2022 beat my ass. I aged ten years in two weeks, what did you accomplish? Getting offline won’t save you from yourself, that’s lesson one. Nothing will save your from yourself, except maybe death, but then it won’t matter anyway. In the meantime, getting (mostly) offline has made life much better. Compared to what? I can’t say, but it feels better. It is truly the gift that keeps on giving and I’m excited to see where this journey, this little adventure of mine, will take me. There is no going back now.
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Wintering offline
Bundle up and gather around, I got a two-word horror story to tell: It snowed. It’s not that I hate winter. It’s just that I hate four hours of daylight and deadly icy sidewalks, and of course, the cold. It sickens me. But as the prayer goes, God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. So, it is officially winter. It’s cold, it snows, and it gets dark crushingly early. Naturally, I want to recoil and die. People tell me they understand my despair: We can’t believe it’s dark already, wasn’t everyone wearing a t-shirt last week? “Watch your steps hun, it’s slippery.” It hurts. It helps. We’re all collectively trying to get through another season of freezing hell, short dark days, icy roads, leafless trees, gloomy afternoons, and it sucks for everyone.
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Apps won’t cure your loneliness
(Sorry, social media followers don’t count.)
Accept failure.
I’m browsing at my favourite shop with my best friend. “Girl, look at you!” I look up beaming. Compliments from strangers are the best; your boyfriend should think you are beautiful. The usual small talk ensues until we find a common ground. “Where are you from?” In Toronto, one of the most multicultural and multiracial cities in the world, this is a common question from strangers; it means where are you originally from. Ethiopia. Oromo. Harare. No longer stranger, we are linked together with thousands of years of tradition, custom, and love. I pull out my phone, “let’s exchange numbers!” By evening we are texting to make plans to hang out that weekend. We do, and it doesn’t work out as I had hoped. Everybody ain’t for everybody.
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A weekend getaway
I have spent man, many years fantasizing about a total escape from the digital world; chuck the smartphone, delete social media, not even bother with Google. Unplugged, disconnected, completely offline. I still fantasize about it, although it has become more of a distant longing. It would be nice, sure, but reality requires something else of me. That’s just life, I think. Instead, I have learned to appreciate the little moments I get to spend away from the internet. Like most mornings I spend reading and journaling, workout classes with not even a Fitbit on sight, Friday evenings spent tucked away at a bar for our weekly gin and conversation. When I’m feeling really fancy, I put on music and do Sudoku puzzles for hours; I sense heaven. This past weekend I got lucky and spent it away from email and browsing. It was accidental.
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Idle hands scroll
Bad advice is a dime a dozen.
I look at my Friday schedule noting I had made no plans. I figured with a busy weekend ahead, and consecutive busy weekends prior, my liver, wallet, and I could use a little break. Just chill at home, I think, it’s okay to be bored. By 4:00pm, I know I have made a bad bargain with the devil; idle, bored, and emotionally distraught, I text a friend to hang out. On my way there, ready for a night of gin and good conversation, I think about what a shit advice be bored is. I am bored! That’s the problem! A lot of advice online is so far removed from reality, at times I wonder who writes it— AI, probably— and who it is for. Many things sound good in theory but have little to no application in real life. You know what else sounds really good in theory? The productivity gurus’ advice to keep our schedules full of important and productive activities. They tell us, work for 12 hours, exercise for 4, and sleep for 8, and well if you add it all up, that’s 24 hours. I’m trying to enjoy living so I have stopped caring about frivolous things like being productive. It takes up too much of my time anyway.
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Kill your phone
I love my smartphone.
It’s functional, practical, convenient, and compact; smart too. It connects, entertains, gets me places. There is not a thing I have owned prior, nor in the present and probably in the future, that could claim half of what this tiny device is able to accomplish. I wouldn’t die without a smartphone, granted, but I would miss this tiny miracle if, for one reason or another, it was no longer in my possession. It began as a love story; the youthful and the new, shiny technology synched together in curiosity, awe, and admiration. But the honeymoon phase inevitably came to an end and the awe and admiration soon turned into resentment. I noticed, despite myself, how the now no longer new, shiny technology, fitting snuggly in my hands, taking very little physical space, controlled so much of my time, attention, life. In the beginning, I enjoyed spending most of my time getting lost in its trance; everyone was there anyway. Then the new became old, the old was lost, and I realized I have made a bad bargain. Despite my best efforts to negotiate, compromise, and at times make threats, my smartphone with its convenient functionality and irresistible distractibility continued to invade my attention and occupy all my time.
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Tips, tools, tricks for time spent offline
On a more practical and less preachy note, I wanted to share a list of tips, tools, and tricks I have used in the past and still use to unplug, disconnect, and spend more time offline. It is by no means an exhaustive list, and it might not be for everyone, everywhere, at all times, but it is what has worked for me over the years and I hope you find if some of it useful.
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Be careful what you wish for
This past Saturday, I was on the streetcar on my way to meet a friend. Enjoying a crisp, sunny October afternoon while engrossed in my thoughts, it occurred to me I was happy with my life-tech balance. My phone was on dumb mode, I have spent the morning commuting, reading, and sweating at FitPop, and I was on my way to spend time with a human being; in real time, face to face, and I knew I would thoroughly enjoy our time spent together. As I reflected on my day up until that point, which was only 2 in the afternoon by then, it felt good how effortlessly offline my day has been. I felt freed from the years of fight I have put up to take my time, attention, and energy back from the digital noise. In 2016, many lifetimes ago, I resolved to put up a good fight against the attention economy.
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In a perfect world
I recently got an email from a reader asking, in a perfect world, what does your relationship with technology look like?
I like this question a lot because it gave me the chance to envision an ideal world, at least for myself, in which I don’t feel controlled, oppressed, constrained, manipulated, trapped, undermined, and demeaned by the devices, screens, and notifications of the digital world. The email continues, “I often find myself wishing for all the screens and noise around to disappear. Every other month I feel a now-familiar urge to just drop my phone in the bin and run away.” I sympathize. There was a time, when I was much younger, idealistic, and radical, I tried flushing my phone down the toilet. I wanted to be freed from the obsessive, compulsive, and hopeless dependency I felt on my phone. That was over a decade ago, and our obsessive, compulsive, hopeless dependency on technology has only gotten worse— and now there is even an app for that.
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Don’t should on yourself
Confession: I have been spending way too much time online lately.
It happened over time. I would give in a little bit here, a little bit over there, and it adds up. There are the excuses, of course, and the accidental discoveries that stop the old tricks from working; and the exhaustion from letting myself down yet again. I should know better, I should do better, but life keeps getting in the way. First went my dumb smartphone. I discovered I could easily change the passcode to block the apps that waste so much of my time, and it was no use asking people to put in a passcode. I figured how to easily “allow” Safari— you know just to look up a recipe, look up events happening on a Friday, etc.
But mostly, as it usually is with these things, I would fall into the trap of mindless scrolling. It’s easy to avoid the trap during the day time, but when the night time rolls around and I’m all alone and lonely, it becomes harder to resist. There is no harm in a little escape right? A chuckle here, some online validation over there. I try to be okay with it: Night time is the toughest. But soon enough, I’m waking up to my phone most mornings; I open my eyes and the first thing I reach for is my phone and into the digital hellscape I go. Luckily, I got used to waking up unplugged for so long that this sent alarm bells. I felt bad. I had spent a long time building better digital habits, I should know better, I should do better.
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time spent offline 