Tag: Social Media

I went into rehab recently…

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I went into rehab recently. It wasn’t to treat substance abuse, though both drugs and alcohol are banned at the facility I checked myself into. Rather, I went to free myself from the noise that is disrupting our mental health in the 21st century.I shut off my phone and laptop and locked them away for three days. But this was more than a digital detox: I joined 50 other people in taking a vow of silence. Instead of scrolling or chatting, we spent hours in guided meditation and the rest of the time alone with our thoughts. As silent retreats go, this one was brief. But I had never kept quiet for so long in my life, and I hadn’t been without my electronics for that long since I got my first iPhone 18 years ago.

I craved the unplugging, but I was admittedly skeptical about elements of the experiment. I didn’t think I had the patience for meditation, and my few previous attempts at yoga typically ended with the administration of Advil. […]

But underneath all that woo, I also found something true. The silent unplugging made me appreciate, in ways I hadn’t fully understood, how much my phone has hijacked my attention. In the notification-free quiet, I wondered: Have I forgotten how to just be?

 Of course, the world’s religions have been practicing forms of monastic silence for thousands of years. The difference is those ancient orders, and even those who went on silent retreats in pre-smartphone decades, didn’t have Instagram accounts. Now, when we go into silence and turn off our devices, we are entirely isolated. In our always-on, hyperconnected world, this is disorienting.⁠⁠

⁠⁠I expected I would go through some digital withdrawal, and that happened. Dozens of times, I felt an involuntary urge to reach for my phone: to check the time, to take a picture, to see if the snow had canceled my flight, to look up “upma” before ladling some onto my plate, to order Valentine’s Day flowers, to find out what I was missing and who was trying to reach me. It felt unnatural not to be scrolling while waiting for a session to begin.

But something else happened during those three days that I didn’t expect — and it was frightening…

— Dana Milbank, read more here: “I went into phone-free silence. Something disturbing happened.” (Washingon Post, February 13, 2026

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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We feel this restlessness; we lament our shrinking attention spans. But to focus on a relatively narrow question of technical measures of our attention span misses a deeper truth. The restlessness and unease of our times aren’t simply, in my experience, the vertigo of distraction and distractibility. No, that experience is itself a symptom caused by some deeper part of the unsettled self. The endless diversion offered to us in every instant we are within reach of our phones means we never have to do the difficult work of figuring out how to live with our own minds.

For many years I have, like an old man, taken a daily constitutional. I began in my early 20s, when I was a freelance writer, which meant working all day either at home or in coffee shops. I found it useful to go for a walk and clear my head. I’d go even on the bitterest days of a Chicago winter, when the wind slices at your face like a blade. I started doing this before the days of the smartphone and even before the days of podcasts on the iPod. During the walk I would just … think. I’d let my mind wander. Almost without exception, my best thinking happened on these walks. I would come back to my laptop, sometimes almost racing up the steps to my apartment, to get the thoughts down. […]

Daydreaming is a central experience of being alive and also a casualty of the attention age. Years ago, podcasts came to fill my ears during my walks, conditioning me to feel a little panicked without one. But as I’ve spent more time thinking about attention, I’ve begun to force myself to just walk and let myself be with my thoughts. I’ve also developed a set of routines, habits and hobbies that can provide the framework for a form of modified idleness, just enough to focus on to keep myself rooted and present while allowing my mind to wander. Chopping wood, making handmade pasta, going to the dog park with my canine-obsessed 6-year-old — these are all in the happy but endangered category of things to do that are neither work nor looking at my phone. […]

You can’t busy yourself out of boredom or amuse yourself out of it. Neither work nor constant entertainment provides a solution. Not for the king or for us. The problem we face is existential and spiritual, not situational. We cannot escape our own mind; it follows us wherever we go. We can’t outrun the treadmill. Our only hope at peace is to force ourselves to step off whenever we can. To learn again to be still.

— Chris Hayes, from “I Want Your Attention. I Need Your Attention. Here Is How I Mastered My Own.” (NY Times, January 3, 2025)

Notes:

  • Photo from morning walk. 6:55 a.m. 18° F, feels like 0° F, wind gusts up to 30 mph. January 7, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. See more photos from this walk here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.

Guilty…

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One evening in the spring of 2015, I filmed a 15-second video out the window of an Amtrak train as it rattled across the barren flatlands of southern New Jersey. There’s nothing artful or interesting about the clip. All you see is a slanted rush of white and yellow lights. I can’t remember why I made it. Until a few days ago, I had never even watched it. And yet for the past nine years, that video has been sitting on a server in a data center somewhere, silently and invisibly taking a very small toll on our planet…

Data centers and data-transmission networks now account for as much as 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption…

With other forms of consumption that are bad for the planet, we all understand that the main burden of responsibility falls on the big players—industry, government, the rich and powerful. But we also acknowledge that everyone else has a part to play too. I stop running the water while I’m brushing my teeth. I carry groceries in a burlap tote. I turn off the lights whenever I step out of my apartment, regardless of whether I’m leaving for five minutes or a week…

Every time we make a new video or send an email, or post a photo of our latest meal, it’s like turning on a small light bulb that’ll never be turned off…We’ve got to think about whether it’s really bad to carry on with our current digital practices.”In other words: To help save the planet, should we be using less data? Given how much of modern life depends on megabytes and teraflops, the answer could be a key facet to living nobly in the AI age…

