The origin of all maps is direct experience. Direct experience is a source of knowledge and energy which is always available and has no substitute.[^1]
>catherine lost her computer while on vacation and spent a week without computer or phone
>she says she feels a bit feral, but in a good way. I feel like I can also feel a difference
>she is dreaming of having no laptop,
>just having her computer be in a physical location where it is used.
>or of getting a job with her hands, becoming a cook
>
>day 10 (tuesday)
>enjoyed getting coffee with Isaac, and baking a sweet potato for myself in the evening.
>not sure if this deserves to be in the journal or not, but it felt nice to buy a single sweet potato, and take it home and bake it and eat half of it for dinner (with rice and beans) and then eat the other half for breakfast the next day with eggs
I also wrote a bit about ups and downs I went through of wanting to “end the project” and go back to using my smart phone at different points, and how ultimately I “gave up” in May but then two days later I went back to using my dumb phone by choice and I didn’t feel as agitated anymore when it was now no longer part of an experiment but just something I was doing and could stop whenever I wanted.
I then continued to use the dumb phone for the rest of the year until November 29 of 2019, except for a period when I was in the US without a working sim card.
up staying in my bag out of batteries for days without me noticing. Disconnection practices can be a tool to help us reconnect with our senses in the interim.
<figcaption>"where are my books which dumb ass steals my books" - one of three text messages saved in drafts of used phone I bought on November 18 of 2018</figcaption>
[^1]: As a short philosophical digression, one could argue that even our "direct" visual perception is mediated by culture and our past experience and so in some sense is also not direct. On the other hand, we all know the difference between hearing someone tell you what someone else said (a form of mediation) and hearing it directly. So like many philosophical questions, we can see that there is some ambiguity, but also like touching our nose with our finger or breathing there are lots of things we can do without knowing exactly how we do it, and we can still speak about a spectrum from more direct to less direct in a useful way. If I needed a definition of direct for this writing, it might be "without being recorded".