The Useless Agony of Going Offline

It “can be quite painful to discover how hooked we’ve become to our digital lives,” David M. Levy writes in “Mindful Tech.”PHOTOGRAPH BY OLIVER MUNDAY

Last month, shortly before five in the afternoon on Christmas Day, a man from Indiana fell to his death from atop an ocean lookout at Sunset Cliffs, in San Diego. He was, at the time, according to news accounts, focussed solely on an electronic device—a phone, or perhaps a camera—and seems to have simply walked off the precipice, plummeting more than forty feet to the jagged rocks below. Headlines referred to the thirty-three-year-old as “Distracted Man,” “Man Engrossed in Cellphone,” and, perhaps most odiously, “Guy Looking at Device,” but his name was Joshua M. Burwell.

I found out about this tragedy two days after it happened, on a Sunday afternoon, in a way that sort of typifies the manner in which I learn about most things these days. My wife and I were sitting together on the couch, watching a football game on my laptop. The browser window showing the game covered about three-fourths of the thirteen-inch screen. This live stream abutted a three-inch-wide strip at the far right of the screen given over to my scrolling Twitter time line. At the very bottom of the screen stretched a tiny sliver of real estate wherein another browser window was open, to my Gmail account, so I’d notice when any new mail arrived.

Directly beyond my computer, eight feet in the distance, a home-improvement show proceeded on a television with its sound muted. As we watched the game, we occasionally looked up and commented on things, like backsplash color combinations or the wisdom of buying a home with popcorn ceilings. We were getting hungry, so my wife was using her own laptop to scan Yelp reviews of brunch spots in the Berkeley, California, area.

Just as our team’s quarterback threw a devastating interception, my wife’s iPhone, perched at the edge of the couch, made an odd sound. It was a FaceTime video call from her mother, in New York. She wanted us to watch as my brother-in-law opened a holiday gift. At one point during the call, my wife pointed at the TV and offered up an exaggerated thumbs-down: the couple on the show had decided to go with an all-white motif for their dining room; it looked sterile. “So lame,” she mouthed to me, out of view of the FaceTime camera. Right about then, a tweet from Slate caught my eye: “Man Distracted by Electronic Device Falls to His Death Off San Diego Cliff.”

I motioned to my wife and pointed at the tweet. We shook our heads in unison as I copied the link from the tweet, clicked on the browser at the bottom of my screen to access Gmail, and began composing a new message with the subject heading “TO READ.” I pasted the link into the body of the e-mail, and then I sent that e-mail to myself so that I could return to it following the football game.

Four hours later, after my team had lost, and subsequent to a disappointing brunch in Kensington that featured an overly greasy omelet, I read about that poor man who fell off the cliff in San Diego.

A week or so earlier, I had finished a book by David M. Levy called “Mindful Tech.” It is about better understanding how and why we use tech devices in the ways that we do, and how we might use them better. The book urges readers to examine how they engage with computers and phones and so on, and to consider adjusting these practices as necessary. “When we see our habits and patterns for ourselves,” Levy writes, “we are in a better position to make meaningful changes.”

Levy suggests a series of self-observation exercises—things like devoting sharp attention to how we think about and use e-mail, or considering what prompts us to switch focus while multitasking online. The capstone experiment asks readers to abstain from using selected devices for a substantial span of time, and then to pay close attention to how things go. The idea is that you will learn what triggers your device usage and then craft an ideal, personalized approach going forward. Burwell’s accidental death, in San Diego, coming so soon after I had read Levy’s book, combined with the memory of almost swallowing a bee that had landed in my iced tea this past summer because I was looking at baseball scores on my phone, convinced me that this exercise might be worth my time.

I decided to start the experiment at midnight on Thursday, December 31st. I’d ring in the New Year by logging off, then not use my phone, my computer, or any social media for a full seventy-two hours, coming back online at midnight on Sunday, January 3rd.

Admittedly, it wasn’t the most ambitious of off-the-grid undertakings. (I was planning to try this over a long weekend—and a holiday weekend at that, when many folks would be doing little more than sleeping off New Year’s hangovers.) But the experiment wasn’t something to sneeze at, either. It was more comprehensive than the typical January 1st vows to swear off a singular Web site or social-media app. I was forsaking all my handheld devices, and every function and convenience they afford me. No phone calls, texts, or online activity. And, normally, I check my phone a lot. E-mails do not sit in my inbox unnoticed for more than a few minutes. I am tethered to Twitter, too, more thoroughly than I’d like to admit. Even when I’m just sitting around watching TV in the evening, I’m nearly always using my laptop or phone at the same time, keeping an eye on Twitter, Googling minutiae related to this or that program. (In truth, I barely watch TV at this point: I merely listen to it, while my eyes jump to some other, smaller screen. For me, at least, TV is the new radio.)

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, my wife and I exchanged a kiss. We used wooden spatulas to bang on some pots. Then the experiment began, and I did not look at my phone or computer for the next three days.

First things first: should you contact someone at the National Institute of Standards and Technology—the governmental entity that oversees civilian time standardization in this country, with the help of an atomic clock that will be accurate to the second for the next three hundred million years—to determine the precise number of hours that transpired on Friday, January 1, 2016, do not believe what you hear. Based on my calculations, New Year’s Day, 2016, was the longest day in the history of recorded time.

