You may be among those, like me, who confronted a great digital emptiness over the last 12 months as Grist’s prolific environmental and political blogger and Twitter presence David Roberts went into a self-imposed offline exile. He’s back, having learned a thing or two, and he charts his 12 months of analog living in the October issue of Outside Magazine. It’s this week’s essential reading for students in my Blogging a Better Planet course at Pace University.
[Insert, Sept. 10, 10:25 p.m. | My blogging students and I chatted with Roberts via a Google Hangout.]
I hope you’ll read his article, too. Here are some fun tidbits, starting with Outside’s summary:
A star political blogger for Grist.org, David Roberts spent so much time posting and Tweeting and staring at screens that he almost went nuts. So he pulled the plug for a year, restarting his relationship with technology and actively seeking health, balance, and adventure in the real world. What he learned just might save you from meltdown.
He describes his state of mind before unplugging:
My mind was perpetually in the state that researcher and technology writer Linda Stone termed continuous partial attention. I was never completely where I was, never entirely doing what I was doing. I always had one eye on the virtual world. Every bit of conversation was a potential tweet, every sunset a potential Instagram….
What had begun as blogging had become “lifecasting,” a manic, full-time performance of Internet David Roberts. With some lamentable exceptions, I was, and am, proud of Internet David Roberts. But he had flourished at the expense of the slump-shouldered, thick-bellied, bleary-eyed shut-in Huck saw sitting on the computer every day.
Then comes the transition to offline living (he did not give up Google Maps or an occasional product search), involving aching yoga and lots of walks:
Those early days of screenlessness were bewildering. My mind, wound up like a top for years, continued spinning. I experienced sporadic surges of angst and adrenaline, sure I was supposed to be doing… something. I’d pull my phone out every few minutes, even though no one was e-mailing me and I’d uninstalled all social-media apps. The habits and mental agitations of digital work life persisted like phantom limbs.
My symptoms were testament to the power of what psychologists call variable intermittent reinforcement. Famed behaviorist B. F. Skinner discovered long ago that if you really want to ingrain a habit, you encourage it with rewards that arrive at variable times, in variable sizes. The lab rat knows that it will periodically be given food for pressing the lever, but not exactly when or how much. The result: a compulsive rat….
The kinds of rewards offered in online communities are particularly compelling, based on what Dan Siegel, a UCLA professor of psychiatry and executive director of the Mindsight Institute, calls contingent communication. It happens, he told me, when “a signal sent gets a signal back.” That simple act, evoking a response from another mind, is a key feature of early childhood development and remains “deeply rewarding,” Siegel said, satisfying primordial instincts shaped by our evolution as a social species.
I love Dan Siegel’s model of the mind, which he has extending well outside the boundaries of the brain — and have written about how online connectedness can help expand what he calls our “we map.”
Roberts describes how he tried, mainly through yoga, to become mindful:
For beginners, at least, meditation means sitting quietly, alone with your thoughts, for as long as you can stand it, which isn’t very long. A recent study published in Science found that many participants “preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts,” which I have to say I completely get.
That, it became clear, was the real benefit of my sweaty yoga: it was a back-door route to meditation. Moving through the postures, I was forced to draw focus to my breath, again and again. My mind never emptied—I’ll probably need a few decades for that—but over the ensuing months I became more able to observe my thoughts, worries, and distractions as they arrived, acknowledge them, and let them go.
Here’s the remarkably trenchant abstract of the shocking Science study (read that both ways), titled “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind“:
In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.
Here’s a video explanation of the research created by the journal:
So, after that digital digression, let’s swing back to Roberts’s review of his offline year. He describes replacing one addiction with another:
[My] mind began to spin down, I discovered that calm was like a drug. It felt so good, so decadent, just to sit in the early afternoon with my feet propped on the windowsill, watching wind brush the trees in the front yard. I was hooked.
He retreated to a cabin in Utah with some friends for a full month of hanging out, snowboarding and the like. A month later, he faltered briefly:
[A]t the end of February, I wound up in a distressingly familiar position: standing at my computer, surrounded by empty chip bags and Trader Joe’s chocolate-covered-whatever boxes. It was almost two in the morning, and I’d just emerged, blinking and dazed, from an hour lost to some online rathole. (I think it was reading reviews of bass-guitar cables, despite already owning a perfectly good bass-guitar cable.) I felt that old sour stew of anxiety, guilt, and exhaustion.
But he pulled back, like Harry Potter popping his head out of the pensieve.* And here he is back online, having nurtured new habits, some abetted by technology, that will keep him — he hopes — from overdosing:
First, I’m holding on to the three most centering, mind-calming practices I developed during the break. There’s yoga, of course, which I can no longer imagine doing without. There’s walking. And there’s bass guitar, my delight in which is undiminished by lack of skill. (If I accomplished nothing else this year, at least I learned the “Game of Thrones” theme on bass.)
For at least one or two hours every workday, I’m going to use an app called Freedom to cut off my Internet connection entirely. That will be my time for deep focus.
When I’m writing, I want to write with full focus. When I’m pinging, I want to ping without angst or guilt. When I’m with my family, I want to be with my family, not half in my phone. It is the challenge of our age, in work and in life: to do one thing at a time, what one has consciously chosen to do and only that, and to do it with care and attention.
I hope I’m up to it.That any of us are.
Please be sure to read the rest. Welcome back, David!
And thanks for agreeing to visit my blogging class this Wednesday via a Google Hangout to talk about the merits of a hybrid life. I’ll post that conversation here, of course.
Now I have to take in the analog laundry hanging on the clothesline in our new back yard. (Oops, I just caught myself “lifecasting.”)
Postscript, 8 p.m. | Joe Romm at Climate Progress summarized an interview with Roberts in a post that provides some amusing extra details, including this one:
Roberts explained to me he is in great demand now as an interview subject to discuss his one year offline: “I am getting famous for doing nothing.”