Low tech Lammite

Between lockdowns one and two, I had to quit something. It was a substance, one I was taking too much of. The parties where this substance was normally prevalent had stopped but in my pandemic ‘bubble’, which consisted of an eight-person houseshare of 20-somethings, it still flowed freely every weekend.

I’ve written about my breaking point before: October 2021, 4am; a sunken couch. It took me two tries to properly kick the habit; the first time I faltered after six months. The second stuck. I adopted certain touchstones throughout these periods, to help resist the siren call of the drug at vulnerable moments. The most effective of these was a visual aid — a TikTok. It was a skit, showing a girl holding a large balloon, about to inhale. ‘Glue’, by Bicep is playing. Birds are audible. She pauses; slowly lowers the balloon, and gives the camera a Kubrickian thousand-yard stare. It was captioned something like ‘4am at the afters’. Its chilling effect was one any anti-drug theatre troupe trawling school assemblies would have killed for.

Quitting that drug was easy, in the long run. I wasn’t yet addicted, just preoccupied and compelled by it. I could still control my usage well enough that stopping was possible without any accompanying support programmes. Far harder is the great Everest of my life: going low tech.

That’s what we’re calling it now, breaking the hold that social media, the internet and smartphones have on us. Low tech. It’s not entirely accurate, of course. I love tech; things like planes, ECGs, automated production lines, I am all for. I don’t want low brain scans. However, it’s the most pithy way to express the lifestyle it describes and is also how August Lamm, the human touchstone I’ve adopted for this ongoing struggle, phrases it.