“If only for a minute or two, I want to see what it feels like to be without you.”
—Lucinda Williams, Side of the Road
In June 2013 I attended a ten-day silent retreat. Each day we meditated for ten hours. On the ninth night they returned our phones, which we’d turned in upon arrival, instructing us not to use them until we left the following morning.
And so, of course, for the rest of the evening we who had failed to bring chargers beseeched those who had remembered to please let us have some juice, breaking both our vow of silence and our vow to stay offline, unable to wait just one more day to resume connectivity.
That retreat was the last time I took a sustained break from screens.
By the time the surgeon general issued a warning last week about social media and kids, I’d already made a plan to use June for a news and social media cleanse. This decision was greatly informed by the things I wrote of last week, the way my job as a docent in an historic house museum is teaching me to slow down.
As the clock ticks down to moving offline, I observe the resistance my own brain is trying to feed me. What if I miss something? What if I need to do some marketing? What if I can’t stand it?
I have been heavily online since 1995 when Prodigy (remember Prodigy?) hired me to write one of the first blogs ever. Blogs weren’t actually a thing yet, so my writing took the form of a weekly newsletter sent to subscribers. USA Today ran a story about me being a pioneer of the form. Simon and Schuster took note of that piece and offered me a book contract. I participated in one of the very first, barely attended SXSW interactive conferences and my name tag identified me as Madonna of the Infobahn. I loved the internet then. It literally made my childhood dream of becoming an author come true.
I also got to witness, unfortunately experience and admittedly participate in the pitfalls of living online. This time last year, though I’d been gone from Shitville for nearly six months, Shitville was not done with me. The same bullies who had threatened to kill me and who relentlessly harassed me in person when I lived in that hellhole town decided they were having too much fun to stop. They invaded my social media and continued their brutal attacks. Blocking individuals proved futile. They kept showing up. They kept bullying.
My mental health was already gravely destabilized from what I’d been through in their real life presence. The continued virtual assault pushed me to the edge. So I did something no one ever would have predicted, least of all myself. I shut down my Facebook account. Full on stop. I archived nothing. I did not say goodbye. I just split.
This move shocked my unshockable son into silence. It netted me countless messages from people who, unable to find my FB page, assumed I had blocked them personally. This is how entrenched I was—no one could believe that I, she of 5,000 followers and thousands of posts could stop, let alone would.
While I resented the reason for my departure—I did not want to back down from the bullies— the departure itself proved blissful. It did not take long for me to see how I hadn’t just spent an enormous amount of time posting, but an equally enormous amount of time ruminating on shitty comments, crafting wicked responses in my head, feeling a pulsing drive to post those comebacks asap.
I continued posting on Instagram. I liked how little arguing I ran into there. I still veered (and sometimes still do) into political territory, especially around the midterms and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But increasingly I focused on sharing about my ranch, my art, my friends. And over time I trained the algorithms to feed me fewer negative and alarming posts and more pertaining to goats, crafting and music. I got hooked on the Griffin Brothers, who do synchronized roller skating to excellent music, Eggs Tyrone who mashes up one culture’s dancing with another’s music, and Derrick, this guy in LA who communes with his neighborhood squirrels every day.
While these happy reels do bring me joy, I started to realize that full is full. My mind’s hard drive is well past capacity. Sustained concentration is increasingly difficult. I often find myself framing whatever I am experiencing in real life as potential fodder for my online life. It is hard for me to simply observe the beauty of my cows, my wildflowers, the sky. I feel compelled to capture these things and share them.
On the one hand, I find pleasure in this. My photography has improved vastly. My ability to squeeze ideas into one-minute movies feels pretty cool. And the opportunity to pair visuals with the precisely right song is a challenge my mind seizes. On the other hand, and I’m not sure why it has taken this long, it has finally occurred to me that daily short form content creation has distracted me terribly from longer form pleasures like reading actual books or participating in deep conversations without stopping to check my messages and likes.
I think it goes beyond nostalgia, this longing I have to go back, if only briefly, to a time when I was not inextricably tethered to my pocket computer. And yet the longing is attended by fear, or at least concern around the potential for boredom. I already know the break is going to stretch my days out in a way that might seem uncomfortable initially. To prepare for the swaths of emptiness, I am compiling a list of things to do instead of googling the ex-boyfriend from the ‘80s that randomly popped into my head. There is art to make, there are books to read and, if I can handle it, silence to pursue.
