My disconnected vacation

Although the destination we’d chosen for our late-August vacation is renowned for its water park, indoor-outdoor aquarium, tropical beaches, and world-class restaurants, my attitude heading into it was that for me, vacation would be a success if I had plenty of time to read and go for walks.

I definitely got my wish – and then some. With the kids happy to avail themselves of all the sun-and-sea recreation free of parental oversight, I had all the time I wanted to sit poolside and read. And I had time for walking, too. Along with a 4-mile run early every morning, while the rest of my family slept, I fit in a late-afternoon walk on the beach every day, sometimes on dry sand, sometimes in the shallowest waves, with the warm water bathing my feet as I made my way first up the island’s extensive shoreline and then back down.

Untethering from email and Facebook was a big deal; not having Internet for filing any articles or doing any work at all while away was an even bigger deal; but I was resigned to both before we left. Internet fees and roaming charges at our destination were just too expensive for us to consider getting on line at all, and I was both apprehensive and curious as to what a fully disconnected vacation would feel like.

But it turned out I was even more disconnected than I anticipated. Upon boarding our flight to the Bahamas, Rick and I both set our phones to airplane mode, but I still planned to keep my phone close at hand so that I could listen to podcasts I’d downloaded before we left, take pictures with my phone’s camera, and time my runs and walks. So I was unprepared for my phone to stop working altogether on the third day of the trip. No more podcasts or photos or stopwatch or alarm clock or any other phone functions I’d come to depend on.

And then the following day, mysteriously enough, my Fitbit stopped working. No more timing my workouts with that, or logging my steps or miles. Suddenly I was far more disconnected than I’d imagined being.

Which meant I had to get by without my usual electronic dependencies. Without my phone’s clock function or the stopwatch on my Fitbit, I had to time runs and walks with my watch, like I used to do back in the 90’s. I had to trust myself that 45 minutes or whatever time I’d set as my goal was a decent workout, even without being able to see just how many steps or miles that entailed. Without access to the podcasts stored in my phone, I turned instead to my 12-year-old for help with audio entertainment to keep me engaged during my run; she lent me her iPod, on which she’d stored the audiobook version of a middle grade novel by a favorite author of hers, and while I ran, I listened not to my favorite NPR podcasts but to the story of a sweet but frustrated 12-year-old trying to get along with her disorganized family.

Though it was disappointing to return home with what felt like a fistful of broken appliances, and losing all the photos that I’d taken early in the trip with my phone was certainly unfortunate, it was good for me to be forced to be so disconnected. It turns out exercise feels good even when you don’t have an official readout of your step count at the end. It turns out middle grade fiction is pretty well-crafted these days. It turns out I can wake up at a decent time merely by relying on my natural biorhythms and not the chirp of my iPhone at a pre-set time.

Most importantly, I did lots of reading and took lots of walks. That, after all, is what I had hoped to do. And all four of us had a great time together. The day after we got home, I was able to get my phone repaired and replace the Fitbit. Being disconnected is a good experience, at least for the course of a weeklong vacation. In a way, I’m glad it happened. It was a great vacation, glitches not withstanding. In fact, maybe the glitches made it an even better vacation.

Click here for guilt

Oh, the guilt.

It all started with a hair care product that a stylist introduced me to last fall. Unlike just about every other hair care product on earth, it’s perfectly suited to my very curly hair. But like many salon products, it’s expensive, and once I got hooked on it, I was spending three or four times more on my hair per month than I did when I relied on drugstore inventory.

Maybe I can find it online, I thought to myself. Of course, if I could, it would probably be on some obscure beauty supply wholesale site where the ordering system would be complicated and the minimum shipment would be two hundred dollars’ worth of the product.

But no. To my surprise, the first hit that came up on my Google search was Amazon, offering the same product for half what I was paying at the salon: nine dollars a bottle, which would likely last me about three weeks. With a click, I virtually deposited two bottles in my cart.

That added up to eighteen dollars, which was a fantastic price for this product but left me seven dollars short of the $25 minimum that qualifies an order on Amazon for free shipping. Normally when this happens, I throw in a book or small electronics accessory, but at the moment I didn’t feel particularly deserving of a gift, and the point of the purchase was to save money, not to spend extra.

Then I remembered a fragment of a line I’d heard on NPR a few days ago. “People on Amazon buying diapers….socks….laundry detergent,” it said.

The lightbulb went off. I could fill up my cart with ordinary grocery dry goods. “What do I least like to lug home from the supermarket?” I asked myself. Paper towels. Click! Toilet paper. Click! Twenty-pound bags of dog kibble. Click!

