My phone is quieter. After making some fundamental changes, I’ve had fewer mornings waking up anxious and angry. Coincidentally I have fewer notifications to manage — fewer demands for my attention. After hitting a breaking point, I spent the last several weeks trying my best to take control of what had become an unmanageable amount of my attention requested through technology relative to what I could handle.
The attention taxes throughout the day are are totally unmanageable for any human being, without making active, deliberate changes to my behavior, OS settings and interactions with others through digital mediums. With hundreds of iPhone apps, email lists, pushy car salesman, automated robocalls, spam, social media and more it’s a wonder that anyone with an email account isn’t on edge at all times.
I’ll spoil the surprise at the end, I didn’t reach a peaceful digital nirvana of calm and control for making the following changes to my life. Things did get better, but that’s it. Just a little better.
Here are the tweaks I made in no particular order.
Phone Notifications
The first (and easiest) thing I did was disable all non-vital phone notifications. Thankfully, Apple has actually made this pretty easy to manage. The sea of red icons, banner ads, pop-ups has all been banished, which has helped me be more proactive and intentional on what I’m doing online, rather than just being reactive to whatever entity can capture my attention at that time.
One weird trick for pesky sales calls
During this experiment, I was in the midst of trying to buy a car. By filling out an online form, you have unknowingly agreed to get daily phone calls from desperate car salesman. Knowing this, I submitted my Google Voice number in any communication and left a voicemail recording that read
This mailbox is not monitored. Please email the address on file.
That obviously confused a lot of salesmen who wanted to talk to you about buying a car the moment they called, but eventually, they got the message and sent notes via email, which I could ignore at my own pace.
Email
Going nuclear on my email through unsubscribes has helped tremendously. However, it takes a lot of work. Any online merchant will by default, email you at least once a day. Which is insane. Every single day an online merchant expects you to think about them. The problem is even after unsubscribing, the moment you make another purchase (ahem…J.Crew Factory), the daily email cycle starts all over again — not to mention the survey requests, the special monthly emails, partner company/list trades etc. A full stop on all communications is the only way to reclaim your time.
To that end, I went berserkergang with unsubscribes, going so far as sending multiple emails to company’s and hounding them down on Twitter when they wouldn’t drop my email from their list. In some cases, I blocked the sender’s domain entirely.
This helped. It helped email a lot. I don’t have any weird tricks to recommend, other than to spend an hour or so methodically cutting down your email subscriptions. But once your mailbox is mostly full of important, intentional messages, it can certainly be a lot more useful.
Social Media
One of the grand experiments I conducted was unsubscribing from every single Facebook page, in the hopes that cutting down the repetition of breaking news stories and the general bullshit in my timeline would lead to a healthier experience on the medium. Initially, I was really afraid that I’d have some FOMO on Facebook content. Like, what if I missed a really good story or update from a group or organization that fell off my radar and I had no way of knowing if something important has happened. After a few days, that feeling wore off and I truly felt no loss. I thought that overall, removing all the stress-inducing content from Facebook would help my information diet. Instead, I found myself substituting that time for more engagement on Twitter, feeling anxious that at any moment a new crisis is happening, a new reason to be horrified and outraged.
It’s hard not look at that behavior through the lens of 2018. I think we’re all a little addicted to the mania of the chaos in the world and finding new reasons to be outraged. And if you’re looking for the means to check out how fucked up the world seems, Twitter seems like the perfect medium. Even though I’m conscious of how Twitter is engineered to make me feel as if something important is happening this instant and I’m not reading about it, I wrestle constantly with the temptation to check. It may take more than will-power to break the habit. Hypnosis? Medication? A screen-free retreat in the hills? I’m open to suggestions.
Disconnect
Even actively trying, I couldn’t totally get away from the anxious nature of how we interact with technology. I thought making some tweaks would help, and it did, but nothing I do changes the fact that we all own phones, tablets, computers that are engineered to suck as much of our attention to that lit up screen like moths to a lone patio light.
What’s frustrating about this whole study is that even with taking deliberate actions to reign in my information diet, cut down on the screen time and generally try to avoid the kinds of triggers that cause anger and anxiety from social media content, I still couldn’t totally break away and find true digital nirvana. Maybe that’s a fantasy that simply doesn’t exist — our society is too far committed down this path of digital reliance.
Good content, real journalism is disappearing faster than the polar ice caps. I don’t want to oversimplify the death of newspapers by blaming Facebook, but it’s also no wonder with a 1/3 of all traffic coming from social media that we are seeing a huge decline in traditional media. Often boring and in some cases news stories that unpleasantly challenge your political views have to compete with a stream full of bias-confirming political memes, the video of the crazy guy having a meltdown in a Wendy’s drive-through or spuriously scientific videos about the benefits of essential oils being promoted by a friend who coincidentally can sell you some if you just join her Facebook group. Thus, is the information diet for many people. And yet, it’s truly hard to disconnect.
So, what’s left is worry. I worry about what content we are choosing to consume and I worry about how seamless it is to access bad content. I worry that it’s all too automatic to reach for my phone to settle a dinner conversation about what actor starred in that one movie. Is there an invisible tax I pay every time I google something trivial, forming a near unbreakable symbiotic bond with a stupid iPhone?
Mostly I worry about how I’m not much different than anyone else. I worry we’re all wrestling with finding the right balance between our desires to stay informed and connected while maintaining our independence and analog identity.
And I worry that we can’t disconnect.