I’m also considering writing another book. Not just to get back into the form I worked in for decades. But also to observe my writing process and even my entire relationship to writing. I used to feel so sure about writing. Writing came as easily to me as breathing practically. I did not question writing. I wrote at length. I wonder if that love affair will heat back up in the absence of online distraction. Or perhaps I will realize that I’m done with a desire to capture and share my ideas, that maybe I don’t miss that distraction either. Possibly I will find my angle of repose, take a cue from my animals, and simply focus on being vs. doing. I’m curious to find out.
In 2011, Pico Iyer published “The Joy of Quiet,” one of the best opinion pieces I’ve ever read. Long before many of us, he heard and heeded the drumbeat of overstimulation related to being online. Among other things, he noted, “the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in ‘black-hole resorts,’ which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.”
Very relatable. While it’s been a long time since I’ve traveled, back when I did I especially enjoyed going places with barely any signal to connect to the outside world. This was forced permission to take a break. It provided evidence of my addiction the times I would, say, walk a half-mile to an island cemetery where I knew I had the best chance of getting a bar or two on my phone if I stood near the headstone at the highest point.
This upcoming cleanse will not be entirely radical. I allow for the fact that if I want to continue paying my bills, I will not be able to go full-on cold turkey. Email will need to be monitored and answered. Fucking AirBnB—the bane of my existence and the source of significant income—will need to be tended to. But I am determined to curb these chores to less than an hour daily.
As for the news and my decision to break up with it for a bit, I know this will be more challenging to execute. I have been a news junkie since I learned to read, raised in a house that subscribed to multiple newspapers and had the TV news blaring every evening. We were taught by example to focus on the horrors humans visited upon one another and to anticipate that such horrors would also befall us should we ever make the idiotic choice to leave our little town and venture into the world.
Many years ago, on a rare trip back to New Jersey, I went digging through the archives of one of the small local papers I used to read as a child. I was looking for information about a friend who’d died in 1978. At least twenty-five years had passed since his death. I distinctly recall being astounded at how nearly identical the historic headlines were to the headlines of the day. The more things change, the more they stay the same and all that. I turn to this memory as a reminder that a mere thirty days of no NYT or NPR is not much at all, and when I return (I know already I will return) there will be plenty of the same old headline shit waiting to lure me into clicking.
To clarify, I refuse to dismiss the internet out of hand as one big cesspool. I have made a fine living and many wonderful friends thanks to this wacky virtual world. As recently as last month I was on the receiving end of just how amazing social networking can be. My service dog Milo had a sudden onset autoimmune crisis that nearly killed him. I could not afford the astronomical price quoted to me to save him. I did not want to ask for help. I asked for help. Within three hours I had so many donations I put out a second plea that people please stop sending money.
But what I like least is all of the negative stuff. Let me focus on my own negativity. I have had more online arguments than I can count. It is in my nature to win. I don’t love this about myself. Win what? Am I winning if I shut down an asshole but the sick feeling of the fight itself lingers for days on end and ultimately fosters a perpetual grudge?
Perhaps by July I’ll be dying to log back on and offer daily updates. Or maybe I’ll be so relieved I’ll never go back. I’m curious to see how it’s going to shake down.
And now it’s question time: What’s your relationship with online life? If you have kids, what’s their relationship with it? When’s the last time you took a break? What happened?
NOTES:
*In June I will be starting up another six-week in-person memoir writing workshop for women here at the ranch. In August I will be hosting a weekend writing and art retreat for women, also at the ranch. Space is very limited for both. Details are at TinyTRanch.com
*Very soon I am starting a monthly gathering for women. I’m calling it Crone Shenanigans. If you want to partake, drop me a note and I’ll put you on the list.
*If you’re up for it, you can subscribe to this substack ($7) per month. I’d really appreciate it. One time tips also appreciated. Venmo: @spike-gillespie. And if paying isn’t for you, you can still help by sharing this with others you think might be interested.
*If you or someone you know is looking for a chill location—for a party, for a wedding, for a memorial service, for some quiet alone time (our wifi sucks!)— I hope you’ll consider the ranch. The AirBnB lunacy has crescendoed of late and I much prefer to work with friends and friends of friends than rent to random psychos. Your help in getting the word out is much appreciated.
Thanks so much.
Not qualified to attend, but: Crone Shenanigans! Love it.
And thanks for the link to The Joy of Quiet. Feeling the need to read that immediately and will do so now. Cheers.