A Quilt, a TV, and My Summer of Less
The Cloverview—On the Wonder-Led Life
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From 2005 to 2020, I lived TV-free outside the reach of endless news cycles, relentless advertising, opinionated drivel, and the quicksand of bingeable streaming series. It was quiet bliss.
But then came the pandemic. The world felt like it was lurching off its axis and staying on top of the news felt like a survival necessity. My parents had just died and I was confined to my house because of being extremely medically vulnerable in a state whose policies favored political hubris over public health.
The black box hanging on my wall became, for a time, my window to the world outside my home. It was imperfect, but good God I needed to stream Harry Potter, Sister Act, and comfort shows on repeat to make the solitary confinement feel less solitary. This TV was quite talented. It played Spotify, became an endless babbling brook, and looked like art in a frame when I wasn’t watching it.
What I didn’t see because it crept over so slowly was the hold it was taking over my attention. Netflix autostreamed and “just one more episode” became “what’s the newest series?” The headlines got louder and the YouTube videos longer. My time and focus were being sucked into a virtual black hole on my wall.
Six years later, between the TV and my phone, my attention started feeling like it stopped belonging to me. And I utterly refuse to cede my attentional agency to an algorithm controlled by billionaires.
So many times I thought of ripping the TV off the wall entirely. But it has some genuinely lovely uses when kept in its place. After all, the issue really isn’t the TV—it’s my relationship with it.
Yesterday I hung a rod with a handmade quilt draped over it that tucked the TV behind a kaleidoscope of patchwork colors. I disconnected the cords and put them in a basket with the remote up on a shelf. I’m not anti-TV—I love a good movie night, maybe a little too much. But…
I want my intention to determine my attention.
I don’t have to live inside an algorithm. Neither do you. I’m the boss of my focus and my time, and I’m fully committed to putting as much friction as necessary between impulse and action to keep it that way.
For the next 90 days, I'm conducting a simple experiment: less television when I could be reading, less scrolling when I should be sleeping, and less consumption simply because I'm bored.
I’m calling it My Summer of Less. I really look forward to documenting what I learn through the experience here, as well as sharing some deep-dive essays from my research around the insights it surfaces.
More of what matters, less of everything else.
I can tell you this much already… The quilt covering my TV made the living side of my house instantly calmer, and me with it. I slept better than I have in eons.
What's competing for your attention right now? What do you want more of this summer? And what's one small piece of friction you could add between impulse and action to help make that happen?
📔 In case you missed it…
✨ Our summer book club starts this week!
We are doing something new with our paid subscriber community—our first-ever book club! In the month of June, we will be reading Sue Monk Kidd’s newest book, Writing, Creativity, and the Soul together as a community. If you are able, I’d love for you to join us!
Each week I’ll send my reflections from our reading during the week along with some discussion questions. Then at the end of the month, we’ll gather on Zoom to connect live.
I’m so excited. If all goes well, we might add this as a regular rotating feature!
It is a joy to kick off summer here with you.
I’m so grateful for you being here. For your comments and support and restacks… and all the ways you are pivotal in building this community together.
Love from the bottom of my heart,
P.S. Let me know if you try your own version of a Summer of Less. Or if you have questions about it. I’m also sharing video thoughts on the journey over on Instagram if you are there.
I have a strange relationship with tv. It is solace for lonely moments but a distraction from the good. I try to have one comfort show that I let myself watch an episode of a day. If I need to have human voices I try and listen to an audio book or the radio instead. I’m learning to embrace solitude.