Being in the Actual World
Notes on unplugging
I unplugged last weekend, no laptops, no screens, I let my brain roam around organic and cage free like a fancy chicken. I spent the weekend at the beach. My wife and I rented a cabin and we got offline and into slow time. I was more offline than I have been in months. We went for a lot of walks, cooked, laid around and read books, spent time in the sauna, took some mushrooms and stared at the ocean waves. We drove around the beach town blasting Wilco and Big Thief and trying to harmonize. We sat around a bonfire with old friends and swapped stories. It was nice. Maybe not revolutionary or groundbreaking, because here is the thing about getting unplugged —it just feels normal, it feels natural, it feels like, yeah this is what base reality probably should feel like. It's the way most of us now live, most of the time, that is weird: glued to our phones or laptops. I'm as guilty of this habit as anyone else.
When you intentionally go offline, time slows down. The day feels more spacious when your attention is not fractured by digital interruptions and scanning the contents of everything in the entire freaking world every 15 minutes. Your phone is basically a magic telescope that lets you see every single person, place, thing, thought, happening everywhere all at once. Especially the ones that shout the loudest and grab a hold of your throat. It really should be no big surprise that this is stressful!
Everyone seems to agree that being always online is making us feel isolated and cranky. Doom scrolling is more popular than walking. My single friends have all given up on dating, and sworn it off as a waste of time and energy. The kids I mentor for my day job are obviously addicted to their phones, they sneak out their phones during class and even recess like a smoker sneaking a cigarette and hoping nobody will notice. I keep having to tell kids, mid-conversation, "hey buddy, put your phone away while we're talking, that's rude." One 13 year old told me, "I'm addicted to my phone! I don't want to be, but I am!" He has never experienced the luxury of being bored all day.
The current joke making the rounds on the internet is "the kids these days are cooked." I don't think it has to stay this way. At first, I thought the basic answer was simple: we need more person-to-person connection. Last week I talked about how we can push back against the current age of isolation and loneliness by being intentional about reaching out, and building community, and spending time with each other. That is totally possible. Just like we have had big culture shifts in the past few decades around things like recognizing that smoking cigarettes is bad for you, and maybe you shouldn't be allowed to smoke on airplanes, for example, we can have a public consciousness shift around smartphones and screen time.
One way to think about this is by reduction, cutting back, cutting down, starting to recognize it in the zeitgeist for the unhealthy thing that it is. But, trying to stop doing something negative always feels harder than actively trying to do something positive.
After spending the weekend unplugged at the beach, I realized there is something even more basic and foundational than connection and community, and that is embodiment. Being in the real, physical world. Spending time just being analog. Campfire time. Beach time. Barefoot time.
Anything that you can do with your hands, anything that places you in the body, anything that is grounding, is a practice that works as an antidote to being terminally online. Yoga, pottery, gardening, hiking, cooking, baking bread, eating at the same table as other human beings, BBQ, painting, playing music, fishing, any sports, massage, hiking, swimming, going to live music performances, carpentry, bicycling.
You could go on obviously. The list of physical things that you can do includes everything in the world that has ever been done. So, there really is no shortage of stuff to choose from! The list of embodied activities—from baking bread to storytelling around a campfire—does have a certain hippie quality to it, I have to admit. That isn't intentional—I think it just means the hippies were actually on to something all along. But don't let that stop you from embracing embodiment. I don't think making an effort to be embodied and grounded necessarily has to lead to wearing tie-dye and eating tofu, but it's also fine if that's what you want to do.
Maybe hippies should be embraced as pioneers of the spirit that will be needed to navigate the ever-increasing weirdness and disconnection of the digital age, but it is time to build something more upon that, to build a healthy and new path into the future, and I don't know exactly what that looks like, what the vibe is— and that is good. It is blank slate. The future always is if you know where to look.