How (and Why) to Avoid Death by Notification

Author Karl Knausgaard's anti-phone philosophy

Most teenagers get 200+ app notifications a day. Any generation can relate: across emails, texts, comments, DMs, shares, likes, and a thousand one-off app notifications, there are too many things for anyone to have time for any thing but responding to other things.

“Notification” is a fancy word for distraction. Distractions are moments of amnesia. Every time you’re distracted, it takes almost a half hour focus again and you can’t remember things as well. As Norway’s literary legend, Karl Knausgaard, explains, we are dissolving into ourselves in modern culture. As he puts it in an interview from 2018:

Nowadays things are less and less things in themselves—they are in a position, you know? And I think there is a longing in “My Struggle” to get to the things in themselves. It’s the same with the self. I think that’s why the self is so huge in the book—because there’s a feeling that somehow it’s disappearing.

In the interview, we see an artist who believes a digital-first world makes the soul slippery and soluble. As Knausgaard explains, he wrote My Struggle’s seven epic volumes (2009-2011) in order to find himself through a brand of autofiction that proved so popular in Norway that the series has sold one copy for every nine Norwegian adults and went on to be translated in more than 30 languages.

There’s something valuable to be gleaned from this interview as Knausgaard explains why he had to write himself back into existence: it’s that the stories we tell ourselves, not the stories we share or consume, is how we figure ourselves out and find our center.

Next time you’re about to scroll the stream instead of, ahem, express the dream, dwell on these four anti-phone principles from Knausgaard from the interview:

1. Devices Offer Only Indirect Access to the World.

The screen is not the world but a medium through which we experience the world. To really experience reality, we have to find our story within it and become it.

It was because it gave my writing a more direct access to the world around me. And then, at some point, I started to look at the main character—myself—as a kind of place where emotions, thoughts, and images passed through.

2. Social Media Moods are Math, Not Miracles.

For every thought, you reflect: Is this what I am? Is this what I thought?

-Karl Knausgaard

One in five teenagers say that Instagram makes them feel worse about themselves. A fair collection of psychological literature has revealed the same. In our very human effort to belong as we grow during adolescence, we try to conform to a community through social media. In front of anonymous audiences, values become proving grounds and popularity gets measured and the loudest opinion wins. We follow the algorithm’s recipes for us and fill up on what the math decides is our information diet rather than finding the ingredients for our own. Our social media self is developed from a paint by numbers kit.

But how is any self developed in the first place? In writing My Struggle, Knausgaard explains he wanted to understand the process of that very real self, the default setting:

An important part of my books is that they want to find out how a particular view of the world comes into being. For Heidegger, the mood or state of mind always came first, because that is what you think through—your mood is always there. No document states it, it’s in no archive, you can try to describe it, but the point is that we don’t think about it, it’s just there. In these books, by writing about so much that I don’t control, I hoped that all this would somehow become visible.

Want to understand the real self?

Express something without thinking about sharing it.

Or, as Kurt Vonnegut once wrote to a high school class:

Here's an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don't do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don't tell anybody what you're doing. Don't show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?

Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash recepticals [sic]. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow.

3. Without Stillness, There is No Art.

In Eric Pickersgill’s extraordinary and powerful photo series, Removed (2014-), he photoshops phones from people’s hands to reveal what we really see of the world in front of us when we stare at the screen: nothing.

It is in this nothing we dissolve. As Knausgaard believes of the inspiration behind My Struggle:

It’s very much about ideas of art and the sublime. The sublime is the perspective outside of us, which I feel is more and more lost in our time, because we’re more interconnected and less outside, and there’s no God anymore. Nowadays things are less and less things in themselves—they are in a position, you know? And I think there is a longing in “My Struggle” to get to the things in themselves. It’s the same with the self. I think that’s why the self is so huge in the book—because there’s a feeling that somehow it’s disappearing.

To find solid ground, we actually have to make something solid - and see ourselves in it.

4. You Lose Sight of the Singular Life.

What a novel can do… go into the particular, into the concrete, singular life. That’s the only thing that really exists.

-Karl Knausgaard

Novels put us in the heart of something so we can feel it in our own. Phones put us in our head, but fill it with other people’s thoughts. Instead of seeing the self outside the masses, the self becomes the masses. When you have a phone, anyone can reach you - at any time - and enter your life without warning. Is that your life?

Knausgaard suggests that literature is one layer beyond humanity:

A common history, a common culture, a common people. It is “we,” it is “us.” But that “we” is general—it doesn’t really exist, it’s a fiction. So the duty of literature is to fight fiction…

As a reader, you identify with them, and with identification a certain form of insight comes, filtered through your emotions rather than through your thoughts.

In other words, reading and writing is what helps us find empathy outside the anonymous headlines by showing us what’s in someone’s head past those headlines.

Presents of Presence

All of this essay started as a way to convince myself to delete the social apps that I felt were taking more than they were giving. Today marks the day that I’ve gotten rid of them all, so let’s see how long it lasts. It’s much easier to preach than practice when it comes to industrial addiction with no tangible downsides other than the fact that everything we value becomes so intangible, even the tokens of interaction we use to communicate with friends and family like memes, GIFs, choice meaty bits of outrage.

The embarrassingly personal relationship we have with our phones shows that we prioritize the dreams in the device over the dreams we can live in the present. But it’s when we daydream that we get our true inspirations and find our real purpose (as Proust explains). In the silence of the self, rather than the sharing of it, we can discover something within that helps us with everything without.

Knausgaard agrees, explaining his own method for finding his next memory of meaning:

I’ve developed a method, which is being in the present, sitting here, drinking some coffee, thinking of a memory. That’s the only way I know how to write. I don’t know how to write a novel. But I know that, if I just try, something might happen.