You never know where you’re going to find wisdom. This simple thought stayed with me, resonating as forcefully as anything I gleaned from the great books I later read in high school. Indeed, I saw it echoed over and over in the fictional characters who populate our best stories, people struggling to come to terms with their essential isolation from others and thus with themselves. Odysseus, Don Quixote, King Lear, Ishmael, Hester Prynne, Huck Finn, Leopold Bloom, Holden Caulfield—it’s their journeys as individuals, into their individuality, that draws us back to their stories again and again. Because they’re our story, too.
The twentieth-century philosopher Paul Tillich once wrote that the word “loneliness” exists to express “the pain of being alone,” while “solitude” expresses “the glory of being alone.” I was experiencing both in those college days, but it’s the glory that I remember most today. The older I got, the more I saw how crucial maintaining some degree of separateness was to my own inner tranquillity and, at the same time, how hard it was to achieve. Society is constantly throwing up obstacles, telling us that we’re worthless without the crowd, that everything is riding on its approval.
In a country built on ideals of individual freedom and autonomy, one might think such messages wouldn’t get much traction. But freedom can be a heavy burden, and in a certain sense, the more we’re responsible for managing our own destinies, the more appealing conformity becomes. Recognizing this, marketers have learned to sell products in a way that makes us feel like bold individualists, even as we’re joining the herd. Advertisements pitch everything from cars to cola as instruments of self-expression and liberation, though they’re really the opposite. Be a rebel, wear the shoes everyone else is wearing.
I still struggle to ignore these messages. But when I succeed at standing apart, the payoff is enormous, and not just in a selfish way. The best kind of aloneness is expansive and generous. To enjoy your own company is to be at ease not just with yourself but with everyone and everything in the universe. When you’re inwardly content, you don’t need others to prop you up, so you can think about them more freely and generously. Paradoxically enough, separation is the way to empathy. In solitude we meet not just ourselves but all other selves, and it turns out we hardly knew them.
Social separateness was still plentiful in the late 1980s, when I was out of school living on my own for the first time in a big city. This was the dawn of the digital era, when personal computers were increasingly common and e-mail was first catching on. Cell phones were still rare, however, as were truly portable laptops. So when you were out in public, you were still basically disconnected. Walking the city in those days, I was both surrounded by others and utterly alone, and it was this solitude within the crowd that made city life magical. It’s what E. B. White was talking about when he observed that New York City “blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation…insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute.”
Written in 1948, that line reads today like an inscription on an ancient tomb. The old unreachability, the effortless kind you could experience even in the midst of a metropolis, has vanished. Right around the start of this century, the ideal of a life blending “privacy” and “participation” was thrown out, replaced by an idealization of maximum connectedness. The first corollary, “The more you connect, the better off you are,” took hold all through society, for the reasons we’ve already seen. Digital connectedness was a deeply compelling force, one that served manifold human purposes and needs. And right on its heels was the second corollary: “The more you disconnect, the worse off you are.” Perhaps there had been a time when most everyone wanted or needed insulation from the crowd, but now they didn’t seem to need it anymore. In a society built on the maximalist ideal, to be disconnected was to be out of it, cut off, in a bad place.
We never sat down and consciously decided that this was the code we would live by. There was no discussion, no referendum or show of hands. It just sort of happened, as if by tacit agreement or silent oath. From now on, I will strive to be as connected as possible at all times. Like everyone else, I signed right on. I’ve spent most of the last decade within arm’s length of a computer or my phone, usually both. When I was away from technology or when I just couldn’t find a signal, I perceived it as a problem. If a hotel didn’t have broadband in the room, I got irritated and complained. When I found myself in a region without cell phone coverage, I felt my provider had let me down. Staying with cousins for the holidays in a house without a wireless router, and thus no Internet connection for my laptop, I would go into the backyard or sit in the car on the street and try to pick up a neighbor’s signal. Not once or twice a day, but many times. How else was I supposed to know what was going on in my life?
Of course, as wireless technology improved and spread, these frustrations diminished. By the middle of the decade, it was much easier to find a reliable connection. Laptops got smaller, and cell phones acquired Internet browsers, making web access as portable as a wallet. Involuntary disconnectedness was increasingly rare. We started to view our high-speed connections the way we view electricity and running water, as a given of everyday life.
It was exactly at this point that I really started to think about my own connectedness for the first time. Given my maximalist tendencies, I should have been delighted to see digital connectivity spreading far and wide. Wasn’t this what I’d wished for? No more of those irritating moments of isolation.
But here’s the weird thing: I started missing them. It wasn’t the annoyance and frustration that I wanted back—I’m no masochist. It was the state of mind that I’d found myself in after I couldn’t get a connection and gave up. According to the second corollary, in these disconnected times, I should have felt a deterioration in the quality of my life. The more you disconnect, the worse off you are, right? Once I accepted my fate, however, I’d experience a slow but steady improvement in my overall mood and attitude. I wasn’t completely conscious of this effect at the time, but it was definitely stored someplace on my inner hard drive. There I was with no inbox to check, nothing to click on or respond to. No demands, requests, or options. No headlines to scan or orders to place. No crowd to keep me busy. With all of that out of reach, my consciousness had no choice but to settle down into the physical place where I happened to be and make the best of it.
