Have you looked at your computer or phone screen lately? Of course you have, but have you noticed how bright and saturated everything looks?
Our devices display intense coloration because bright, saturated colors appeal to our instincts, our animal natures. They catch our attention. They look like sweet fruits and poisonous animals, but much brigther and more saturated, and in nature we only see such colors on occasion, and when we see them they mean something important. That’s why they catch our attention. Now, in this digital world, we see them all the time. I’m not confident that viewing such intense coloration so often is harmless. It is certainly not natural.
It reminds me of my youth when I regularly consumed unnatural foods with intense flavors. My tongue loved them because, in nature, delicious foods are generally nourishing foods. But my tongue was deceived because food scientists have learned to produce delicious foods that offer little or no nourishment. Lack of nourishment makes us vulnerable to illness, but such foods are widely distributed because they are highly profitable. I wonder if the producers of our digital tools have adopted the same trick.
A couple months ago, seeking to remove non-essential pieces of my digital toolset, I turned on my operating systems’ (MacOS and iOS) color filter settings. I configured them to desaturate colors, with a grayscale filter, so that I could only see enough color to distinguish things that I might need to distinguish by color, like the circle in my employer’s chat system that shows red when my manager is busy and green when he’s available.
I knew the colors on these devices were intense, but until I spent two months using a desaturated screen, I had no idea just how intense they were.
One day, I needed to see an accurate representation of an image on my screen, so I turned off the color filter. Only then did I realize the excess in the coloration on these devices. I was alarmed, so I want to bring this to your attention in case it, in its contrariness to nature or in its deception of our instincts, is doing some harm to our bodies, minds, or souls.
It would be wise to, at least, test these things for some time. For that reason, I am providing links to instructions for desaturating today’s most commonly used operating systems. In addition to those links, I am also providing links to two Apple Shortcuts that I created to easily switch the desaturation settings on and off.
As the producers in our physical world compete with the producers in our digital world for our attention, especially in the consumer sector, it may also be wise to wear sunglasses in shopping centers. That is partly a joke but worthy of consideration. If we choose not to wear sunglasses in stores, we also open our senses to powerful forces of manipulation.
Color filter Google Pixel Color filter Samsung Galaxy
Color filter iPhone Color filter iPad
Shortcut to desaturate colors Shortcut to re-saturate colors