Flies
Previously we discussed the conceptual proof of attention is all we have. Then life somehow threw me a vivid example with a supernatural kick.
Exactly 10 days ago, I decided to fast from social media. I have struggled with doomscrolling since 2019. I have used social media to avoid pain, fatigue and boredom in real life. Doomscrolling has deteriorated my quality of life significantly. The impact on my wellbeing is unbeknownst to me until I did an audit of where I spent my time and how I felt. I has discovered all my time and energy were spent on increasing my anxiety and despair. The anxiety and despair in return drag me down to a deeper hole of my doomscrolling. Another factor is these days I finally had the time to taste what it could be if I am fully present throughout my day with my significant others. The contrast is too big to ignore. I want more of those moments of sublime sweetness.
Previously I have tried multiple tricks to try to limit it but all of them were to no avail. In this attempt, I felt empowered and decided to take a nuke approach. I deleted the 4 horsemen of doomscrolling in my phone: Instagram, Threads, Facebook & Twitter. Below is the change of average screen time this week.
Deep down I am amazed and in disbelief.
So you can see the difference is tremendous.
I encountered something that was too coincidental when I was on the second or third day of my fasting journey. That morning when I left my flat, I spotted something weird: there were flies in the lift lobby.
a GenAI illustration of the floor plan of my lift lobby
The lift lobby has no window, the waste room is always closed. Our cleaning lady cleans it every day. There should be no insects. But the door of the waste room had been a few hours the day before and I had closed it since then. For some reason I started counting. There were 4 flies. All 4 of them were chilling right in front of my front door. Given my experience with flies, there was little chance for me to hit them, so I decided to leave them alone.
When I came back later that day, they were again, in front of my flat.
My wife was afraid of them flying into our flat, so we quickly rushed into our flat. My wife put up a small bag decoration soaked with Eucalyptus essential oil to repel the flies. I felt eerie. I went online to look it up, and learned that flies in the Christianity usually represent Beelzebub, a demon of gluttony.[1] If you look closer, doomscrolling is a form of modern gluttony, you consume social media so much that you are hurting yourself. It is considered easier to be depressed and social media can be a source of despair as none of the news out there can be positive.[2]
4 apps, 4 flies. What a coincidence.
Me when I am tired, bored or running away from pain.
And later that day, I went out of my flat again, and I saw 1 of them on the floor in front of my house. I stepped on it and I crushed it. And then I decided to look for all of them. I managed to kill 2 more. I felt even more weird. The flies should be very agile and it is almost impossible to kill them, but these flies I have killed flew very slowly.
I went into the elevator, thinking I have done a great job killing them, with a hunch of angst, “I still get a bad feeling about this.”
As the elevator was going down, I received my wife’s call, “There is one in our flat!”
And I rushed back. After a few minutes of hide and seek, I killed it with an unexpected ease.
I triumphed against all 4 of my demons, little I knew that I haven’t done with them yet.
The next morning when I left the flat with my family, 4 flies in the corridor showed up A.G.A.I.N. Did they just respawn like those monsters in the computer games? Feeling frustrated, I am tempted to kill them again. This time I choose differently. I decided they weren’t worth 1 second of my life. I contacted the building management to help find the source of flies. And I urge them to make sure there is no strange smell coming from our floor. As I did everything I could to find the source of flies and eradicate them, I went out in relative peace and enjoyed the rest of my day, without having them annoying me in my mind.
And the next day, I saw 3 dead flies on the floor. The tactic of letting nature do its job worked. And since then there have been no more flies in the lift lobby.
Let’s keep it this way.
It is probably easier for you to ignore the flies in your life. Time flies and you must attend to the more important matters.