A vision developed in front of me as I sat at the keyboard. Everything that’s a pain to buy at the supermarket was going to appear on my doorstep. Free delivery, and at purchase prices marginally lower than what I normally pay.

And that’s where the guilt kicked in. I know ordering from Amazon has its ethical drawbacks. Avoiding state sales tax means I’m not helping to build Massachusetts infrastructure. Having a truck deliver grocery items rather than taking them home in my Prius increases our carbon footprint. And it’s not like I want my local Market Basket to go out of business. Not at all.

I gave it some more thought. It was just a one-time event, but already I was finding the idea of never again unloading bulk paper products or heavy dog food bags from the car tantalizing. Was I really willing to take on the ethical implications of this choice?

It was a powerful reminder that just about every decision we make comes with costs and benefits. The thought of having these items delivered to my door made me happy. But was I willing to use that sense of good cheer and the extra time it earned me to do something really positive and productive to benefit the world? If so, it was a fair trade-off. But if I didn’t make a conscious effort to somehow compensate for my decision, it was harder to justify.

So I’ll try to think of a way to “pay back” the time and freedom that having paper towels and toilet paper delivered to my door will gain me. I’ll try not to squander the extra time or take it for granted.

I’m sure I’ll still make plenty of visits to our local supermarkets to buy food. I’m not ready to go so far as to order edible groceries on line yet. But it’s definitely a quandary to which I need to devote a little bit more thought. And with the mental space I freed up by not having to shop for paper products this month, that’s what I’ll try to do.

Off-line

It is so hard for me to go offline for any period of time, and yet I’m so aware of how much I need to do this more regularly.

I’ve written before about my ambivalence about not having a Smartphone, which would give me easy access to email when I’m away from home. Sometimes I’m tempted to upgrade, and other times I’m so appreciate of the value of being compelled to just leave my email behind now and then – whether it’s for short periods of time when I go out to do errands or go for a walk, or longer periods of time like the day last month when I spent eight hours on a daytrip to southern Maine and had no access to email from about nine in the morning to five in the afternoon.

If anything, lately I feel like I’ve become more compelled to be on line. Receiving a hand-me-down netbook from my mother meant my online world was more portable then ever around the house, if still not actually portable outside the house. It became so easy to have the netbook with me in the kitchen when I was preparing meals, or on the porch when I was reading the paper, or on my nighttable when I was getting ready for bed at night.

But I was also becoming increasingly aware lately that I go to the Internet, particularly email, for the wrong reasons. I was constantly searching, waiting, anticipating that all-important email…and yet I can no longer explain what that email might be.

At some point it occurred to me I was looking at my computer screen the same way my husband sometimes looks into the fridge: certain that there must be something in there to satisfy his longings, and yet unable to name what that longing might be for, when I ask him pointblank what it is that he wants to eat.
And so this past weekend it was with a sense of relief that I closed up my computer at 10:00 Saturday morning and left for an overnight trip. “There’s nothing I need. There’s nothing that will come by email this weekend that will make my life any better than it already is,” I told myself several times. And I didn’t give it another thought while we were away.

The funny thing was that when we arrived home midafternoon on Sunday, I found I still didn’t want to get on line. I didn’t care how many emails had built up; just like my husband with the fridge, none of them was going to fulfill the nameless thing I wanted from it.

So I went for a walk in the woods instead. I walked for an hour and a quarter, and then when I got home I turned on my computer at last. I had 30 new emails, certainly not a staggering number for a day and a half off line. I scanned the subject lines quickly. A few from friends who I was happy to hear from, but none of them contained anything terribly important. A lot of ads, of course. A few items related to community events or issues. Nothing work-related since it was a holiday weekend. I went through them all briefly, responded to some, and then disconnected. It felt good.

Changing my ways this one time doesn’t mean I’ve ended my compulsion once and for all. It just means I’m trying really hard to rethink it, to remind myself that a sense of spiritual or emotional enrichment almost never comes via email. I don’t know if I really have the capacity to improve in this area. But reminding myself of how much more that walk in the woods did for me than scanning my emails ever will seems like a good start.

A disconnected week

Because we are transitioning from one house to another, we have Internet access in neither home for most of this week. It’s been nearly fifteen years since I lived in a home without Internet access. As with so many changes to routine and the things we take for granted as part of daily life, it’s good to be reminded that what we are accustomed to isn’t how it has to be. And while for the most part I have to admit it’s a big inconvenience to be without Internet access – not only for email but for looking up addresses and phone numbers, checking my Google calendar, backing up documents I’m working on and much more – there are ways in which it brings a touch of grace, as well.

