Life is not rocket science, it really doesn’t take a genius. By a rough estimation based solely on my own lived experience, and precise feminine intuition, you can solve about 72 to 82 per cent of your current life problems by going offline: Just Walk Away From The Screen. Close Your Eyes. No social media, no waking up to the news, no scrolling to sleep; Life is truly amazing unplugged. This might be the best kept secret of our times. You really don’t need any of the digital noise— None!— to live a perfectly balanced, enjoyable, exciting life.
(more…)Category: Attention
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Is time spent offline for you?
time spent offline isn’t for everyone.
In fact, it is for a very select few with a large appetite for life.
It takes a large appetite to decide to go against the grain, the status quo, what they say is just life now, ya know, and say, NO, THANK YOU.
It takes a large, large, large appetite to wake up every day and decide— Yes, YOU decide— what to think, how to feel, what to do; There are no tweets, feeds, notifications dinging at you, nudging you towards what you should think, feel, do in each moment. You must decide: At the crack of dawn, while waiting for your sushi at the counter, and at night when sleep evades you.
It’s just you, really.
It takes a large appetite for life to go on looking for love, connection, community Without a follow/ Without a mention. Trusting life just a little.
Just so you are sure, sweetheart.
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Let’s get personal!
When I was in high school, I used to get sent to the principle’s office regularly for wearing inappropriate clothes; Shorts and skirts that made the male teachers uncomfortable, the women seethe— Just kidding! but otherwise I was a good, fairly smart, and engaged student in one of the worst high schools in the city at the time.
This time, the principle was new; new to the chaos, of children that had to grow up too fast, too angry, and so when he pulled out the school agenda to reason with me, that according to the rules, standing with my hands flat to my thighs, my skirt would have to be past my middle fingers, which the one I was wearing wasn’t, I accepted the challenge.
The adults were rookies to me.
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You; Sitting With Yourself
It’s funny the things you can get used to.
I used to wake up to Twitter, the avatars shouting their grievances at me first thing in the morning; Open my eyes, reach under, beside, on top of the pillow until I felt it: Hard, flat, cool— Tap, tap, tap, tap; slide, slide; tap. For years, day after day, I would wake up every morning and before I even had had a chance to fully open my eyes, to grasp at and reorient myself to another day, reality, I would reach for the hard, flat, cool object under my pillow and enter the noise with thousands of avatars shouting their grievances to no one in particular first thing in the morning; the same noise I fell asleep to the night before. For years, day after day, this was how I started my day, how I went about my day, and how I ended my day.
For years, day after day.
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Let’s get physical!
And the thing about time spent offline is that you know what to do, you just don’t do it, or you don’t do it enough, or you do it for a bit but then you inevitably find yourself back in the rabbit hole of bottomless Instagram reels and clever Reddit posts while the book sits unread. And you wonder to yourself, What the fuck is wrong with me?
Nothing.
Some things are easier than others; social media is easy, real life is hard.
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Making good use of my one wild, precious life
I turn 30 this month.
With age, I have become less volatile, more sentimental. “The dots connect looking back,” he tells me over our drinks, blabbering to amuse ourselves; he’s quoting Steve Jobs. I nod, It is true. When the mood strikes, when I feel brave enough, gentle enough to look back, I pull the plastic bin from under my bed and I rummage through the carefully labelled journals from the past four years. For six years prior to switching to paper I used a free online journal, but I have no immediate access to those now. They’re saved somewhere on a USB stick that is no longer compatible with the Macbook I use, and I am too principled and stubborn to buy the adapter for it. But the $2 notebooks, there is a pile of those now; Pages and pages and pages of daily contemplations— daily tantrums— accessible anytime I feel brave enough, gentle enough, to look back; the living adds up. And whenever I look back, bravely, gently, it shocks and delights me to see how all the dots connect.
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Can I have your attention please?
Attention creates reality.
And my attention creates time spent offline the Substack newsletter; it has done so week after week for 3+ years now. Your attention, week after week for 3+ years now, sustains time spent offline. This tiny corner of the internet with its weekly five ideas to spend less time online and (re)discover the pleasures of the offline world exists solely because you and I— Yes, You and I— have decided it is worthy of our attention; My attention to write, your attention to read. If either of us were to decide today that this, Yes, this, isn’t worthy of our attention anymore, time spent offline the Substack newsletter would cease to exist. Our attention, what Mihaly Csikszentmuhalyi refers to as psychic energy in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (I love the term so much!!!!) creates reality as You and I know it. Without your sustained attention to read, and my ongoing attention to write, this wouldn’t exist. That is what attention does for you, for me; it creates ideas, thoughts, feelings, actions— It creates our reality.
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Mornings spent offline
Some evenings, filled with terror from witnessing another day— time— passing me by nonchalantly, and unwilling to escape my emotional discomfort with Netfixes and digital pacifiers, I turn to my morning journals. Each page is carefully handwritten and stamped, and I begrudgingly flip through the pages until I stumble upon a date, a word, a sentence that catches my attention. I read. I don’t recognize the woman from these morning pages: Curious, open, understanding, accepting—Excited for the living to come, to unfold, with her childlike glee. What does she know, I wonder, what does she know in those quiet, calm, peaceful mornings spent offline that I seem to forget as the day unfolds?
In the beginning, there is silence— If you let it be so.
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Getting offline is the easy part
“Wherever you go, there you are,” he used to warn me.
This was after he gave up the pleading, and we both settled for defiance; somewhere in between disdain and indifference. I was inconsolable; These walls, I would scream, come alive each morning and raise their voices at me to mock me, to ask how come I’m still here, and he would keep on talking as if I were muted; “You’re not listening to me, wherever you go…” And after the fact, after defiance turned into indifference and there are things you simply cannot sustain on non-feeling, I would look back and realize I never so much as whispered— The screams were all in my head. And after the fact, much later, it bothered me endlessly to find out we were both right: Sometimes you gotta leave, and every time, you must face yourself.
I had to leave social media.
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How to live without social media
“So, no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat, no Tik Tok…” I know he believes me when I say I’m not on social media; it’s just that he wants to make sure I didn’t forget to mention the Instagram account I kept for art inspo or the Facebook one I keep to stay in touch with family back home. “Nope, nothing” I say, “I have email?” I offer. We move on to more interesting topics. By now my default has become no Instagram, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat, no Tik Tok… Not even WhatsApp—This one makes life the most inconvenient but as a woman of principles, I had to leave when Facebook acquired the platform sometime ago.
Life adjusts accordingly.
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time spent offline 