James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle says he’s an addict and describes the symptoms that will be familiar to most of us, I’m afraid. Basically it’s an inability to let go, and it is only getting worse in the age of smartphones. I’m not as intense a user as a lot of people. In fact I often feel guilty because I don’t keep up with every new app and social site as quickly as I should. I constantly feel as if I’m falling behind. And the truth is there is no way to not fall behind. There’s so much stuff coming out every week, just a firehose of new sites and apps. Even if you only use Facebook and Twitter you’re getting blasted with way too much information.
Anyway, I’m by no means an early adopter, and I don’t spend 24 hours a day online, and even at this level of engagement I worry that I’m too distracted by online life. I have this terrible fear that my kids are going to remember me as some guy who lived in their house when they were growing up and was always staring down at a smartphone, checking email or reading Gawker. (I also see how deeply attached my kids have become to Angry Birds and Temple Run on our iPhones and iPad, and it terrifies me.)
So I’ve been trying to force myself to be at least partially unplugged. On weekends I put away the smartphones and try not to use them. Same thing in the evening. No checking email at dinnertime. After dinner I help the kids with their homework. (I have 6-year-old twins.) In the morning, after dropping the kids at school, I take the dog for a walk in the forest near our house. I don’t bring a phone. The first thing you notice is the silence. It feels like you’ve escaped from a world of constant noise — the digital dust storm. Suddenly there’s nothing. It’s bliss.
I feel ridiculous singing the praises of the analog world. One shouldn’t need to do this. I’m embarrassed to have been so far gone that the “real world” feels to me like a lost place that I’m now rediscovering. But there it is.
Last week we took the kids to Utah for a ski trip. They’re good little skiers, but this was their first time seeing big mountains and I wanted to be with them, completely, for all of it. We booked a lodge at Alta that does not have TV. I made a point of not bringing a laptop. We brought some smartphones and an iPad for the plane ride. But when we got to the lodge I put the smartphones and the iPad in a drawer and never took them out. I carried a little flip phone just so I could be reached for phone calls. We skied. We swam. We ate great meals and had long conversations with some fascinating new people: a track coach from Georgetown, two physicists from New Jersey, a paparazzo from Maui. No one pulled out an iPhone at dinner. It was great. And I missed nothing.
So, sure, things like Pinterest, Highlight, Glancee, Foursquare, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Quora, Trippy, Words with Friends, Draw Something, and on and on and on — yes, these are all fascinating and wonderful and even useful things, and I’m sure there is some sense of accomplishment that comes from mastering them, using them, getting absorbed in them. But they are all, in some sense and to some degree, nothing more than a distraction.
Neil Young said recently that Steve Jobs used to come home from work and listen to vinyl records. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’d like to believe it. Neil Young was making a point about analog music sounding better than digital, but the other point, and the one I want to believe about Steve Jobs, is that when you sit down and listen to records, you tend not to do anything else. You sit down, and you listen.
I never do that anymore. Hardly any of us do. But that’s how life was in the analog age. You didn’t multitask. You didn’t hammer away on your phone, texting and emailing and checking in and updating your status. You sat down, and you did one thing. You listened. (Sure, maybe you used the sides of a double album to sift seeds from buds while you were listening, but that wasn’t exactly multitasking.) I like to think that Steve Jobs liked to just put away his iPhone and sit down and listen. I also like to think that when Steve Jobs went on his long walks, he didn’t bring his phone. Or if he did bring it, he wasn’t walking around staring at it. I like to believe that Steve Jobs, of all people, understood the virtue of being unplugged, and the value of being in a quiet place, free from digital distractions.
