Sunset on Star Island
When was the last time you turned your phone off completely? A few airplane trips and a night time snooze don’t count.
When I wake up in the morning I check the time on my phone, turn off my alarm (also on my phone) and then often pull up Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram, not necessarily in that order. I might check my email, or my Amazon orders all before getting out of bed, and sometimes before kissing my girlfriend on the forehead. It’s a dizzying schedule, to be so connected without having to move, and each blast of information pushes me in a different direction. Between news (both personal and impersonal), images, work, and cats, I’m flooded with more emotion, more information, and more outright input than I was on any given day fifteen years ago. Even a trip downstairs to pick up a newspaper from the front step would be an improvement, and once upon a time we thought that was too much.
I spend a week every summer on Star Island off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire. It’s a Unitarian Retreat Center, and for a long time it was a conscious break from technology. As a teenager there was a single phone on the island that visitors could use, and I spent each week completely and utterly cut off from the world. I was gloriously oblivious, and it was a joy that I mostly took for granted.
In the last few years they’ve improved cell service, brought in a wi-fi connection, and allowed people to sit on the porch working on their laptops, even if it’s occasionally frowned upon. This past year I made an effort to leave my phone in my room, and even then to only check it once a day. In fact, I congratulated myself on just how disconnected I was, and it felt like an achievement. It was an achievement, and I cherished it.
And yet, that’s one week out of the year, and I mostly succeeded. How long did I spent trying to connect to everyone? How many years did I spend feeling lonely, longing for those who weren’t there, and hoping to find simple human contact? And now, I push myself hard to get away, disconnect, and shut down so I might once again engage with those around me.
Connect. Disconnect. Talk. Discuss. Silence.
It’s a mass of struggle that I play out, wondering at each decision as if I wasn’t simply a creature of habit. As if I decide each morning that Facebook is what will bring about my happiness at that very moment, and that checking my email is just the thing to make me smile. So I push, and feel guilt and shame as I struggle to connect and disconnect at the same time, hoping that one direction or the other will have the answer. Maybe a handwritten letter will bridge the gap, and maybe a flip phone will change my behavior.
But even a week without it all simply serves to remind me of how alienated I am when I choose not to engage in the spaces we all now live.