Readers Write In #682: Retracing the past one year at a time

By Rahini David

I was reading the recent and very relatable RWI by Abishekspeare and the reply was getting long enough to be its own RWI and so here goes. The disillusioned feeling after months of over-consumption of social media is so common and it happens so regularly to so many of us that it is a bit weird that it doesn’t seem to have its own unique name. Something snappy, clear and usable.

So naturally I did what I did best and had a short conversation with ChatGPT and it suggested Medialanguor, Screenweary, Techexhaust, Digitafatigue, Scrollslump and Cyberdrain for this feeling. All nice suggestions and I should probably write a separate post about how ChatGPT understands my questions better than any human ever did and also deigns it worth its while to reply to them.

This post is more about what I personally do when I feel encumbered with medialanguor and why I like this exercise. This is something I do once a year, and it always leaves me refreshed.  I start this project on the first of a month and I am only allowed to listen to songs released when I was a certain age. For instance, I can only listen to songs released when I was a one-year-old on 1st March and songs release when I was a two-year-old on 2nd March and so on. I can listen to the songs of my 31st year at the end of March. Naturally as someone who is 31+, I utilise more than a single month for this project. I make a YouTube music playlist of about one hour’s worth of the relevant year’s songs each morning and I use it for my one hour walk in the evening.

This takes a bit of preparation. But it is not hard, and it made my one hour walks more fun and more regular. It is impossible that there can be any repetition at all and most importantly for me it triggers a thousand memories. I can remember theatres I visited, songs that were played at school excursions, friends who were team-Rajini or team-Kamal or as years rolled on, team-Vijay or team-Ajith. Year after year I associate songs with different collegemates, teammates and bus mates and different stages of life as a young wife or mother.

This year I am doing this de-tox project differently. This time I dedicate more than a single day to a year, and I watch the songs on YouTube rather than just listen to them during a walk. Currently I am consuming not just songs, but also comedy scenes and favourite scenes from 1989.  The rule is that I shall not listen to any Tamil movie content that is not associated to the year 1989 for 4-5 days and after I move to 1990, I shall not return to 1989 for now. Sounds a bit silly, but it works.

This year’s modified project is already a favourite with me. When I watched “Ther kondu sendravan yaar” from “Enakul Oruvan” just a few weeks back and I was thinking how important Bharatanatyam was to actresses in 80s (and before that) and how much the trend died out in the 90s. We notice trends better the second time over, the nostalgia will keep the train moving and taking the journey all over again is such wholesome fun.

This makes me wait for 20 more days before I am permitted to watch Khadhalan songs and perhaps a month or more to get to Yuvan’s music. It improves my appreciation for these songs. I am almost as excited about discovering a new actor or actress. I am sure that if I included Hindi songs and the Hrithik song that Abishekspeare mentioned, I would surely see the movements as quite fluid once again.

How is this different from the usual media detox? I find it more achievable. I continue to permit myself indulge in funny YouTube skits and art-related videos and cake-décor videos. I am not forcefully removing anything from my feed. I am adding something wholesome. And this is exactly what proper nutritionists recommend to those who combat eating disorders. Rather than restrict a food group that you consider junk, add a food group that you consider wholesome. Add a bowl of fruit and a cup of green tea to your consumption first and then decide what you want to remove or restrict. I would never feel deprived, but it is a detox all the same.

As you can see, you can speed run the project with a single artist or a couple of artists. If you watch only a single song from all Rajini and Kamal movies, you can be done with 49 years’ worth of very popular music in just 3 weeks or so. Try it out. Not everyone can immediately come out of Netflix addiction and become a gardener of organic vegetables.  Small, achievable, enjoyable media detoxes ideally trump over detoxes that sound too zen. I admittedly don’t like very recent media and this exercise fits my tastes quite well. But I feel that anyone can find a variation of the overall flavour of this suggestion and reap its benefits.