3 Things I Learned From My Digital Detox
by Michael Marinaccio
In anticipation of our first child, my wife and I decided to break for a week in the Aloha State and take in some hiking, kayaking, and pensive introspection amid an island paradise.
For my part, I decided it was due time to sever my umbilical to the news-cycle and leave my phone behind. I made the commitment to myself — saying goodbye to Email, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, you name it. I was going to kill this habit and relax some.
My wife and I had already decided to purchase an actual camera for the baby on the way. We wanted a different device to hide behind than our phones and something that also took high quality photos. So I did my research and picked up a mirrorless micro four thirds, the Olympus OM-D E-M10.
I figured between the new camera, sand and water-sports, it would be easy to leave my cellphone at the house and enjoy our week on the beach.
It was not. Here’s 3 things I learned from my struggle to digital detox:
1. Cold turkey is not hard. It is impossible.
Let us first skip over the 12 hour flight-time devoid of movies, WiFI or casual conversation that disemboweled my plans to stay off my phone. A mixture of crossword puzzles and pre-installed games kept us sane.
When we landed in Oahu, I turned off all my email notifications and put the phone on silent. I put it in my back pocket and I lasted exactly 20 minutes before I had it back out searching for directions to our rental car lot. After I had found where we were going, like an itch, I was already scrolling through Twitter to catch up with the world after losing an entire day. Damn it.
As a personality, I am overly controlling and fairly disciplined when it comes to committing to something. So I was pretty grief-stricken when my early attempts to affix the digital brick to my back pocket failed.
In the land of the practical, this interconnected world we live in has created something of a nuisance of our ability to solve problems. Could I have easily walked up to anyone and asked where the rental car lot was? Yes. But for some reason I chose to avoid others and punch information into my phone.
Many millennials ironically ponder “what did we do before Google?” knowing full well what we did. We asked lots of questions and got lost. However, I will concede that unless we had planned our vacation down to the street and turn, this part was inevitable. The phone is a GPS, so we used it as one.
Getting past some of the logistical speed-bumps, there was a constant fight against the “what is happening now” fever. Much like a drug, alcohol, or porn, most relapses had an initial “oh I’ll just look this up” and then I would be stuck reading through the recent police murder or Trump charade.
2. I felt so much better.
By day two I was successfully peeling away the anxiety of missing a work email or delaying a personal response to a friend seeking a dinner date. The numbness of jet-lag was passing and I found myself sitting on a beach with crystal-blue water. For once, time was passing slowly and nothing required my immediate attention.
For this experiment, I was careful to record any noticeable differences in our behaviors. The character changes I did notice in my wife and myself were as follows.
- Physical comfort: Sleeping in a new bed in a much different temperature usually would have ruined me — but it didn’t. The posture changes I noticed were significant. Without a constantly arched neck and back (reading both laptops and phones), I felt like I could run 5 miles. In fact, we did some hikes and kayaking that were way beyond my fitness level.
- Better conversation and eye contact: My wife pointed out to me afterwards how much better we were at reading each other’s thoughts/emotions without the phones in the way. I definitely found myself making greater eye contact without the excuse of a phone to escape trivial conversation. If we did not make small-talk interesting, we just sat around staring at each other or the jungle.
- Pensive Spontaneous Prayer: This change was by far the best. I could not have predicted how well I would be content for long periods of time without any distractions. On the same day my wife noted spontaneous prayer while snorkeling amongst sea turtles and exotic fish, I sat 50ft back underneath a shady tree for almost 2 hours doing absolutely nothing but pondering the green mountain peering out from the cloud-filled sky. The rich romanticism of the moment affected me more than any video or long-read I have ever labored through.
3. Returning to the day-to-day is hard.
After we returned from Hawaii, we both found it extremely difficult to reengage with our worlds. I skipped my Saturday newsletter last week and I still have not really sunk back into Twitter.
If you have ever abstained from drinking a cola or a soda, maybe sticking to only juices and water, you will find that your first drink is always a mixture of surprise, delight, and disgust — at least that has been my experience. There is just something refreshing about cleaning your system out that makes returning to your old ways quite hard — but that feeling quickly dissipates upon repetition.
All in all, I think the experiment could have been more thorough had we
- Left all our phones at home.
- Fully planned out our trip in detail.
- Vacationed for longer.
But living in reality makes controlled experiments like this impossible.
The lesson I take away?
These communications we embrace have become an irreplaceable part of the way we live. However, because of their multi-purpose utility, they can often be conflated with many other distractions that ruin our concept of human dignity.
The reason I bought a digital camera was to bring a singular utility and form to the device. I could have taken photos on my smartphone but the temptation to drown out my vacation with nonsense was lessened by avoiding that temptation from the start.
Vacations should embrace and challenge our loneliness and despair, the fears that we have of being around other people — like when vacations force us to fake conversation or tolerate family. Those are the moments that make us healthier, kinder, and more aware of our own faults.
As society moves ever closer toward a global web of interconnectivity, it will become all the more important to set time aside to re-focus, re-energize and recreate within ourselves that which we have lost in our distraction.
