Technology and Poison Plants

Years ago, I underwent a surgery that left me bedbound for several weeks. Despite it being an excruciating procedure, I declined pain medication to manage the agony I was in. I wanted to be fully present for it all. I didn’t like the way I felt on narcotics and weaning off of them was always exhausting. I figured I could just deal with the discomfort of healing.

I did deal with it - sort of. I spent every waking minute of my recovery numbing myself with TikTok. I used it like a drug, consuming 30-second video after 30-second video until I was removed from my body and the pain. The distraction allowed me to survive the healing process, but it also changed the way I related to my devices. When another medical issue arose later, I turned to my distractions again. When anxiety overwhelmed me and I longed to reset after a hard day, I turned to my distractions again. When I was too tired to function, I turned to my distractions again.

Just like the metaphor of a frog in hot water, I didn’t notice the addiction creeping up on me. It finally clicked when my energy levels became constantly low and my chronic pain condition worsened. I suspiciously eyed my devices and remembered that, like all things in this world, too high of a dose turns anything into poison. Even something as essential for life as water has the potential to kill. It was clear that my phone had become something more than what it was intended for. The dependency had me in a chokehold and the poison was making me lethargic, disregulated, and depressed.

I wanted out of the cycle. Attention is a form of currency and technology was bleeding me dry. I tried breaking the habit with willpower, but the allure of a tiny backlit box with an endless scroll kept pulling me back in. Devices have evolved to entice us like brugmansia’s mesmerizing scent and I was not immune from becoming a human sacrifice.

Luckily, working with poison plants prepared me in how to handle toxicity.

Instead of trying to fight it like a weed in a pristine garden, I got curious. I noticed my compulsions and the way my body would react whenever I spent time around my devices. I thought about times in my life where I had felt fully present, realizing they were all when I had little access to technology. When Hurricane Helene obliterated the power grid in Appalachia, I became weirdly in-tune with my body. My rhythms fell back in line with the sun when screens were removed. I slept better, food tasted better, I understood my needs better. I felt like a kid in the 1990s again - before we had access to everything in an instant.

While there’s no way to go back to the beginning of our relationship with technology, I wanted to recontextualize it. In the 1990s, we had our devices tethered to the walls instead of our bodies. So I set up a dock in my office for all my technology to live in. The act of having to physically walk to my phone made the compulsion to check it diminish within a week. It became a choice to look at it, not a habit. And placing it at my workstation was a reminder that this was a tool again, not an extension of myself. It was like putting a plant back in its original ecosystem where it filled a niche - rather than let it spread everywhere as an opportunistic invasive.

I let the environmental metaphors continue with the idea of companion planting. This is an old gardening technique of growing plants together that benefit each other. I began setting neglected tasks from my to-do list next to my technology dock. When boredom would strike, I’d be confronted with an alternate option. Did I want a quick dopamine hit or would I like to feel accomplished? My to-do list and my screen time shrank simultaneously.

I wanted my interactions with this poison to mirror the relationship I had with dangerous plants: intentional in how I approach, respectful of their power, and mindful of boundaries. My experience needed to be more meditative and less like a runaway train. I eliminated anything on my devices designed to distract me. I turned off settings that made the phone seem more alive than it actually was. I paired my apps down to the bare minimum and set up time limits on social media. I dumbed my phone down to the point that it just had black text on a white screen, like a website without css. Removing the aesthetics made it easier to see my devices for what they really were.

Technology isn’t good or bad; its capacity to heal or harm comes from how it is managed. If I inhale brugmansia’s intoxicating scent too long, I’m sure to feel the effects. Getting lost in the algorithmic swirl of mindless videos can impact me just as much. It’s a slippery slope for anyone flirting with a fixation that may engulf them, but we do have the ability to balance. The key, for me, was bolstering the line between medicine and poison.

All the changes I’ve initiated serve the same goal: a strive for mindfulness in how I interact with my world. I love that I can listen to any song ever recorded and talk to my friends on the other side of the planet, and I’ll continue to do so. But I’d also like to give the mountain magnolias, the towhees, and the tomatoes my attention. I want to find inspiration on a walk rather than in an app. I need to be present for the endless ecological scroll of the seasons changing.