At those times, I’d been a castaway washed up on a desert island, a digital Robinson Crusoe. And in classic castaway fashion, now that I was rescued, I saw in retrospect that there had been something very special about my island. Life was different in disconnected mode. The easier it became to stay connected, the more I thought about this other, different way of being and started longing for it.
I first noticed it on airplanes. Cell phone use has long been prohibited on commercial flights, and at that time there was still no airborne Internet service. Boarding one of those disconnected flights was like passing through a wormhole into another dimension where time moved differently. Buckling into my seat, I felt my mind relax as I was liberated from a burden I didn’t even know I’d been carrying. It was the burden of my busy, connected life. The burden of always knowing that everyone everywhere is just a few clicks away.
The limitlessness of digital life is thrilling, but it’s also unsettling, in two important ways. First, the hours we spend flitting constantly among tasks train us to treat our time and our attention as infinitely divisible commodities. On a screen, it’s easy to jam more busyness into each moment, so that is exactly what we do. Eventually the mind falls into a mode of thinking, a kind of nervous rhythm that’s inherently about finding new stimuli, new jobs to perform. This carries over into the rest of our lives; even when we’re away from screens, it’s hard for our minds to stop clicking around and come to rest.
At some point, I noticed that it had become hard for me to stay focused on a single task of any kind, menta
l or physical, without adding new ones. While brushing my teeth, I would wander out of the bathroom in search of something else to do at the same time. I’d be organizing my sock drawer with one hand while trying to reach my wisdom teeth with the other, and even then I could feel myself craving still another job. The digital consciousness can’t tolerate three minutes of pure focus.
The second unsettling aspect of this is philosophical. The more we connect, the more our thoughts lean outward. There’s a preoccupation with what’s going on “out there” in the bustling otherworld, rather than “in here” with yourself and those right around you. What was once exterior and faraway is now easily accessible, and this carries a sense of obligation or duty. When you can reach out and touch the whole world, a part of you guiltily feels you should be reaching out. Who’s waiting to hear from me? Is the boss wondering why I haven’t responded?
In addition, outwardness offers something more potent than mere duty: self-affirmation, demonstrable evidence of one’s existence and impact on the world. In less connected times, human beings were forced to shape their own interior sense of identity and worth—to become self-sufficient. By virtue of its interactivity, the digital medium is a source of constant confirmation that, yes, you do indeed exist and matter. However, the external validation provided by incoming messages and the number of times one’s name appears in search results is not as trustworthy or stable as the kind that comes from inside. Thus we’re forced to go back again and again for verification. Who dropped my name? Who’s read my latest post? Are there any comments on my comments? Who’s paying attention to me now?
Up in an airplane without wireless, all of that receded. The world of endless potential tasks was gone, and so too was that feeling of compulsory, needy outwardness. What was special about those flights was the very thing I had long tried to avoid, involuntary disconnectedness. Though air travel is miserable in so many ways—and at six foot five, I’m no fan of the Torquemada-inspired seats of economy class—I actually started looking forward to it. Here was a rare respite from my connected life. Existence was reined in, reduced to just me and my immediate surroundings, the other passengers, the cup of tea on the tray table, the words on my notebook screen. I got some of my best thinking and writing done on those flights. And down on the toolbar at the bottom of the screen, was a constant reminder of why: the red X over the wireless icon, for no signal.
NOW, PLOWING THROUGH the water with a lifeless cell phone in my pocket, I’m having the same sensation. It’s bracing being out here all by myself, with nothing to distract me from the task at hand. In fact, there is no task at hand other than getting back to my mooring. Not only can nobody reach me, but, just as amazing, I can’t click a few buttons and create busywork for myself. If my phone were working right now, I’d be on it with my wife, Martha, saying I’d be home in twenty minutes, though she really doesn’t need to know that. I’d tell her about how I’d fallen in the drink, and we’d have a laugh about it.
After years of being so connected, I’m used to sharing all thoughts and experiences impulsively, in the moment, with everyone and anyone who comes to mind. Why not, when they’re all around you? I’ve forgotten that some information is like wine: it gets better if you let it rest for a while.
I’m steering with one finger, watching the seabirds dive for breakfast. Oh, what a beautiful morning, oh, what a beautiful day. Okay, I’m not actually singing, but I could be. Could this sudden ebullience be all about a dead cell phone? No, I’m happy first and foremost because I’m out on the water on a nice spring day. But there’s a special quality to this mood, a looseness in the way thoughts and feelings come and go, and even in how my body feels. It’s a happier kind of happiness that reminds me of those early tastes of independence in the old pre-digital world. The little self-help book was right—what fresh air we breathe when we take possession of our own separateness, our own integrity!
