I am thinking again about this notion of “self-sameness” that Byung-Chul Han talks about in The Disappearance of Rituals. He writes:

For Hannah Arendt it is the durability of things that gives them their “relative independence from men [sic].” They “have the function of stabilizing human life.” Their “objectivity lies in the fact that…men, their ever-changing nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their sameness, that is, their identity, by being related to the same chair and the same table.” In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points.

Han, The Disappearance of Rituals, page 3

The table does not change—at least, it does not change at any time scale that is noticeable to the human who sits before it. I do not need to pay attention to the table, because nothing is happening with it that requires or even asks my attention. I can simply trust it. I can turn around and turn back, and even with my eyes on something else, I can reach for it and know it will be there, exactly where I left it.

Screens, of course, lack any such sameness or stability. Screens are inconstant, unsame, unstable. A screen demands my attention—not only via the regular chirping of notifications, as hungry and unrelenting as a baby bird—but through that fundamental inconstancy: I know something may have changed since I last looked at it, know I cannot trust it to remain the same, to be steady or faithful. I must be vigilant towards a screen, always on alert, suspicious.

And vigilance is exhausting.

I will not add to the discourse about how we should spend less time with screens; you are as familiar with those patterns and arguments as anyone. I want to suggest instead that turning away from screens is turning towards something else. It is not an absence but a presence, not an empty hand but one with a hold on something solid and true.

That is, a politics of refusal must be more than a closed door; it must be both a closing and an opening, both rejection and invitation. The refusal must contain its alternative, the other paths, the thing you are turning to while you turn away. And what you turn to must have that stabilizing presence, that thingness, the restfulness of something you can trust. A rock that fits into your palm, a notebook, a bowl, a tree, a trail through the woods, a book (always a stack of books), a table, the chairs around it scraping the floor as your kin sit down to join you.