Sometimes it's a fight to feel alive
Walking composition
From Yellow Bay State Park, Flathead Lake, Montana
Audio version:
I desperately want quiet. That kind of quiet you get in the midst of a forest where even the pervasive whine of traffic is too distant to penetrate. I’ve spent all week wanting nothing but quiet, as I attended meetings and bought fidgets for someone’s birthday and cooked dinner and did dishes and woke up so, so early and hugged the quiet, candlelit hours to myself like an infant who’s finally drifting off to sleep.
In those hours, the need for quiet crashes in. Sometimes—often—the online world is so noisy that I feel like I need ear plugs. Mind plugs? Even without social media, the nudges for attention from online fracture my thoughts and focus and capabilities. I told someone once that being online reminded me of parenting toddlers, with every minute broken by some version of “mom, MOM, Mom.”
I grew up without television service, without even a telephone in the house until I was almost ten. I didn’t have a regular email address until my late twenties (one of my brothers-in-law worked at Google at the time, which is why I’ve had the same email address since Gmail was in beta—20 years now) and staved off switching to a smartphone for nearly a decade after they were released to feast on people’s time and attention. And yet here I am, 47 years old, with one kid nudging adulthood, metaphorically whimpering in a dark corner to get some mental space away from my devices and the needs of online.
Not everyone has these problems. I keep having this conversation with people, who often recommend turning off notifications—I did that in 2017 and never turned them back on; it’s been years since I allowed anything but texts and phone calls to nudge me—and don’t always seem to understand that the addictive design of these devices is all too effective for some of us. It doesn’t matter how many apps we delete.
I spent too much money purchasing a dumb phone last month, the only one I could find that works only in grayscale and doesn’t accommodate any apps. As I’m slowly weaning myself off of turning on my smartphone (the camera is still an issue), I remind myself of what my mornings were like when I didn’t feel its tug. For years I’ve turned my phone completely off at night, as I do the WiFi on my laptop, so that I can get up in the early hours and do all the little things that make me feel whole and connected without staring into the face of that bright screen first, but I can still feel its presence stalking me around the house.
It’s more than the smartphone. Online communication and interaction manages to completely drain me on a regular basis. This was one of those weeks, where I couldn’t get offline because that’s where my work is and increasingly felt like I was at a loud party full of flashing lights, bad music, terrible drinks, feeling desperately tired and thirsty because the water fountain was broken, but I wasn’t allowed to leave.
Next week I have three nights alone at my favorite forest service cabin, offline and away from electricity, and all I can think about is not how much work I might or might not get done, but an almost desperate need to sit by the river and not think or do anything. To watch the long, slow shifts of light at sunrise and sunset. To spend the middle of the night awake hour staring at the stars and Moon if She’s visible.
I have all sorts of strategies to manage my relationship with digital technology, put in place years ago for my sanity, creativity, and, as I’ve written about before, because my humanity is more important to me than finding conventional writing success, and I don’t like the human I am when interacting with social media.
None of those strategies are really enough, or maybe recently I’ve been feeling the press of it all more. I had a wonderful, long conversation earlier this week with a good friend and colleague about this particular platform, and ended up realizing how much more difficult I find to use ever since Notes was rolled out and the social media-ness of it has increased. That doesn’t mean I’m leaving it (I tried setting something up elsewhere a couple months ago but simply don’t have the technical expertise), but figuring out how to open a tab on my browser and look at it, even to read other newsletters I like, without feeling instantly disheartened and drained, has been difficult. I’m bolstered by writers like
writing about which newsletters she reads for nourishment, and all the tremendously good writing and research and interesting ideas I’ve seen, and even friends I’ve made, that I never would have without this platform existing. There are ways to be in this particular space without feeling like it’s taking more than it’s giving. At least, I hope there is. I just need to figure out my own balance.But it’s also important, I think, to keep in mind that no technology is value-neutral. How it’s created, built, deployed, used, and discarded matters. I saw a comment elsewhere recently that said we’ll learn to live with and benefit from digital technology “just like we learned to live with and benefit from cars” and I refrained from answering that comment only because at this point it makes me very tired. I wrote a whole book about what we’ve lost to cars and car-centric infrastructure, how much damage we live with because of cars and the loss of walkability. It’s a very good book, and I think an important one.