LIKE MANY OTHERS, I’d been dutifully toeing the line, allowing digital connectedness to reshape my life without asking if it was the kind of life I really wanted. The more connected I was, the busier I became attending to all the people, information, and tasks that the devices bring within our reach. And this had two distinctly negative effects. First, as the gaps between my digital tasks disappeared, so did the opportunities for depth. Screen life became more rushed and superficial, a nonstop mental traffic jam. Second, because I was spending so much time in the digital sphere, I was less able to enjoy my own company and the places and people right around me.
The same tool that added depth to my experience was taking it away. It was only when the tool was rendered useless that I felt the balance shifting back. When my phone died, a space opened up between me and the rest of the world, and in that space my mind was able to settle down. It was an accidental version of the place I went to after calling my mother and a reminder of how important that place is. I was myself again that morning, free in a way I seldom felt free anymore. What larks!
Yet the opposite message was coming from all directions: Connect! Connect! A revolution was under way and people were sleeping on sidewalks to be in the vanguard. Standing at a crosswalk in midtown Manhattan one day waiting for the light to change, I realized that the eight or ten other pedestrians standing around me were all staring into screens. Here they were in the heart of one of the greatest cities in the history of civilization, surrounded by a rich array of sights, sounds, and faces, and they were running away from it all, blocking it out.
When a crowd adopts a point of view en masse, all critical thinking effectively stops. The maximalist dogma is particularly difficult to challenge because it’s all about joining the crowd, so it’s self-reinforcing. There was an inexorability to it, a sense that if you didn’t hop on the digital bandwagon and stay there, you’d be left behind. The industry study I mentioned earlier, which predicted a vast migration of the human species to hyperconnected living, included this stern warning to the global business community: “Enterprises will either manage this migration or get trampled.” Who wants to be trampled? Besides, the technologies are remarkable. To have doubts felt retrograde, like throwing in one’s lot with the technology pessimists, casting a vote against the future.
Our own perceptions and feelings are rarely as peculiar as we think. The lonely thought you had at 3 A.M. turns out to be everyone else’s lonely thought, you just didn’t know it at the time. Once I started to question my own maximalist tendencies, I began seeing evidence that I wasn’t alone. In the news outlets I habitually follow, the same ones that cheered the revolution and promoted digital devices as saviors, stories about the burdens of overconnectedness appeared with increasing frequency. They weren’t bannered across the top of the front page or leading the newscast. You had to look for them in the back pages, scroll down, or wait for the second half of the show. Typically, there would be some new study or survey indicating that screen life was taking a previously unrecognized toll. Some of these reports were intriguing enough that I clicked around and found the source material, which tended to be sketchy and inconclusive. Still, the point was that others were noticing what I was noticing.
Problems were turning up in three different but overlapping places: (1) in the interior lives of individuals, where experts were describing psychological and emotional disturbances far more serious than what I’d experienced; (2) in family and personal relationships, where screen time has been replacing face time; and (3) in businesses and other organizations, where distracted workers are hurting the bottom line. Let’s take them one at a time.
From the earliest days of computers, there have been worries about the effects these technologies would have on the human mind. Back in the early 1970s, the futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “information overload” to capture what he believed would happen to the human consciousness as connective technologies brought the world to our mental doorstep. In the last decade, the phrase has gained new currency, mainly through media reports about novel psychological conditions and be
haviors that some experts attribute to digital overload. They include attention deficit trait, a malady related to the like-named bane of modern childhood. According to Edward Hallowell, the psychiatrist who first described it, ADT is “like a traffic jam in your mind.” Symptoms include “distractability, restlessness, a sense of ‘gotta go, gotta rush, gotta run around’ and impulsive decision-making, because you have so many things to do.”
Many other conditions have been linked to overload, including continuous partial attention, defined as the state of mind in which “most of one’s attention is on a primary task, but where one is also monitoring several background tasks just in case something more important or interesting comes up.” E-mail apnea, meanwhile, is “a form of shallow breathing while checking email that, in some extreme cases, leads to an increase in stress-related disease.” There’s also Internet addiction disorder and, at the comic end of the spectrum, nomophobia, “the fear of being out of mobile phone contact.”
New, snappily named disorders are always suspicious, crafted as they often are to pull in the very media coverage in which we learn about them. For our purposes, whether they really exist as discrete phenomena is beside the point. What the media serve up each day, more than anything, is an X-ray of the collective consciousness, which is just the sum of our individual hopes and fears. When crime rates are a worry, the headlines are full of serial killers. When global climate change first entered public awareness, every big storm was a symptom. Likewise, this rash of alleged digital neuroses reflects the concern just about everyone now feels about the relentless pull of the screen. Putting a scientific-sounding name on it, however contrived, is a way of feeling in control. As with crime and climate change, this doesn’t mean the underlying problem is illusory. Nomophobia may sound funny, but the challenge of the new busyness couldn’t be more real.
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