For the past few days I’ve gotten on line only a few times in the course of the day, by bringing my computer to my parents’ house or the library and taking advantage of their network. In between visits, I tend to wonder what I’m missing out on. Is someone trying to reach me – an editor, a friend? (Of course, if they are, they can always call.) Is there a breaking news story I don’t know about? (Of course, I’d hear about it on the hourly NPR news broadcast to which I tune in at least every couple of hours.) And what about those thoughts that constantly flit in and out of my head concerning ideas I need to communicate to other people? (I’m finally learning to write them down as I think of them, and then use those notes to dash off emails once I do get on line.)

In reality, it’s reminding me of what daily life was like when I was in college and in my early 20’s, before the widespread use of the Internet. Contact with friends was sporadic, not continuous. Whether “sporadic” meant a phone call every day or a letter once or twice a year, there were intervals of disconnection. We had time to mull over our correspondences and our relationships, rather than constantly and ceaselessly expanding upon them. I’m remembering what it’s like to save up personal news for the occasional phone call with my sisters or my parents rather than dashing off an email every single time I think of something that might interest them. And I’m remembering what it’s like to wonder what’s going on with my college roommate and look forward to our yearly or semi-yearly get-togethers rather than just logging onto Facebook to see what she did yesterday, last night, this morning.

All in all, it would be dishonest of me to pretend I’m fine with this Internet hiatus. Knowing that hours are going by when I might not know about an assignment from an editor or an important new piece of information for a story makes me anxious about getting my work done sufficiently, and I miss the steady comforting stream of chatter from email and social media.

But I’m also enjoying the novelty of a kind of silence that isn’t common anymore: not silence in the literal sense but the silence of cutting off our usual streams of communication. My 12-year-old son, who during our enforced Internet recess is missing the interactive online games he frequently plays with his friends and the instant-messaging he often conducts with a couple of girls in his class, said it was like a power outage only without the cold and darkness. I know what he means. As with a power outage, we’re having to break out of our usual patterns and find different things to do, different ways to carry on our preferred communications and entertainment.

I never cease to be delighted by the thrill that comes when the lights blaze and the heat roar back on after a blackout. It’s as if we’ve been without heat and brightness forever and not just for a few hours, each time it happens. We’ll feel the same way once we again have regular Internet access. For a couple of days it will seem fabulous; and then it will seem everyday again.

It’s good to be knocked out of our routine and thereby to remember anew just what exactly our routine consists of. I’ll owe a lot of emails once I’m back on line. For now, I’m thinking fondly of my friends, working hard on assignments, and hoping that I’ll be forgiven for my lack of communication this week.

Smartphone-free and fully focused

Because my kids are not exactly brimming over with intellectual curiosity every day, it can take a bit of effort on my part to get them to enjoy a cultural excursion. So when they agreed to my suggestion that we visit the Salem Witch Museum on a rainy day earlier this week, I made sure that a hearty meal at a local luncheonette was part of the deal. We were sitting at a booth when Tim, after watching a table of construction workers all pull out their iPhones simultaneously and start scrolling through their screens, suddenly said, “Mom, you should really have a smartphone.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because everyone else does,” he responded. I suppressed a smile. Isn’t that normally the reason kids his age – twelve – want things for themselves: because everyone else has it? Was I discovering a new phase of child development: peer pressure by transference? Bad enough for a pre-teen not to have what everyone else does: is it even more embarrassing when your mom doesn’t hold the latest purse-sized technology?

“I don’t want a smartphone,” I told him. “I like to be able to walk away from my email. If I had a smartphone right now, I’d be checking my email and writing back to people. I like having to just leave it all behind when we go somewhere together.”

So it was fitting that less than 24 hours after this conversation, I was reading an article about MIT internet expert Sherry Turkle, who in her newest book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, describes her experience conducting interviews with hundreds of teen subjects who complained about their parents’ overuse of mobile technology when they should be paying attention to their kids.

Turkle said that most people who heard that had the same reaction: they expected to hear that parents were complaining about their kids’ reliance on constant access to mobile communication, but what she instead found was the opposite. No matter whether they are toddlers or teens: kids want their parents’ undivided attention. My kids complain when we do errands or go to community events and I spend time chatting with other adults I know. “No chatting, Mom!” they insist time and again.

If I had a smartphone, it would be like chatting, only silently, I fear. My attention would be directed away from them even when we were deliberately choosing to spend time together. Turkle describes the scenarios she sees in which parents’ attention gets divided: a mother pushing a child on the swing with one hand and texting with the other; a father who sends emails during his son’s baseball game. As Turkle points out, it’s a mistake on many levels, and not only because it detracts from one-on-one time between parent and child. It’s also dangerous to let yourself get so distracted, and multitasking tends to lead to a decrease in the quality of whatever it is you are trying to accomplish as you multi-task.

