finding real color
How going grayscale restores the vibrancy of life / February 8, 2024
Most people say I'm insane when they see my phone screen, and they're probably right. Everything is in black-and-white. Prompted by a post on r/digitalminimalism a couple weeks ago, I poked around in my phone's settings a bit and managed to find the grayscale color filter in its accessibility settings.
We all know how modern design exploits color, whether it be through bright-red dots on everything that needs our attention, overwhelmingly glitzy tiktoks trying their hardest to make us focus for more than three seconds, ads that seem more prominent than anything you actually wanted to look at—whatever. But I didn't truly understand the extent of this effect until it was gone. Instantly, everything was about ten times more boring than it had ever been since the dawn of the modern internet—and that's a good thing.
Where hoisting myself out of the endless pit of doomscrolling had previously seemed a herculean task, it was now difficult to even start. I basically stopped using all social media cold-turkey, and I didn't even have to try.
won't you just... turn it off?
The thing that surprised me most about this change is that I haven't given up on it yet, and I don't really have any desire to... at all. In the past, almost every screen-time-management solution has basically turned out useless, over-restricting the things I needed until the only choice was to cave and turn it off entirely. Apple's time limits are a joke (press a button and you're back in the action!) and software like Opal isn't much better (if you wait 20 seconds, feel free to take a fifteen-minute break).
Most of all, though, I feel like the fatal flaw of these "solutions" is that they didn't make me want to use my phone less. They didn't do anything to make it less appealing, besides being a little angel on your shoulder to say "hey, uhh... don't you think you've been looking at this thing a while? erm… maybe you should stop… if you want…"
In this regard, switching my phone to grayscale is the only real solution I've encountered so far. It's not a subtle reminder from an apathetic third party that you should maybe, just maybe, consider doing something else—it's a fundamental modification of the experience that makes you want to do something else.
maintaining what's important
What's more, this approach doesn't limit you from doing what you should be using your phone for. Roommate sent you a message on Instagram? Feel free to check it out. Want to keep up with friends on Snapchat? Go ahead. Unlike screen-time-tailored solutions, you don't need to fight the system that's meant to contribute to your self-improvement—in fact, with the reduction of background noise, what you want to see is all the more clear.
This flexibility is critical since what we might want from technology is in a constant state of flux. While YouTube may be nothing more than a distraction most of the time, it also might be a medium for you to review a critical lecture before an exam or expand your sociopolitical perspective with a video essay. App blockers don’t account for this; it’s all or nothing. However, by eliminating distractions rather than access, a simple filter manages to subvert this issue entirely. Through the removal of superficial attention sinks that prey on the id, your attention is diverted back to the purpose for which it evolved in the first place: self-improvement.
reading
One aspect of the change that I didn't anticipate is that I've started reading. Books, editorials, news articles, even research papers sometimes. Looking back, though, the reason for this is blatantly obvious: textual media don't use color in the first place. Or at least, they don't use it to capture your attention. The playing field had been leveled, and with my attention back in my control, choosing to read wasn't just easy—it was appealing. I know I sound like a geezer telling people to drop tiktok and pick up a book, but just give it a shot. Accumulating truly substantive knowledge feels good.
photography
As a bit of a side note, I wanted to bring up photography. This was perhaps the only reservation I had with the change to grayscale. Like anyone else, I like taking pictures of flowers, mountains, beautiful sunsets—documenting the moment when golden hues cascade over the Boston skyline so that I can stumble upon those memories in my camera roll some six months later. Wouldn't the lack of color ruin that experience of perfectly capturing a time capsule of my surroundings?
No, not really.
There's a reason why film cameras are still a thing (other than the fact that they make really pretty photos). A certain novelty emerges in not knowing how your picture turned out until it's too late to retake it: you're stuck with what you've got, and maybe, just maybe, what you've got is beautiful. That's how it is looking at photos I've taken in grayscale when I do eventually see them in color, and I'm more than okay with that.
to conclude
Your attention is your most valuable resource, and if you're like me, you've probably lost some (or a lot) of it to the stimulation machine in the palm of your hand. Maybe you've turned on screen time monitoring, seen that yesterday's doomscrolling amounted to six hours, and guiltily disabled the feature thirty minutes later. Maybe you've installed a content blocker, only to instinctually ignore its nagging reminders. Maybe you've given up on resistance altogether, languishing in your algorithmic feed of visual ASMR because you can't find anything else that fills the void.
Maybe, at last, it's worth sacrificing the color on your screen, if it means you can see more in the world around you.