Single Purpose Device Month - Update #1
It's been one week since I've shifted to only using single purpose devices and well...
A fog has lifted. Work filled pomodoro after pomodoro have fallen before me. My to-do list is now a crossed out mess of a page. I am now fluent in three languages. My habits have been stacked to hell and back, my protein goals smashed and there's so much fibre in my diet that I no longer require toilet paper. My girlfriend says I remind her of John Limitless from the movie Limitless. Life is good.
Alas, it's only been a week and there have been no dramatic changes, but I do have a few observations.
I have carried around an iPod/Phone with Spotify for around 15 years now. For a very long time it's been something I've not really thought about, but there's seldom been a time when I've been alone and without headphones in. Sometimes, an album comes out and I'm excited for it, so I make an effort to listen to it front to back while going about my day. I'll pick out my favourite tracks, add them to my year playlist and move on. I don't really see anything wrong with this, I could probably do with spinning albums more than a few times, but I think this is a relatively healthy way to engage with new music I'm into. What I think is bad for me, and something I do far more often, is just put on music without really thinking about what I'm listening too. It's simply there to fill a gap formed out of habit. This leads to listening to the same bands, the same playlists and the same songs over and over again. I've never really thought much about it until this week. At the start of the week I put a bunch of music onto an old iPod I got from a market near my house for the princely sum of £5. As I am a man in my 30s I put a bunch of Neil Young on there I hadn't listened to before, Bjork's discography and a bunch of albums from the Japanese environmental music maestro Hiroshi Yoshimura. A lot of this I had not heard before, and I'd make a concerted effort to listen to an album all the way through. Unless I really wanted to listen to something, I just wouldn't.
One of the great things about this, is that I feel like I've made a few more memories with these songs. I can remember where exactly I was, what I was doing and how it felt listening to some of this music for the first time. A few days ago I had been with a few friends at the pub and got a night bus home. In London over the last week it has been freezing cold. I mean longjohns, two pairs of socks, hoodie under jacket cold. I was walking down a high street where every shop was now closed, the road ahead only illuminated by street lamps and headlights reflected in puddles on the pavement. I had been slowly making my way through the second part of these Neil Young archives when this version of Speakin Out began to play, as I walked down a more residential road I was plunged into temporary darkness, the only light on the road was coming from the front room of someone's house, there was clearly a party going on. Silhouettes danced in the window while in my ears a very obviously half drunk Neil Young asked a band mate for a drink, the whole thing made me feel for a brief second as if I wasn't just stumbling home, but about to walk into a dive bar and see a band playing in the corner. I stopped for a second, looking at the window from the other side of the road, the slow, meandering jam playing in my ears, then I took my hands out of my pockets and turned the volume up a bit more before stumbling home.
-Stray Observations-
- Loading music onto an iPod in 2026 is surprisingly easy. I remember it being a pain, but I assume that's because I was using the dreaded windows version of iTunes? Nowadays it's as easy as loading music onto a flash drive.
- I've had a few moments where I've wanted to show someone a video or search for an ancient meme and then remembered that I can't because it's against the law. This has either prompted a conversation about my silly little challenge, or I've just asked them a question about themselves and we've moved on. Either way, nothing of value was lost.
- The iPod I bought is old, as a result the battery life is abysmal and it is constantly lying about its actual level. For the most part this is fine, I keep it docked (My GF and I have a multi-purpose speaker dock thing we are using for the time being in the living room). However, there was an occasion where I hadn't charged it and went to the gym with it only to find it was completely dead. I ended up doing a HIIT routine (bad) in complete silence in a brightly lit room (worse), at one point I was sitting on my ass doing Russian twists and my dog like panting was the only thing I could hear (the worst). I felt like Patrick Bateman, it sucked.