You’ve Got to Learn How to Get Offline, Right Now

This started out as a post of reflection in the wake of the recent U.S. Presidential election, but something bubbled up to the surface while I was thinking through it.

(And yes, I realize the irony that it requires you be online to read this. What can I say? Life is a contradictory business.)

At the ripening age of forty-three, I’ve learned there are lots of things in life no one bothers to tell you about. Things that, in retrospect, seem quite important. Things I’d have liked to learn about earlier. They can sneak up on you.

Here are a few: Babies get high fevers sometimes, and it’s normal. Almost everyone at work feels like an impostor. No one can read your mind. There are loads more.

I’ve got a really important new one for you. Ready?

You can go offline. It’s okay.

It’s More than Okay

I’ll go further. You need to go offline. A lot more than you probably are right now. I’m not suggesting you cancel your internet service, move to Wyoming, and start growing rutabagas. I like air conditioning and Wi-Fi just as much as the next meat puppet.

The goal is a calculated reduction in noise. Your approach will be personal to you. It will seem experimental, very niche, and won’t look quite like someone else’s. That’s good. Because there’s no one out there to help you. You have to make the choice. Even the act of trying presents you with a healthy chance for some positive action.

There are so many combinations and permutations of Things to Consume, it would be impossible for me to make recommendations for you. But taking a look at your ecosystem and making some hard decisions will, I guarantee you, yield near-immediate and ameliorating benefits.

You may need to go scorched-earth, deleting apps and deactivating accounts en masse. Don’t be afraid to go too far. Those services will always be right there waiting for you if you choose to re-engage. Or, it may be a surgical strike, removing that one pesky app that delivers sweet, unadulterated dread to you every morning in bed, when you’re pretending to be asleep, but aren’t.

No one is encouraging us to remove ourselves from the circus. Why would they? No one but you knows what your circus is really like. And it’s completely against their interests; your attention and concern is their bread and butter. Any single company, organization, or service doesn’t consider itself to be a threat. They’re almost all specializing in something quite specific. They’re not any one of them to blame on their own.

No one is making you consume. It’s all opt-in.

The Devil is in the Aggregate

More, more, and much more make Charlie an anxious boy. My friends regularly make the observation that we can’t keep up with all the content coming at us, and yet streaming services just keep cranking it out. Maybe you’ve received texts like these:

• Season three drops next month 👀
• That new true-crime series is 🔥
• You haven’t seen that documentary yet?! 😬 WTF

And that’s just television.

Then there’s the news. Oh News, you sweet summer child. You never, ever stop, do you, with your minute-by-minute barrage of articles with similar-sounding titles written to trigger the anxiety that lurks inside us all. Oh, give us those sweet, delicious clicks and pageviews.

The formula is so simple it hurts:

Somebody, somewhere—everywhere— is doing something very, very bad, so please, please click and find out now before the evolutionary train leaves you in digital dust. You wouldn’t dare leave the house—or the bathroom—uninformed, would you?

Something wicked this way comes.

Then there’s the corporations. Every business seems to have their own app, platform, and subscription services. Alms, alms, for the CEO. Every few weeks I get an email that attempts to—as tenderly as possible, bless them—inform me that my affordable service just got ever-so-slightly less affordable. It’s usually something like a $1.99 increase per month. A mere pittance, fair citizen! Your Americano with two pumps of hazelnut plus cream costs more than that! No reason to be upset! We wouldn’t have bothered you, but we’re legally required to tell you. Don’t you appreciate our transparency?

Maybe Someday, but Not Today

We’re the first wave of casualties in the Internet age. Generations down the line, our brains, habits, and expectations will have learned to adapt. But this first few billion of us that first took right it in the face? We’re a little bit (to a lot) screwed.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a terrifying yet necessary look at what our advancements are doing to us, and to our children:

“By designing a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids’ eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socializing, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.”

We’re just now beginning to get serious about imposing limits on our children as we slowly emerge from three decades of techno wonder-fog to realize that this is a legitimate health crisis. These conversations seem most dire through the lens of our children’s health, with good reason, but what of the grownups?

No one told us that we could—or should—turn it off.

You Have Permission

If you need it, here it is: I’m giving you permission to be more uninformed. I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t often think of taking that path. Usually, I end the day on screens, after spending the day on screens, only to start the next day right back at it.

Much is said about disrupted sleep, caffeine, body chemistry, or whether blue light is disruptive, but precious little is said about actively taking charge of your online world. It should be an aspirational thing, to find the courage and focus to determine which players in your personal digital ecosystem are most to blame for our thinning mental margins.

I’m about three months into this effort myself, and I’ve seen distinct benefits, among them the following:

• Less anxiousness
• Less feelings of doom
• Better sleep
• More time for things that bring joy
• More appreciation and interaction with the non-digital world
• More acceptance of what I can and can’t control

And don’t underestimate the effect this might have on your interpersonal relationships. The people in your life just might appreciate a version of you with a little less existential dread coursing through your veins all day.

Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign took a lot of flak for its overly simplistic approach to drug use, which was fair in that context. But in the case of the internet’s ills, it may suggest the best path to a happier life.

It’s not going to slow down or stop. You have to decide.