2025 / #07: Declutter

I’m back from two weeks in Goa, and honestly, I don’t quite feel like getting back to real life. I’m a quarter Goan, and there’s a part of me that feels like home there. It’s hot and muggy, but I love that the capital city feels like a small town and is small enough that you could circumnavigate it in 40 minutes, I love that once you’re out of the city it’s all open roads with wonderful greenery around, and I love being near the sea, even in monsoon when you can’t go swimming (especially in monsoon, because that’s when there are no tourists).

It was a good time – a bunch of friends visited throughout the trip, and K and I got to pig out on all the meat and fish we could’ve wished for. While we were there, a couple of my friends decided to give me an early birthday gift and got me a beautiful guitar – an Epiphone classic guitar reissue, so I guess I’ve got a new hobby (I used to play when I was a kid, but entirely lost touch since).

The first half of July was quite busy at work, but that’s because I decided to take that two-week break. I tried frantically to finish all my commitments before going, so I wouldn’t have to work on vacation, but I wasn’t quite able to. By my count, I did 2.5 days of work while on vacation, but my usual workday is 3 hours these days, so that’s not too bad.

Since I got back, I wrapped up Everything Dead & Dying #2, and then Resurrection Man #6, which arrived after I got back. Now I have an eight-pager to letter till the end of the month, and one full issue if I get the script in time. My plan for the rest of my time is to make revision notes for the second issue of SEASIDE, so I can do a second draft of it in August.

Release-wise, The Department of Truth #32 came out this week, but that seems to be the only book out since last we spoke. The Internet also tells me that Human Nature #1 is out this week, but I don’t think that’s the case?

As I was writing this post, this year’s Eisner Awards were announced. Delighted that The One Hand/The Six Fingers won for Best Graphic Album (Reprint), my pal Jordie Bellaire won for Best Colouring, and Clayton Cowles won for Best Lettering (after Hass last year, it’s nice to see career letterers winning this one more – other than the great Todd Klein, of course, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame this year). Also, nothing related to me, but Tokyo These Days won for Best US Edition of International Material – and that was one of my favourite books this year – you should read that.

I didn’t do much work on the vacation, as I said, but the artist on SEASIDE continued to do thumbnails, so we’d spend a fair bit of time on the phone and on Google Meet talking about them. We’ve now got 18 pages of thumbnails finalised (from a 34-page first issue), and we paused and picked a page to finish up as a test page. This is so we can nail down the style the artist is going to use, as well as figuring out what colouring style fits the art best.

I’ve seen the inks on the test page, and they’re gorgeous. It’s being coloured right now, and I can’t wait to see the finished page. Now that the first page has been drawn and inked, it feels like work on this is properly underway (six months since I wrote the first page of script, and two months after we started working on character designs).

My fortieth birthday approaches, so I reread this long correspondence from the ’90s between Alan Moore and Dave Sim (who by this point was already deep into his esoteric misogynistic Judeochristoislam thing). Reading a long Alan Moore interview has been a birthday ritual for me for more than a decade now – Moore’s considerate and principled approach to his life is a model for how to look at one’s life and one’s art deliberately, and it always helps me reconsider my life and what I want to do with it for the next little duration.

There was a non-zero chance that I might pick up religion in the way Moore did (he celebrated his 40th by “going spectacularly mad”, and is now a magician who worships a snake god that was revealed as a fake in the 2nd century), because I think most people have an instinct for religion – that is, something larger than themselves that they can feel a part of and that they relate to as an engine for the universe – and I felt that eventually I might come to that way of thinking, and when I did, it would be useful to have a religion standing by rather than join an existing organised religion (I’d especially want to avoid Hinduism, both Brahminical and esoteric).

Over the last five years, I’ve been reading different mythologies and spiritual/magical philosophies to see if one felt particularly interesting over the others (I’ve had a lot of fun exploring these texts in a historical and scholarly context, but none has exceeded that). But I’m nearly 40 and remain resolutely atheist, almost by instinct. I would’ve loved my mid-life crisis to be “turn into a wizard”, but that’s not happening. I do want to develop a more numinous connection with the world, but that’ll take its time and can’t be forced.