So despite Tim’s comment, I’m glad not to carry my email around with me. I know I’d succumb to the temptation to use it when I shouldn’t, so why put myself in that position? As we ate our sandwiches, I listened to the kids talk about the witch museum, and then we all laughed quietly about a conversation going on at the booth behind us, which reminded us of a similar situation last month in which we heard a funny conversation at the booth behind us while we ate breakfast at a local diner. Tim asked me what kind of job I thought the construction workers who were avidly punching away at their phones as they waited for their lunches were doing on this rainy day, and Holly drew a picture on her paper placemat.

In short, we paid attention: to each other, to our surroundings. I was glad not to have any distractions; when my phone rang I silenced the ringer. My guess is that I won’t hold out forever. Everyone else walks around with their email at their fingertips, and eventually I will too. I just hope I remember that undivided attention should always be a priority: whether it’s on the kids, the driving, or just the sound of the rain against the restaurant’s windows.

Pursuing the goal of an Internet hiatus

I need to make a greater effort to impose Internet hiatuses on myself.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while: ever since ten months ago when I traded my desktop computer for an ultralight “notebook”-style laptop. With the rather old-fashioned desktop, which lived permanently in my second-floor home office, hiatuses enforced themselves. I’d walk away from email and Internet simply because I had things to do in other parts of the house.

But the laptop is easy to bring along when I’m in the kitchen, which is where a lot of my non-office time in the house is spent. That means I know as soon as a new email pops onto my screen. I can look up a book on Amazon at a moment’s notice. I can check the weather forecast or see who’s doing what on Facebook – whenever I want to.

And naturally, like just about every other 21st-century Internet user in the world, I eventually realized it was too much. Too much distraction, too much ceaseless information. I was losing my ability to stay inside my own mind and exist without constant input from the outside world – whether the outside world consisted of an email from my sister or an op-ed piece in the New York Times.

I needed a change, and I was able to get a preview of what that might be like last weekend when I went to a retreat house in northeastern Connecticut. I brought my laptop with me because I planned to do a lot of writing, but I didn’t know if it was even possible to get on line from the retreat house and I didn’t plan to ask. This would be my enforced 48-hour fast from the Internet.

Except fate intervened in a small way when on Friday night, one of the retreat leaders asked me for some writing exercises and I thought of one I’d read about in a newspaper essay recently. I couldn’t reiterate the exercise myself; she’d need to see the original essay if she wanted to use it. “Just tell me the name of the essayist and the publication where you saw it, and I’ll get it on line,” she said. “This house has wireless access, you know. The password is the same is the phone number.”

It was too late to block my ears and sing, but I did not want to know that, because I didn’t want any temptations. I told the retreat leader that she could use my computer, but she’d have to access the article herself; I didn’t even want the little number popping up on my screen telling me how many new emails I had. I didn’t want even the slightest temptation to hop on line.

And for the rest of the weekend, I didn’t. Even after having been given the password, I stayed away, and it felt wonderful. My mind felt clearer without so much information to choose from. I’d brought a few books and a couple of newspapers with me to the retreat, and that was enough reading material for me: I didn’t also need the entire universe of free online periodicals and blogs. I was staying in the retreat house with 17 other women, and that was companionship enough for me: I didn’t also need the social reinforcement of email, Facebook and Twitter.

But as so often happens after retreats of any kind, the question was how to maintain it once I got home.

Being self-employed as a writer, I don’t feel the same guilt as an office worker might when I occasionally log onto Facebook during the workday – as I see it, Facebook is the equivalent for me of water cooler conversation, the kind of social break that renews my energy for the next segment of work I need to do – but it would still be better if I used it less during work hours. Email isn’t so easy, of course, since that’s how I communicate with clients about ongoing and upcoming assignments. If I put too many restrictions on my own use of email, I won’t get any work anymore.

But weekends and evenings are another story. I’m trying to implement a new habit of shutting down my computer by 6 p.m. and staying away from it for the next two or three hours; a quick check-in before bed for email and other messages is okay. On weekends, I would really like to step away altogether from the Internet and all its potential for hyperactive distraction, just as I did at the retreat.

True, not all email communication is frivolous, even during the weekend. But I can try to get away from it a little more. I can try to remold my brain into the neurological patterns it had before there were so many options for communication. And I can hope that in doing so, I find my way to a higher plane of focus and concentration.