By my estimate, following a formula included in a recent research paper, storing my train video has created about 100 grams of CO2 over the past decade. At first blush, this is effectively nothing: less than one three-100ths of a percent of the yearly CO2 emissions from a pet cat. But data slough off us like skin cells. Last year, I sent 960 videos to the cloud. Because phones record videos in much higher quality these days, most of these clips are larger than that 15-second video from 2015. And like many other people, I have a sprawling digital footprint; many of my stored videos have been either sent to or received from at least one other person who is also storing them on one or two cloud platforms…

We just need to start to think around the impact of every button we press ‘Send’ or ‘Upload’ on,” Jackson told me. As a first step, he suggests going back through your phone and computer and getting rid of all the data that you’ll never use again. (The industry term for such detritus is dark data; much of Jackson’s research focuses on teaching companies to reuse old information instead of making new bytes.) That’s easier said than done. When I was looking through old videos for this story, I found many clips that sparked cherished memories. None of these videos was particularly fascinating. But a data center had conserved the data for so long that watching them now transported me, joyfully, to a simpler time. Deciding whether to scrap any of these is not the same as deciding whether to turn a light bulb off when you step out of a room. “The light bulb, you can just come back and switch it back on,” Jackson admitted. “Once you’ve gotten rid of data, it’s gone.” Even my feelings about the train video—which did not spark any fond memories—remain unresolved. For now, it’s still up there…

In a report published in 2021, Berners-Lee and a team of researchers found that if the information-and-communications sector is going to match the reductions necessary to keep global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold, it will have to cut its carbon emissions by 42 percent by the end of this decade, and 72 percent by the end of the next…’

More fundamentally, maybe we don’t need to turn everything into data. If I put down my phone the next time I’m on a train, it won’t save the planet. But I’ll be looking out the window with my own eyes, creating a memory that emits no carbon at all.

— Arthur Holland Michel, from “Every Time You Post to Instagram, You’re Turning on a Light Bulb Forever.” (The Atlantic, July 5, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake Up Call

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There are many reasons not to read a book. One, because you don’t want to. Two, because you started reading, crawled to page 17, and gave up. Three, because the idea of reading never crosses your mind. (If so, lucky you. That way contentment lies.) Four, because it’s Friday… Five, because reading a book is, you know so lame. Only losers do it. And, six, because you simply don’t have the time. But what if the need to read won’t go away.

The most potent enemy of reading, it goes without saying, is the small, flat box that you carry in your pocket. In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth. There’s no point in grinding through a whole book—a chewy bunch of words arranged into a narrative or, heaven preserve us, an argument—when you can pick up your iPhone, touch the Times app, skip the news and commentary, head straight to Wordle, and give yourself an instant hit of euphoria and pride by taking just three guesses to reach a triumphant guano.

This is where Blinkist comes in. Blinkist is an app. If I had to summarize what it does, I would say that it summarizes like crazy. It takes an existing book and crunches it down to a series of what are called Blinks. On average, these amount to around two thousand words…

Once you are Blinked in, your days will follow a new pattern. Instead of being woken by an alarm, or by a bored spaniel licking your face, you will find yourself greeted by a Daily Blink. This will arrive, with a ping, on your phone, alerting you to a book that, suitably pruned, is ready to be served up for your personal edification…

It’s easy to decry this stripping down of complex reasoning, as if the app were bent solely on decluttering books of everything that lends them vitality. Yet you have to admit: if you’d never read Pinker or James, Blinkist would furnish you with a basic grasp of their intent—sufficient, perhaps, to do more than merely drop their names. If the topics that Pinker addresses happened to crop up in conversation (“Everything is so crappy nowadays, worse than it’s ever been”), you could just about hold your own, at least over a cup of coffee. (“Well, there’s this guy, Pink-somebody, who says that infant mortality is way down.”) Is that what books are coming to, a handy social lubricant? Should you care if literature gets Blinked away, like an eyelash? […]

Such, to my dazzled eyes, is the crowning glory of Blinkist. Its high-tech alchemy, transmuting literature into business, turns the inhabitants of literature, even the ones with tattered wings, into businessmen. Listen, rapt, as the devils crunch the numbers and kick around ideas for going forward:

Moloch suggests open warfare against heaven. Belial advocates for doing nothing. Mammon argues for making hell a little nicer so they can all live a happy life of sin.

I’m with Mammon, all day long. Life is short, and so, if you look at your phone, is literature. Blink and you’ll miss it. 

— Anthony Lane, from “Can You Read A Book in a Quarter of an Hour? Phone apps now offer to boil down entire books into micro-synopses. What they leave out can be revealing. (The New Yorker, May 20, 2024)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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MN: Not a day goes by when I don’t feel grateful that my formative years were all lived without the internet. […]

MD: Maybe part of the fatigue (and potential bulimia) of the internet comes from knowing that ‘everything’ is available to us at the touch of a finger. It’s all there to read instantaneously, or it can be on your doorstep in two days.

— Maggie Nelson & Moyra Davey, in Maggie Nelson’s from “A LIFE, A FACE, A GAZE. Conversation with Moyra Davey” in Like Love: Essays and Conversations. (Graywolf Press, April 2, 2024)

Notes: Book Review from The Guardian: “Like Love by Maggie Nelson review – music, passion and friendship“