For all that, as I said last time around, I think it’s time for a big change in life – something that reflects the rearrangement of my priorities in the last few years away from work and towards something more artistically fulfilling. But it’s something I’m still figuring out. I had assumed it would be writing, but while I’m having a ball writing SEASIDE, it doesn’t feel like I want writing to take over my life in the way it had in my 20s. It’ll likely be something else. I’ve got a few more months before I have the time to indulge in whatever I decide to indulge in, so this is the time for thinking.

While on my vacation, I reread Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. I recently read his latest book – Slow Productivity – and felt like it was time to go back and read my favourite books by him – Deep Work and this one. I made copious notes on Deep Work, but this one’s a lot simpler, given that it’s less about actively doing things and more about choosing not to do stuff.

A fair few things Newport suggests here are already part of my life – I have no social media or email on my phone, my notifications are off for everything other than calls and text. I used to organise my life using Things and Trello, but now my system sits in a notebook, I spend a lot of my time with my phone in the other room, and pursuing quality, immersive entertainment like films and books rather than doomscrolling. But I do have one scrolling app on my phone – Reddit – and I still access social media on my laptop.

One of Newport’s suggestion in this book that I didn’t implement the first time I read it is a “Digital Declutter” – a thirty-day break from all social media and scrolling apps. He phrases it as such rather than as a “digital detox” because the latter implies that it is a temporary thing. Instead, his suggestion is that after thirty days, you take stock on what you feel you really need back in your life, and only go back to those things, and not everything again.

I didn’t do this last time because back then Twitter was more useful to me than it was distracting – the entire comics industry was on there, and I got a fair bit of my work by connecting with folks there or by simply posting my work on Twitter. This isn’t the case anymore.

I’ve been very conscious for the last couple of years about what takes up my time and attention, and I was surprised some months ago to find something I hadn’t thought of. Last month, Joe Hill had a section in his newsletter called “How to Set”:

Now and then it’s crucial to set for a while. This is an action often confused with sitting for a while but they’re not the same. Clay has to set before it hardens into its final form. Cement has to set before you’ve got a sidewalk. When the sun sets, you need to be still for a moment—look up from your work, your phone, your anxieties—or you’ll miss the sky at its most breathtaking.

Before the smartphone, people used to set all the time. The way you set, you park yourself in a chair in the garden—a wooden glider is ideal—with a cold drink in one hand. And then you don’t do anything. Maybe you get the sun on your face. The children rampage about, calling to one another and pursuing each other, swept up in their private three-year-old missions. There are chores that need doing but it’s not the time to do them. There might be a transistor radio caching a classic rock station: Boston, Hendrix, Journey, an ad for a car dealership, an ad for affordable flights to Orlando, a traffic report, Tom Petty, Wings. Nowadays you’d use your phone and a bluetooth speaker to put on a favorite playlist and without even realizing it, you’re not setting anymore. Because you can’t pick up the phone without falling back under its sway. You’ll start looking at the news and what they’re saying about the news on TikTok and then you’ve blown it, your attention captured by an algorithm (again).

He continues, and the rest is worth a read, but I was taken aback by this. I live in a house at the foot of a hill just outside town, facing west, and one of my favourite things to do when I first moved here was to make coffee in the evening, pull up a chair in my balcony and just watch the sun go down. I was reminded that as much as I have taken my attention back from my phone, I haven’t yet reconnected with the things that truly enrich my life.

So I wanted to do a digital declutter, properly. Unlike the last time, I don’t need social media for my work anymore, or to stay connected with my friends. Everyone I know hates social media, even those who are still ever-present on it, and I don’t think I have any friends whom I can only reach over social media. My feeling is that there’s nothing to be gained from being on most of these places these days, and it would be fine to just … not do any of these things for a month and see which accounts I want to delete.

The one thing I really feel I will miss is r/AskHistorians, where actual historians answer very fascinating questions about the past, but I can always check back in after the declutter and read the backlog.

So, on 1st August, I’ll be deleting all the apps and/or logging out of Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky and Reddit. Letterboxd too, most likely – though I’m sure this one I’ll want back. On 1st September, I’ll check through my notes and see which ones feel additive and which ones are just clutter. And if Reddit needs to be on my phone at all (I suspect not).

The blog will continue – this is the only part of my active internet I’ve felt I should be on more rather than less. So I’ll keep seeing you folks here. It’s just those other folks I won’t be seeing.

Ta!