Life Face to Face
Living without an Audience
A while back I read How to Break Up with Your Phone. Excellent book: empathetic, well-written and -organized. I created a recurring note in my calendar, inquiring how the break-up with devices (not just the phone) was going. It hasn’t gone well.
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I drove from Dubuque to Holy Cross, Iowa, a little town of 350 or so. Founded in 1845, it has a church (surprise!), a library I was interested in, a cafe, and homes. Not much else. A neighbor waved as I went by. Driftless Area backroads all the way there. There are plenty of corn fields, but the area is not what you imagine Iowa looking like. There were lots of wildflowers, patches of prairie either restored or benignly neglected, deer-rich areas to traverse slowly and watchfully. Long vistas alternate with paths between limestone outcroppings and ditches. Quiet country – except for the occasional tornado or hail storm.
From Holy Cross I followed “blue highways” to New Melleray Trappist Abbey about 10 miles away. After college I considered becoming a Trappist monk. (For those who don’t already know, I was raised Catholic, had a classic born again experience while in high school in Missouri, and was a charismatic fundamentalist when I went to college. College calmed me down so by the time I graduated I was less fundamentalist. Long story short, over the following decades I became an agnostic: “a long, strange trip.”) Ever wonder about the roads you chose not to take? It remains a place of meditation and informal retreat for me.
While there I decided to try to transition to a cyberless life. I will still post here as irregularly as usual, but only articles. Not the social media stuff. No more inundating friends with news clippings via text and email. No more seeding outrage. I will check in infrequently, like being on vocation (get it?). I may even leave the phone at home! Can you imagine??
I’ve always considered myself kind of . . . monastic. Secular monastic these days. Being logged on means I’m never alone and it’s never quiet. Like having the TV on at home all the time. Always said that’d drive me crazy, and . . . well, the analogue has driven me crazy. Might work for you. It’s not for me. I’m not trying to write a prescription here. I’ve been living life online, as if for an audience, and have lost . . . decades. Like the Land of the Lotus-Eaters, but with less fun, more fury. Now I’m 70, and wonder what it would be like not to be distracted every second of every day.
The change will be fascinating to track. When I’m alone, I’ll be fully alone: not checking over my shoulder to see who’s watching, not playing for a crowd (that isn’t there anyway). When I’m with friends, I’ll be with them face to face – or, for distant friends, voice to voice. Like any change, much less one this big, there will be knock-on effects and unexpected ramifications. It may or may not take.
Maybe this will be temporary, like an extended vacation, or maybe it will be permanent. Let’s see.
For my offline friends and family: if there’s an emergency, call me using the ringer technique: let it ring once, hang up, wait a few seconds, and then call me right back. Otherwise, I’ll let most calls go to voicemail – because the phone will be at home, and I may not be – and will check it sometime before the end of the year. ;-) Ditto e-mails and texts.
