The car radio experiment

A year ago, my friend Jothi wrote a thought-provoking post on marathon G.O.A.T Kipchoge and his immunity against the addictive spell of his smartphone.. right after he became a serial Olympic gold medalist! While runners can never tire of reading about Kipchoge’s greatness, the section below is what made me want to write this post:

You need to go up in the office elevator to the 9th floor, you will have to check the phone for that 10s. Most kids and adults walk with their face glued to the phones. The phones and the apps have cast such an enchanting spell and hold us in such a tight leash on us that we feel almost helpless to get out of its grip. Two questions arise. Do we even want to get out this? If yes, how do we? While it appears intuitive (at least to me) that the answer is “yes” to the first question, I am not at all sure if this is the answer for most folks. May be they do not even want to acknowledge that they have fallen into a trap. Or may be this is no trap at all.

The folks answering “no” to the first question are clearly ignorant about what they are losing while engaged in the process of continuous passive consumption.

In many ways, getting out of this trap is akin to quitting smoking. I’m specifically referring to the multitude of emotions that are associated trigger points: I’m happy so I want to light up; I’m sad so i want to light up; I had a satisfying lunch and want to bookend it with a smoke; I’m bored so want to light up. Quitting smoking fully involves your repeated will-power victories over each of those emotion triggers.

The analogy to smartphone addiction is not perfect and a key difference needs to be stated:

• The smartphone has perfect periods of supreme utility (notably for communication, collaboration, entertainment) and the rest of the time is just plain optionality that devolves to passive consumption. Smoking, on the other hand, is devoid of any redeeming positive qualities so the only way forward to give it up completely - period.

The gnarly emotion which is the bane of both smartphone and smoking addictions is boredom. And that is the hardest trigger point to beat.

This post is not about me quitting the cig - that was written 7 years ago - quitting in the age of vaping.

This post is also not about beating smartphone addiction but rather an illustration of a clawback tactic that could help you reduce your daily “number of screen unlocks”.

To my long suffering readers, the preamble is over.

Around 8 years ago (when our family car was the Mahindra E2O), it was time for a new abstinence experiment - can i drive around town without the car radio on?

Obviously the smartphone abstinence was part and parcel of the car radio abstinence else what’s the big deal with the experiment?

Back then I wasn’t a podcast consumer so it was just music i had to resist. Music that was an endorphin amplifier when the traffic flowed and an analgesic when it didn’t.

It was not like the music was flowing. The pattern was something like this - love this song - increase the volume - hate that song - switch station - stupid ad - another stupid ad - let me stay on the Kannada station so i can test my verb recall - damn nothing good is playing anywhere — and so the loop repeated. Perhaps this is why I didn’t find the experiment to be taxing.

If you are a people watcher like me, you wont find this experiment very hard. There’s always something interesting going on at a traffic signal - the chap gesticulating in his car as he vociferously makes his pov on a call - the folks crossing the road at signal and before the signal - weaving their way through, in all their glorious physiognomic diversity, an occasional kerfuffle between colliding motorists - my younger son’s complaint is that this doesn’t happen often enough!

An annoying bug in the E2O was that it wouldn’t persist the infotainment settings. Everytime you switch on the ignition you HAD to switch off the radio. It was like the Tempter asking “Are you sure you want me off?” every time i got into the car.

It took a few months of this experiment before my wife noticed it. It started with “can you turn on the music?” After noticing that this instruction had to be repeated every time, realisation dawned. Don’t recall her precise Punjabi reaction but she rolled her eyes. If you haven’t seen her eye roll - you’ve missed out on an eighth wonder.

The experiment lasted 6-8 months and it only ended because we traded the E2O with the Nexon EV - a real car with a real infotainment system.

These days i hit the Bluetooth connect to Spotify (Basic, not Premium) as soon as the car exits the parking garage - hit the mute every time the ads start and unmute when the ads end. Surely I can afford the Premium plan but the prospect of a bottomless pit of music without interruptions is so predictably boring. I’m waiting for Spotify to recognise me as the last remaining Basic customer in my PIN code.