The Screen and I
I feel I’ve been in a hamster wheel for 3 years since I started to establish myself as a freelance cellist, rather than a relatively closeted cellist where I was playing for myself and enjoying the complete freedom that comes with it not being linked to my income. The hamster wheel looked like this: getting up early every morning for the maximum productivity, learning software, writing e-mails, building social media feeds, researching, making a podcast, doing projects on my own initiative from the lack of a network of musicians, dealing with bookkeeping, and of course maintaining a minimum level of my own cello practice going. With time, there came more and more cello students and more and more projects and gigs. Every day I felt like there was not enough time for everything I wanted to do. Every day I felt like there was not enough time for everything I wanted to do.
That in itself is a bit crazy, I think. It leads to one place: a wall.
For the past several weeks, I haven’t been able to keep going at the same tempo. I don’t know what triggered it but I’ve been standing outside of myself for some time, looking in on myself. It feels crucial to swim up to the surface and take some air, look around, question what I’m doing.
On the large scale there’s life itself; is this what I want to do with my life? What will I think when I’m on my deathbed, looking back at what was my only life?
The scale gets smaller and smaller all the way down to questions like Is my Facebook page worth keeping? and Is it time to use a more private, paid e-mail service rather than gmail?
On the one hand, I know that a lot of this thinking is just me getting lost in my own mind. And on the other hand, I see the value in being able to take control of how I actually spend my time and which platforms and companies I support.
But back to the larger scale: Am I doing what I want to be doing with my life? Being a freelance musician involves things that mean a lot of screen time. I’ve never spent this much time on a screen ever before. I didn’t even own a computer when I wrote my master’s thesis. It’s a bit weird that my job, essentially an activity where no electricity is needed, results in all this screen time. How did that happen? Well, in order to let my future colleagues and students know of my existence I made myself a homepage, a Facebook page, an Instagram account and a LinkedIn profile. Then, I started to make a podcast which involves at least four different types of software. I started to write music digitally since it’s less strenous for my hands, and it’s so much easier to transpose a score to a different key, or simply add a couple of bars in the middle without having to rewrite half the score by hand. E-mails take time every day; communicating with my students and my colleagues, with potential grant providers, with my accountant, etc. I also decided to make an online cello learning space which involve countless hours of video editing. I use software for making posters for my concerts. Ironically, I’m also right now in front of a screen, writing a blog post about whether or not I spend too much time in front of a screen.
I could easily lose my thread here.
The point is, being a freelance musician is on the whole exactly what I want to do with my life. The freedom to choose my workhours, the joy of playing and teaching, the excitement of bringing creativity to my workday - these things weigh heavier than the bookkeeping (whoever says that if you know music you also know maths, haven’t met me) and the screen hours.
It seems my screen hours is what I wish to change. E-mails in particular is frequently a stress factor. I think it’s because my inbox confronts me with how fragmented my world is. One e-mail is from a student wanting to schedule the coming lessons; the next is from my dad wondering how I’m doing; the next is a newsletter about international drug policy, the next is about home insurance; the next is a cozy thing with my siblings… You get the picture. What I always do is to go through them one by one until there are no more unread e-mails. But every one of these lead into a world of their own. One brings me into my calendar. The other brings me to my family. The next brings me out into the politics of ‘the World’. It’s exhausting. Am I the only one who finds this exhausting? Or am I just getting used to not getting involved, to do what’s necessary for me to move on with my day with the least amount of energy spent. I suspect that might be the case. This is why I can’t imagine sending out an e-mail newsletter myself, because I suspect that it’ll be read by people who skim through it in order to reach that point where -just for some minutes- there are no unread messages in the inbox.
I think I’m fed up with content. As a creative person who put my soul into a simple Instagram post, it’s just become a bit painful. Post something today, and it’ll be invisible next week, together with millions of other pictures and videos. I grew up in a time when there was respect for content. It took time to make, it was circulated slowly, made with care, not disposed of lightly. Without it being a conscious decision, I’ve been keeping a distance to the social media platforms I’ve been using. I need a good WHY, and a good WHAT, now before continuing.
AI-tools are making some people embrace those new possibilities, while I just feel like jumping off that train before getting on (I have prompted some AI-generated images, which was fun for a little while but now I can’t stand the look of them). I want to spend more of my life on what I perceive to be real; what I see with my own eyes (that’s not a screen), what I hear with my own ears (that doesn’t come from a server and through speakers), and what I can touch and shape with my own hands. Cello playing is just this, it’s real. Leaving the philosophical discussion of ‘reality’ aside, cello playing is real, it’s valuable, rewarding, therapeutic, nourishing and grounding. It’s not draining, it contains no ads, it’s not stressful, confusing, or disturbing for my circadian rhythm. There is no ‘share’ button or ‘save’ button or ‘upload’ button. No cookies, unless I baked them myself. My cello practice isn’t stored on a drive, it’s happening in the moment.
What am I writing about again? I think I wanted to see my thoughts in writing. There’s an incoherence here, I can see it. The screens took over my workdays so quickly that I haven’t caught up with what’s happened yet. Just wanted to share that.
