I often wonder if I’m a bit too severe about my insistence on a screen-free home. We have a television, but it’s rarely turned on. Perhaps because we intentionally placed it in our guest bedroom, which doubles as my workroom and currently serves as the sleep quarters for me and our newborn. We didn’t want our living room organised around a large flat screen.

In the early days when the five-month-old was a tiny potato whose only goals in life were to feed, poop, and sleep, it was easy to turn to Netflix to distract oneself from the laborious nature of breastfeeding. This was how I ended up watching all six seasons of Parenthood. But the moment I noticed him steadily coming to life, growing in awareness of his surroundings, I stopped watching for leisure. I wanted to focus, instead, on cultivating his faculties for observation and attention. I don’t want these to be numbed through over-exposure to the dopamine thrill that screens readily offer.

Funnily enough, I rediscovered my own threshold when it came to my consumption of social media. I gave up on Twitter years ago. I browse through Facebook for ten minutes a day. I cannot handle more than 10 minutes of reels. My brain very quickly feels like it will begin to rot. My mind and body begin craving intellectual stimulation — the kind one accesses through the critical faculties required to digest the written word. I have re-committed myself to the thrill of learning something new and building upon my existing critical faculties. Not from a space of lack or insecurity about not knowing enough, but from the realm of joy. I am not driven by the desire to know more so that I can feel smarter or even be empowered, but for the unadulterated pleasure of taking in the ingenuity of a concept or a literary turn of phrase or to expose myself to a powerful articulation of a lingering thought. Sometimes, I am excited to see how someone else has approached an idea that I have also had, even if their manner is not aligned with my methods.