Don’t cell your soul
It’s next to impossible for many to free themselves from their phone, neither is it realistic. The answer may not lie in abstinence, but rather to ‘take time off the screen’, even if it’s just for a day in a week.
A FEW months ago, I arrived at work and realised I left my smartphone at home. I panicked.
How would my kids get in touch with me? Did I have a dermatologist appointment that day? What if that cute guy from a dating app texted me to see if I was free that night?
I was cut off from the world. Maybe you know the feeling. Except I wasn’t. The world was right in front of me – my co-workers, my computer, my notes, my coffee mug.
That was really all I needed in the moment.
When the anxiety lessened, I went about my day. Funny, but after a few hours without my phone, it felt, well, liberating. Remember when it was like that all the time? When you told your mom you’d be home by dinnertime and you were – without her tracking you?
When you could read or eat or play with your dog or do just about anything without alerts and beeps and dings and buzzes demanding your immediate attention? When you had to entertain yourself when you were bored? When you had nothing with you that tempted you to look at it obsessively?
I do. But I, like so many others, have become somewhat of a slave to my phone. Tiffany Shlain would like to help us.
Yes, that Tiffany Shlain, the Internet pioneer who founded the Webby Awards, which has honoured the best websites since 1996, and who was dubbed by Newsweek magazine as one of the “Women Shaping the 21st Century”. She’s been in tech from the beginning. And yet in her new book, 24/6: The Power Of Unplugging One Day A Week, the Mill Valley, California, resident and award-winning filmmaker makes a case for taking a day off – a Tech Shabbat, she calls it – which she, her husband, who also works in tech, and their two daughters have done for 10 years.
Every Friday night, they put their phones away for 24 hours and ... do what, exactly? Things they love.
They have friends over for dinner. They play games. They cook and bake. They read. They play music. They take walks. They laugh. They engage with each other. And they have the best sleep of the week.
At 5 pm Saturdays, they plug in again. But life is different.
“Every week I get to recalibrate and remember what it’s like off the screens, so the other six days I am more aware and intentional of how I use them,” she writes.
“If life itself is a balancing act, this one day a week reminds me where the centre of gravity is.”
It sounds nice, doesn’t it?
But it’s more than just recalibrating and finding gravity’s centre. Our phone obsession is affecting our mental health and relationships. It’s greatly reducing the eye contact we have with others, she notes.
“Eye contact is the first and last form of communication we have. It’s fundamental. And I worry we’re losing it,” she writes.
“Nothing is more effective for increasing empathy than in-person, face-to-face eye contact. We look up. And open our eyes.”
And we don’t fully know what other negative impacts our phone obsession might be doing to us.
True, we’re adults, with one foot in tech and the other in the old days; we can get by with a phone left at home for a few hours or unusable on a weekend wilderness backpacking trip.
Today’s kids -- Shlain’s are 10 and 16 -- however, are growing up entirely online. And they’re suffering because of it -- it’s making them unhappy, it’s causing more family conflict, it’s impacting their ability to focus at school, it’s blunting their emotional development, she says. And just when it seems like we need more empathy in the world than ever before, we are raising children to be less empathetic.
As much as technology can connect us, it can disconnect us, from ourselves and others. We’re not really being present, despite all the yoga, meditation and mindfulness self-help books many of us partake in.
Shlain spent many years trying to get people to connect online. Now, she wonders how to get people offline routinely so they can live better lives.
It’s going to take a mindshift.
“Let’s evolve how we think, live and work. We have to start viewing rest as a strength, not a weakness, and reward people for taking care of their bodies and minds, as well as creating infrastructures that support this across socioeconomic strata,” she writes.
“We need to create more opportunities to bring people together, face-to-face, without screens, and we have to offer time and space for that to happen.
“Because the alternative is living as though technology invented us to serve its needs rather than the other way around.”
When I got home that phoneless day, sure enough there were texts from friends and a few voicemails. I answered them all that evening. No one was angry that it took so long for me to get back to them. There wasn’t one “Where r u?”
Sadly, there also wasn’t a message from that cute guy from the dating app. Despite all that smartphones can do, they can’t always give you what you want.