I am growing a bunch of vegetables on my balcony. They share a big horizontal ceramic planter; onions and tomatoes and spinach and cabbage and lettuce growing side by side with varying degrees of success. Co-planting, they call it, and it’s supposed to be good for soil health and pest control. Four weeks in, the onions have aphids, the spinach and cabbage appear stunted and the tomatoes wilt every noon under the merciless glare of the Nairobi sun. 

I don’t know whether I will get to harvest anything from this crop but it won’t be from a lack of trying. Every morning I dutifully check the soil for moisture, trying to decide whether they need more water or if I am risking root rot from overwatering. I worry that they get too much sun but there isn’t much I can do about that because my balcony is unshaded. I check for signs of growth; new leaves, firmer stems, more vibrant colour. That’s how I discovered the aphids on the onions. They look like clusters of tiny black beads against the bright green of the leaves. Even thinking about them now makes me feel trypophobic.

I took a picture and texted it to my more experienced farmer friend, “what are these bugs and what do I do to eliminate them?”

Aphids, she said, and recommended an organic pesticide from a shop on Instagram.

I bought the pesticide this week, along with a spray bottle, and a bigger watering can. I have now become the sort of person who gets excited about farming implements. The pesticide seller said I should mix it with water, spray on affected plants, then wipe it off, for leaf shine. I am OK with my leaves not shining so I’ll leave the pesticide on, if it’s all the same. Because I also sprayed it everywhere, not just on the onions and the rest of the vegetables. I put it on my succulents, my lemon tree, my rosemary and thyme bushes. None of the 20 or so plants I have growing on this balcony went unsprayed. A prophylactic measure of sorts because I do not ever want to see those black aphids again.

In under a year, I have gone from owning one emaciated bamboo plant to over 40 scattered in different places around the house. A minor miracle for someone who has what the opposite of a green thumb is.

My new interest in gardening probably comes from the same place as my new interest in choral music. I sang in a classical concert this weekend. A proud (although middling) Alto 1 at the Nairobi Music Society community choir. When I joined last year and learned that choir members are expected to not only carry a tune but also sight-read sheet music, I wanted to quit at the first rehearsal. 

I was under no great illusion about my abilities as a singer but I hadn’t expected that that level of competence was required. I didn’t quit, I showed up for rehearsal after rehearsal and learned to follow along well enough to make up for the lack of any real skill. Dogged determination will take you places that talent cannot. A few weeks later, I was convincingly performing Stabat Mater in front of an audience of hundreds that had actually paid to be there. A year later and I just did my second concert and oddly, I feel like I belong in this choir, even though I still do not know what a quaver is. Ha! You really can just do things.

So I garden and I sing in a choir and I have a library membership (and perhaps I should add knitting to complete this quad of smugness) and it’s all nice, and I am supposed to tell you the ways in which these things have made my life better, but listen, a life is just a life, you know? I am still happiest when I am scrolling Instagram reels about house decor (and buying yet another overpriced lamp from those lovely thrift stores) and enjoying second hand gossip on Twitter. These are the cultural artefacts of our time. 

Social media is agnostic to our morality/usefulness/interestingness/intelligence. Be (chronically) online or don’t, start a hobby or don’t, you’re no worse or better as a human being, I think. 

I suspect that we’d clutch our pearls less about what we’ve been told is excessive screen time if we stopped thinking of our brains as fundamentally broken because we stayed up til 2a.m. watching reels, and accepted that there are nights when we just won’t get enough sleep and so we self-soothe by going on our phones. It’s all part of the human experience. Pathologising our instinct to go online with terms like “doomscrolling” and “brainrot” only serves to make us feel bad about ourselves and render us powerless against the big bad wolf that is big tech. 

Psychologists are finally telling us the truth about phone addiction: it is just not real.

Sure, we can all benefit from activities that require us to look away from our screens and breathe a bit of fresh air and connect in person with people but a lot of this is not down to willpower or virtuosity, rather, it is a product of the environments we live in. I garden because I have a balcony that can accommodate plants. I go to choir and learn to sing because rehearsals meet in my neighbourhood. I have a library membership because I can afford it, and I have the time to visit the library every two weeks. To paraphrase what Kerry Washington said to Reese Witherspoon in Little Fires Everywhere, I don’t make good choices, I have good choices.

That said, I just placed an order for a handy little book called Offline Activities that gives you tasks to complete without the aid of a screen. Guess where I found it? Twitter.