Another Go at Screen-Free Saturdays

As a professional computer programmer, digital photographer^[1], compulsive diarist, and all-around information addict, I spend an incredible amount of time staring at a laptop. It’s unnatural and certainly unhealthy. So, I’m setting aside one day each week to abstain from using screens. It isn’t so easy. For one reason and another, Saturdays are the only practical opportunity for me to log off for an entire day at a time. In a perfect scenario, I would have Saturday free of computers, phones, media, and chores^[2] as something like a secular sabbath.^[3] I'm not even close to there, yet.

Yesterday, I had a go at a computer-free Saturday. I planned to spend most of the day outdoors on a rainy day photo walk as a screen-free alternative, but the weather was quite cold and heavy rains soaked me to the bones within twenty or thirty minutes, so I retreated back inside to the safety of a dry apartment and long naps on the new sofa. I peeked at my phone a few times, and watched a whole lot of YouTube on the smart TV, mostly videos about Fujifilm camera setup^[4] or cooking shows featuring dishes I’ll never attempt to prepare, but all the laptops remained closed for the entire day. It was nice.

1. I shoot some film too, but even that winds up being scanned onto the computer.

2. I find life as a professional adult largely amounts to a time-devouring routine of working at a computer, followed by household chores, broken up every few months by some new medical procedure, and occasionally there’s pizza, but only very seldom does the pizza have pepperoni on it, for fear of more medical procedures.

3. I’ve tried out this secular sabbath idea in the past, but it never worked out. I’m not sure how it’s even possible for there always to be so many chores in need of choring.

4. I sold my Bitcoin collection a couple of weeks ago, and used the money to buy an X100Vi as an upgrade to my X100V. I can’t believe my V is almost three years old already!!! The time passes quickly, and that’s a good thing too, because they tell me my new camera won’t roll off the factory floor for another two or three months.