this past week? I hope you enjoyed today’s post!
I posted a note yesterday about how I haven’t been on social media for a while and I was surprised but so glad that a few people have also been doing the same. I think the movement to turn away from social media and find joy in living offline again is bigger than we all think and I love that for us. Are you thinking about deleting those apps? If you have already, how are you feeling?
I’m obsessed with all things offline and coming off social media at the moment, so I want to hear about your experiences! Also, if anyone has any article/substack recs about this sort of thing, please send it my way!
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Thank you for this piece, Candice! While reading your quotes of your mother I could definitely hear my Caribbean mother’s voice and attitude coming through as well😂. I agree that the root of our problem is that we are rooting our lives in the digital world rather than the physical. However, when the expectation is to be more grounded in the digital world, how can we build tangible communities among peers?
I was literally planning on writing on my social media journey next month (but I’ve moved that post to August). I spent 2017-2023 gradually deleting and letting go of social media accounts. I don’t have Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and although I have a TikTok account, I never use it because I don’t have the app on my phone–it’s too distracting for me. And I feel as if I have way more space in my life. Every time I tell people I’m not on social media, they’re always shocked and ask me what I do with my time and I’ve started telling them I live life.