Two hours with your phone face down

I’m suspicious of anything sold as mindful, so I’ll try to get through this without using the word again.

Adults have very few hobbies that end in an object. Most of what we do after work is consumption. You watch the thing, you scroll the thing, and at the end there’s nothing to show for the evening except a slightly worse mood and a phone at 4%.

Building something is different in a plain, mechanical way. At the end there is a thing in the room that wasn’t there when you started.

The low skill ceiling is the point

Plenty of hobbies produce objects. Woodwork, pottery, painting. They also want a workshop, a year of being bad at it, and somewhere to keep the mess.

A brick mosaic has almost no skill floor. You match a number to a colour and press. Which sounds a bit condescending until you’ve done it for an hour and notice you stopped thinking about work somewhere around the second row.

What makes it absorbing isn’t difficulty. It’s that there’s always one more brick, and every one of them is a tiny finished decision. Fifteen minutes in you stop narrating it to yourself.

What it’s actually like

The first stretch is background. A lot of one colour, and it moves quickly because you’re barely thinking. Then the shape starts arriving and you speed up, because now you want to see it.

Most people finish in one or two sittings. A few have told me they deliberately stretched it over a week to have something to come back to in the evening, which I suspect is the better way to do it.

About the screen

I don’t think a plastic mosaic will repair anyone’s relationship with their phone. But it does occupy both hands, and that’s the only reliable trick I’ve found for putting one down.

You can absolutely put something on in the background while you build. Most people do, and given what we make, that’s rather the idea.