Funnily enough, when I sat down with my notebook to draft this, my intention was to mention my fractured attention and communication overload, and not write much at all but to share some photos of recent activities that keep me feeling alive and engaged with the world as I want to be in the world.
In a way, that’s the crux of humans’ evolving relationship with technology—all technology, but digital in particular. In what ways can we manage to function with what’s demanded of us—and I use those words intentionally, because some people might succeed and even thrive in relationship with technologies, but there are always vast consequences unseen or unacknowledged or unimportant to people who benefit from them; most of life is simply trying to survive it—while being alive? Completely alive. Aware, conscious, attentive.
Every time I go to one of these cabins for days offline, or spend time in the wilderness, or go for a long walk along the river after school drop-off and before checking email, or spend wonderful, attentive time with a friend or few, it’s a fight not just for my own life, but for all of life.
Aside from sharing research and ideas on private property, ownership, and the commons, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here: share with you a love of life. The hilarious turkeys I can hear outside right now, and the very noisy magpie staring at me through the window, the way sunset last night melted its way through rumples of gray and blue-silver clouds, how the Milky Way has been visible the last three nights. The way the air doesn’t yet quite smell of spring and I’m holding on a little longer to my favorite season of cold and dark, the hours we’ve spent together in quiet aliveness. So maybe I’ll just be quiet for a bit and share some of that.
My brother-in-law and I recently took a wildlife tracking course together through Swan Valley Connections. As we approached the meeting spot, we slowed down for the awesome sight of a juvenile bald eagle feeding on a deer right by the side of the road. No photos of that (we were driving and he flew off), but we got to watch some bald eagle shenanigans for a few minutes before meeting up to go track wolves, mountain lions, mink, muskrat, and a ridiculous number of squirrel feeding sites (mounds of shredded pine cones), which I was so entertained by I neglected to take photos.
That same day, one of my college roommates, who happens to be one of my favorite people in the world and whom I haven’t seen or even talked with in about eight years, came to town with her boyfriend for a week, so I took some time off to drive them down to the Bison Range and around the entirety of Flathead Lake, which is gorgeous at all angles (especially the spot in the top photo and below, which is a tiny state park I really like visiting in off-season in wild and unruly weather).
Doing things like these keeps me in touch with how I want to be spending my time. Not as an aspirational goal or some kind of self-improvement resolution, but because that’s what makes me feel alive. And isn’t that what life wants of us, really? To live with this world like we care about it.
Moon halo
I'm in Paris for the week, to see the Rothko show -- Rothko, an artist whose work is all, as Benjamin would say, aura. Rothko, who is unphotographable. Which is why I had to spend 15 hours on planes to see this show, because the catalog can't do any of it justice. And yet, in every room, people taking phone photos. All over Paris, people taking selfies. As if one isn't here without putting it online. It makes me glad to be old (tho also glad for the phone I've been clutching, with it's maps and metro ticket embedded). I also find that now that I've left the platform (which isn't a solution for anyone but me) I spend far less time on Notes. I've also reverted to reading most of the newsletters as email. Just to bring down the noise level.
Enjoy the cabin. What a resource they are, the FS cabins ....
I love this world and just want to be more in it, and the phone often keeps me from doing that, despite all the restrictions I, like you, have put in place. Curious to hear how the not smart phone experiment goes. We bought one for our oldest, and it was stupid expensive and then the carrier stopped supporting it. So annoying.
The cars analogy really got to me. I read somewhere but now can’t find where that the Māori and other indigenous cultures had tests for new technologies that had to be considered by the community before the community decided whether or not to let them in. It was a way of prioritizing their values first and seeing if the new technology could be congruent with them and/or what limits would be necessary for them to be congruent. What a concept!