Notes on a disconnection
I woke up on day one and knew nothing of the world. Nothing but the morning sun and coffee, a record spinning at low volume in the background, pen and paper on the side table for ruminations and sparks. When Cynthia got up she browsed a news website and I asked, half-smiling, mostly sarcastic, if I'd missed anything: “Well, looks like the US are at war with Iran...”
…
In 1997 I was still years away from owning a cellphone. My Internet access passed through a 56K modem, blips and bloops and screeches galore. The iPhone and iPad didn't exist. As a result, very little in my life happened quickly, let alone instantaneously.
I thought a lot about that last week.
I learned about Noem's dismissal a day late. I heard about the Macbook Neo from my mother-in-law, of all people, when we visited during our break. And not only did I survive, but my mind progressively grew quieter. It stopped racing or spinning, rabidly latching on to the latest mind-numbing obscenity. On the way I discovered something so simple and basic it's almost dumb: I rarely need to know anything straight away. Questions can be noted and answers delayed. News reports at lunchtime and 6PM aren't just sufficient, they also tamper that oppressing sense of urgency I get from constant breaking headlines, spread out over the fifteen+ hours of my waking life.
So I've decided to keep this going.
“The urge to know is gone. I sit here, free and innocent, unaware of what the night inflicted. I’ve heard nothing of political intrigues or the latest scandal and when I do it’ll only be in passing. No deep dives, no endless dissections and commentary. Surfaces. Short briefings. The news of the world at horse and buggy speed.
I was thinking, yesterday, of how we used to consult the Web. Of internet cafes, and the limits of our reach in those days. Knowledge was sporadic then, slow enough for our minds to digest, between sessions, the things we’d learned. But instant, always-on access brought instant gratification, and we’ve been lab rats ever since, endlessly pushing a button for rewards, unable to resist.
NOW, it seems, is our only timeframe. The past immediately forgotten; the future in constant flight from itself. Every answer, every urge, addressed and validated. This isn’t the Buddhist NOW. Not the NOW of presence and acceptance. It’s the NOW of escape and envy and impatience. The NOW of distractions.
Opium? Fuck. This is Sodium Pentothal. ”
Immediacy has robbed us of magic, of the thrill of anticipation. We've forgotten how to wait, perceive silence as unbearable. We fill the slightest hint of emptiness with any shiny or noisy bauble, as long as it takes up space. I left social media a couple of years ago and yet the phone reflex never went away: hand reaching to my pocket while making dinner, launching Safari, scrolling the same newsfeeds for the umpteenth time; blindly fumbling for any source of outrage, and justifying it as "keeping myself informed". It took several days for my mind to properly accept the lack of access and to stop thinking about it. But now... now it's as though it's forgotten the possibility altogether. I've somehow tricked my brain into believing it's 1997 again, and we're free from our tether. Question is: can it last? I don't know, but the week certainly made an impact. Here's my new post-break device setup:
A single Focus mode during the day. It only allows only specific contacts to go through.
All but very few notifications disabled. The ones I've kept all go into Scheduled Summaries: one at noon, another at 3 PM. The only ones set to immediate delivery are filtered by the daytime Focus mode.
General web browsing, and RSS reading, are scheduled for one hour in the afternoon. If I think of something I write it down to check up on it in the following session.
No news sites. I may add the BBC to the browsing sessions at some point, but if I do I'll restrict it to only once or twice a week.
Newscasts from Radio-Canada: noon and evening.
The iPhone is a control device and communicator. It feeds CarPlay when I'm driving. That's mostly it. No more mindless pickups to pass the time, regardless of where I am—in the house or elsewhere. Unless there's an emergency, the device doesn't exist otherwise.
The iPad is where I write (for this blog). It's also where I read during the daily browsing session. The same Focus mode applies, and the screen includes Bear random widgets (for atomic highlights review).
The Mac is the hub again: it's a desktop; it's a fixed location. It's incapable of intrusion.
I also came very close to ditching Things and moving organization entirely to paper, but changed my mind. The point is to be clear about what's beneficial and what isn't, not turn this into an anti-tech crusade. I did, however, overhaul my app workflow as a result, to be more in line with the changing lifestyle. Still a work in progress .
“What needs to go is the reflex. Weening myself away from the instantaneous and learning to differ gratification again.”
I'm aware of the privilege I enjoy to experiment with all of this—I don't wait for calls or gigs anymore, and can now afford to disconnect. So please don't take this as any sort of blueprint or—god forbid—preaching. I'm just trying stuff out folks.
In the last post I wrote about a "new testament"; that was a tad grandiose.
Call it a pact.
