The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection (23 page)

August 14

No epiphany quite yet.

It is
still
hard. (Though not physically sick-making, anymore.)

Benjamin Franklin is helpful—he had this notion of “philosophical self-denial,” which William Powers writes about:

You have to see that there is more
to be gained by resisting the impulse than giving in. Once you truly believe this, it’s all downhill. What previously seemed a dreary, priggish way to live—denying oneself pleasure—suddenly becomes positive and even hedonistic.

Meanwhile, I spent two hours today looking up things in books I could have sourced online in thirty seconds. Perhaps the hedonism comes later.

August 15

Each morning I kiss K. good-bye and he goes off to work at his new studio gig; I remain at home with the breakfast dishes and try not to give in. I imagine K. interacting all day with other clever artists—he’s storyboarding the new Seth Rogen flick and so, no doubt, lunches in chic Gastown rooms with the beautiful tribe, decked in Frank & Oak shirts and toting Hirschel bags.

Through his phone, K.’s in touch with a few people before breakfast, in fact. I hardly cared before, but now our early-morning, toothbrush-in-mouth conversations seem nastily pruned by the endless ping-ping-ping. It often happens that, even before K. has left the apartment, he’s touched more lives than I will all day. I pad about the rooms with a book and pen, looking forward, pathetically, to the thrill of my Starbucks trip.

Working from home was far more bearable when e-mail and texts provided a soft, ambient sense of connection to the outside world. Technologies, I guess, support an attitude in which feelings only count when they are expressed; and this leaves me unwilling to believe my days really matter when I can’t share them. It’s no good to think of our experience as reducible to tweets and instant messages, but it’s equally pointless to live an unshared life.

Dilemma.

August 19

Did a
Where’s Waldo
at the café. Shocking bad sign.

August 21

On the unexpected pleasures of pamphlets, I could now write a treatise. Each day I await the mail carrier with a mortifying degree of suspense. Usually he arrives between 11 a.m. and 11:15, but today he did not arrive until half past noon. (The awareness of this transgression places me in the company of an over-starched Barbara Pym heroine.) Naturally, all news, all
content,
is now a precious alert from the wider world. I read “exciting offers” from credit card companies and think, “Yes, that
is
exciting”; I read newsletters from local politicians with unprecedented interest and today spent twenty minutes poring over a Pottery Barn catalog. Soon I’ll be one of those people who stop to chat with petitioners at Broadway and Granville.

P.S. I now read
newspapers
.

August 22

We just can’t handle solitude without a rich interior life. At first there was this bewildering, wind-swept void where my online world had been. Now, haltingly, I place other things in that void. A book. A walk through Shaughnessy to monitor the construction of various McMansions I have my eye on. But, of course, nothing—
nothing
—is as enthralling as the lovely, comforting, absence-destroying Internet. You can’t really revert to a prior state of mind because (as Nicholas Carr points out) our brains may be changeable and plastic, but they aren’t necessarily
elastic
. My online mind waits angrily for its food.

August 23

My tolerance toward interruption has plummeted. (Good sign? Bad sign?) During a chat at the pub, or on the seawall, my interlocutor will raise a finger (pressing an invisible hold button in the air between us) and answer an incoming text message with a sort of blithe assumption that my own attention will immediately flit somewhere else in the meantime. But, without my phone on hand, I simply stare into this white noise and wait.

The real annoyance, though, is not with conversation pauses; it’s with the dullness of the conversations such fractures produce. A divided self is simply not a worthwhile thing to focus on.

So then I disengage—I’ll start daydreaming or I’ll study a mosquito bite—and we end up with a case of Compound Distraction.

August 24

Was at first distraught to find that everyone I informed about Analog August wanted to know what my epiphany had been. Surely, if I was going to all this trouble, I must be experiencing an inner transformation. Or perhaps my interrogators felt the exercise was pointless but assumed I would claim such a transformation to save face.

Have found myself a little desperate to make something up. The closest thing I can report, though, won’t sound dramatic enough. It’s just this: Behavior that seemed utterly normal on the 30th of July now looks compulsive and animalistic. Now when I see teenage girls burrowed into their phones on the sidewalk I think of monkeys picking lice out of each other’s hair.

August 25

In the 17th century, newspaper readers in coffeehouses were thought to be antisocial and indulging in a “sullen silence.” Today they’re a charming part of the mise-en-scène. Time settles everything. One day soon we’ll contentedly discuss dreams that appeared to us as bright blue bubbles of text.

My day’s activities included: a visit to the bank to pay a bill; sending a printed chapter of my book to Matthew in Ottawa; Mailbox (11:45!); 40 minutes ogling Shaughnessy mansions; 30 minutes reading Coupland’s riff on McLuhan’s
The Medium Is the Message
.

But nothing feels productive (i.e., nothing makes me money).

Increasingly disturbed by how hamstrung my work-life is without Internet. I can’t take on new projects, or even invoice for old ones. I sweep and tidy my desktop instead. My free time is capacious. Found myself disappointed when I checked my toenails and saw it wasn’t time to clip them yet.

August 26

Bertrand Russell says in
Conquest of Happiness
that the ability to fill leisure time intelligently is the last product of civilization. I guess I thought I’d start filling my own free hours more intelligently once I cut out the cat videos and Bret Easton Ellis tweets. But no.

I appear to be as much of a moron offline as on. The real difference is that my unintelligent behavior is much more painfully obvious now. Which is something to hold on to, if not to cherish.

August 27

I wanted to remember the absences that online life had replaced with constant content, constant connection. I’ve remembered what it is to be free in the world, free from the obliterating demands of five hundred “contacts.” But, of all the absences I’ve remembered, there’s one that is the greatest, the most encompassing—that is solitude.