How else could one explain the five college-football bowl games I watched, or all those magazines I read? I somehow got to laundry-basket zero before noon and, at one point, spent forty-five minutes contemplating, in silence, ways my fantasy baseball team can be better next season. There were, if I recall correctly, three separate sunrises. I’m pretty sure I showered four times. And that was only day one.

By Saturday afternoon, I had raked some leaves and organized a bookshelf. I emptied a barely half-full kitchen trashcan, on the premise that it seemed “more smelly than usual.” On a whim, I picked up and read “Endzone: The Rise, Fall, and Return of Michigan Football,” a brick-size book that had been lying around the house for months. I ran to the store for things we didn’t really need, and watered plants that I previously hadn’t noticed existed. I got ahead on a few work projects. I played Boggle. And I watched the local news from start to finish for the first time in a decade. On Sunday, I tuned in for an entire Jets game. It was absurd.

With thirty minutes remaining in the experiment, during an epic, multi-hour Boggle session, I asked my wife if she had noticed anything different about me during the past few days. She paused for a moment, and looked me up and down. “Oh my God,” she yelled, “did you try to shave your eyebrows?” Wait, what? I had not. A few other guesses also failed to hit the mark. Clearly, I would have to look elsewhere to understand how I’d benefitted, and what lessons I’d learned.

In his book, Levy, who also teaches tech and mindfulness courses at the University of Washington’s Information School, writes that most people who attempt this sort of experiment successfully complete it, and that they often “feel good about it.” He offers examples of individuals who noted that a day unplugged represented “one of the best days I had had in a long time,” and who “welcomed the silence and the relief of pressure.” Levy adds that “the three main benefits people describe have to do with increased productivity and focus, better use of their time, and greater relaxation (reduction in stress).” The experimenters in “Mindful Tech” speak of breaking the “addicting circle” of social media; it “can be quite painful to discover how hooked we’ve become to our digital lives,” Levy writes. Many who partake in this exercise, he says, report that not constantly checking their devices meant they had “more time to spend on other important activities, such as (offline) reading, walking the dog, and ‘talking to my grandma on the phone.’ ”

Good on those folks, sincerely. But I hated spending three days without computers. And I feel no deep shame about this. I don’t think my disdain for the logged-off existence was due primarily to the fact that I’m addicted to social media, or cannot live without my phone, or have morphed into the prototypical “Distracted Man.”

Levy writes that when we choose to cast aside “the devices and apps we use regularly, it should hardly be surprising if we miss them, even long for them at times.” But what I felt was more general. I didn’t miss my smartphone, or the goofy watch I own that vibrates when I receive an e-mail and lets me send text messages by speaking into it. I didn’t miss Twitter’s little heart-shaped icons. I missed learning about new things.

During the world’s longest weekend, it became clear to me that, when I’m using my phone or surfing the Internet, I am almost always learning something. I’m using Google to find out what types of plastic bottles are the worst for human health, or determining the home town of a certain actor, or looking up some N.B.A. player’s college stats. I’m trying to find out how many people work at Tesla, or getting the address for that brunch place, or checking out how in the world Sacramento came to be the capital of California.

What I’m learning may not always be of great social value, but I’m at least gaining some new knowledge—by using devices in ways that, sure, also distract me from maintaining a singular focus on any one thing. I still read deeply, and study things closely, and get lost for hours at a time in sprawling, complicated pieces of literature. Since moving to California from Manhattan a couple of years ago, I'm almost certain I've paid attention to more sunsets and cloud configurations and blooming flowers than I had in the previous decade. But I also enjoy being able to find out what year Chinua Achebe published “Things Fall Apart” in roughly three seconds. And, while it is true that, as Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, and others have pointed out, my desire to learn in this manner means that I am opening myself up more completely to advertising saturation and affronts to personal privacy, I’ve made the choice to live with and combat such vexations rather than proceed through life overrun with stagnating curiosity.

So many questions went unanswered during those seventy-two hours—so many curiosities cast aside and forgotten without being pursued. I was less harried, I suppose, but I was also far less informed, and not as advanced in my understanding of all sorts of things that interested me. I felt as though I were standing still rather than moving forward. And while standing still for a while can be pleasant, it’s not without its drawbacks. Instead of feeling more relaxed, I mainly felt unfulfilled.

I would like to say that I reached some time-maximization epiphany during my New Year’s experiment, but I’m not sure that I used my time any “better” than I normally would have during that span. I just used it differently, and found myself frequently bored as a result. What’s more, I don’t know that I learned any lessons about my tech usage that would make David M. Levy proud of my efforts, or that will help me use my devices more intelligently going forward. (To his credit, Levy does not attempt to assert any universal, preferred manner of engaging with tech devices—he simply wants readers to thoughtfully consider their own practices in order to determine what’s ideal for them. “I have no hidden agenda here,” he writes. “I’m not trying to get people off Facebook, to stop them from multitasking.”) Perhaps even worse, I also watched much more TV than I normally would. As Clay Shirky noted in a Wall Street Journal essay a few years ago, “Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ than reading Proust, prior to the Internet’s spread.”

At the end of the experiment, I wasn’t dying to get my phone back or to access Facebook. I just wanted to get back to being better informed. My devices and the Internet, as much as they are sometimes annoying and frustrating and overflowing with knuckleheads, help me to do that. If getting outside and taking walks, or sitting in silence, or walking dogs, or talking with loved ones on the phone got me to that same place, I’d be more than happy to change things up.