The Joy of ‘Calm Technology’

It’s late August, and I’m finding it quite difficult to focus on screens and words. I’ve been struggling particularly to pull together this edition of Galaxy Brain because I can’t seem to stop procrastinating by playing guitar. Like every fifth white dude in their mid-30s, I picked up the hobby again during the pandemic and enjoyed relearning some basics, but I’d still describe my approach to the instrument as relatively shallow. Guitar was supposed to be a fun distraction, so whenever I hit a wall, I’d bail and return to familiar territory: a style of noncommittal half-songs and scales that I have dubbed “ambient noodling.”

But in the past two months, my mindset’s shifted. When I hit the wall now, I try, gently, to climb it. This started when I found an archived Instagram Live video that my favorite guitarist did during the pandemic: an that includes an exercise he uses to warm up his hands to play. It consists of every combination of the ways you can move your four fingers on a guitar string, 36