And yet, of this absence, a little goes a long way. 1987, it turns out, makes for a crushingly lonely vacation. Still, if solitude feels painful it’s only because we don’t know how to be alone.

August 28

Friends who’ve done the West Coast Trail talk with glassy eyes about the White Spot burgers and 24-ounce Cokes that get downed on the ferry ride home. The religious consumption of that long-denied high-fructose injection. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to eat first—digitally speaking—when I go back online. E-mail, obviously. I fantasize with a starved man’s mind about sitting down at the laptop with notepad at the ready, a cup of piping coffee . . . how I’ll just let it
run
over me, a joyful sabotaging of the calm mediocrity I’ve been engineering this past month.

August 29

It
is
possible to abstain. To know full well the hefty glamour of the world’s shining face and then, for a time, step away.

But exactly what part of me I’d be abstaining from wasn’t clear before I tried this. How large a portion of my life was enmeshed so thoroughly in online technologies that it could not be extricated. Social life stumbles forward at half-speed, perhaps. But work grinds to a halt. In the entire month, only
one
work-related phone-call. The rest of my peers and editors, on receiving my bounce-back alert stating that I’m not online, appear to have written me off for dead. How much money have I lost? And how many chances?

September 1

Game over. But we’re on an island. It’d be sacrilege to binge on e-mail here. Now that it’s come down to it, waiting a few more days doesn’t feel like anything at all.

September 3

Back home from the Gulf Islands. Last night K. and I fought.

After dinner I glanced around like I was about to commit a crime and cracked my laptop, freed its wireless settings, dove into the 264 buzzing e-mails that were waiting for me, all aglow. This, naturally, meant ignoring K. for the course of the evening. He’d ask what I was looking at and I’d mutter one-word answers without looking away from the screen. His monk-like boyfriend—who tutted at the distractions of others—had blipped out of existence.

And what a sweet ride, to slice through that stack of missives! Of the 264 messages, 100 were easily junked. A further hundred required only single-sentence replies, which I issued with a rat-tat-tat military efficiency. And
such
efficiency! Such quick arrows of accomplishment! Meanwhile, K. grew increasingly annoyed at my happy-robot distance. I left the in-box at 11 p.m., with about 60 thought-requiring messages left for me to tackle in the morning; sated, I trotted off to bed. It wasn’t until then, as I laid myself down to sleep, that I floated back to my surroundings and became aware of K.’s anger, aware that I’d utterly botched my first day back online.

Coupland warned me not to expect an epiphany from all this. An epiphany? Maybe no. But it’s the break itself that’s the thing. It’s the break—that is, the questioning—that snaps us out of the spell, that can convince us it was a spell in the first place.

Perhaps, despite the dullness, despite the cotton-stuffed torture that goes along with 31 days of disconnection (the very opposite of epiphany, of gaining access to some new understanding), I have learned something after all. That I am so irrevocably, damnably, utterly wired to the promise of connection that I have to constantly, every hour of every day, choose
which
connections matter in a given moment. I’m not going to fast away the distracted parts of my brain with a month-long Internet sabbatical; if I’m going to live intelligently
in
the world, I’ll have to do it every hour of my life. How exhausting, I thought to myself, as these conditions dawned on me in the shower this morning. How very exhausting. Yet how very worth it.

• • • • •

There’s this idea that keeps getting whispered through history. It was Thoreau who first suggested it to me, the idea that we aren’t lonely because we are alone; we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude. Thoreau was never seeking out loneliness, after all. He went to the woods
because
of his loneliness; he went into the woods to enjoy the company of his bare self. Here was a twenty-eight-year-old Harvard-educated man who walked out of town with a borrowed ax and, using native lumber and scrap wood, built himself a twelve-by-fifteen-foot cabin to live in; his nearest neighbor was a mile away. He dug a root cellar in the soil. He planted a bean field. He had no job, but he read and wrote and watched the woods around him. He gave himself two full years there to “follow the bent of my genius.” As surely as the Internet burrows pathways into our neural network, Thoreau wore a pathway from his hut to Walden Pond. He seemed to prefigure our understanding of neuroplasticity when he wrote: “
The surface of the earth is soft
and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.”

But which paths did Thoreau think we should follow? What exactly was Thoreau’s idea of good solitude? I returned to my own copy of
Walden
. Rereading that distillation of quiet wisdom again, I was struck by one well-trotted line:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

But it’s the sentence that follows that adage, a less famous line, that I want to unpack here. Thoreau goes on to say, “
I did not wish to live what was not life
, living is so dear.”
I did not wish to live what was not life.
There are two ambitious assumptions being made here. The first assumption is that the bulk of the buying and selling and
managing
that makes up the everyman’s daily existence can be set to one side and counted as “not life.”
²¹
The second assumption Thoreau makes is that once we discern what is “real life” and what is not, we can then cut away the fat. His book is the knife he offers.

Walden
is nothing so clear-cut and encouraging as the self-help guidebooks we now hoist to the best-seller branches of Amazon charts. It means, rather, to outline a mental crisis and then leave each reader to step into that frame of reference should he or she choose. I wonder if, one day,
Walden
will be carried around on the tablets of the young as a kind of security blanket to ward off the crush of connectivity they were born into. Perhaps it will deliver the same intense meaning for those youths as
The Sorrows of Young Werther
once did for eighteenth-century German youths. A totem for a new Romanticism. Perhaps, instead of taking Grand Tours of Europe, future youths will embark on a tour of Solitude. A Grand Absence. Might they roam through the backcountry of their own lives? (Probably not.)