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It started in my business world. Long gone were the days where leaving work meant you were out of touch with your office except for the rare phone call relegated to extreme emergencies (like, your place of work just burned down). Then there was email.
Email proved more invasive. Bosses could send you messages after work hours. Even if you didn’t respond, unless you avoided email altogether in the evening you still saw it, and read it, and fretted over it since it usually meant some pending crisis that you would have to deal with first thing the next morning. Over time those emails became more urgent and you would find yourself forced to deal with them more immediately.
That immediacy became even more the norm after cell phones. Now you could be reached after hours, while at lunch, while driving away from work, or while vacationing at Disneyland. There is nothing like feeling a phone buzz in your pocket as you are being hurtled around in the darkness of Space Mountain to bring home the point that you can’t get away anywhere.
Now we have texting, smartphones, instant messaging, Facebook notifications, and Snapchat. We are never out of contact with the outside world. Not only can your office find you, but all your friends, family, and, too often, complete strangers. Many years ago I found an internet cafe in Beijing to deal respond to urgent requests about a work project; today we can immediately video chat in the middle of the ocean on the phone that rarely leaves my body.
This constant contact with the world can be draining. I remind myself that I don’t have to bring my phone with me when I go hiking, but then again, what if there is an emergency, I say. So it stays with me. I do turn it off to save the battery and remove the distraction, but it is there, and it beckons me as the One Ring beckoned the darkness. Of course, as soon as I turn it on I am bombarded with latent text messages, phone beeps, and social media app notifications. The invasion is constant.
Psychologists tell us it is important to have some “me” time. This is especially true for the kind of introverts that so often find themselves as writers. Get away for a while, leave the phone and tablet and laptop and smart watch at home. Find a woodland trail to hike or bike. Do some activity where it is possible to be alone. Disconnect from the world temporarily.
It does wonders for the psyche.
Don’t worry, people will still be there waiting for your return, along with the buzzes, the rings, the beeps, the notifications.
David J. Kent is a science traveler and the author of Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America, in Barnes and Noble stores now. His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity (2013) and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World (2016) and two e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
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Hot White Snow 
It is easy for us to still check out here: there are loads of internet holes. In town, in the Olympic Mountains, all over the place. My phone has service about half the time and I think that that is a blessing.
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That’s a great incentive to “drop out” of contact for a while. Something all of us should choose to do more often.
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Heh. Search your community for the “no bars” place. Sacred spaces.
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Great idea.
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Understand the cringing.
Best use of cell phone is for safety though. I don’t drive that much, but when I do it’s a 452 mile one-way trip. It is a nice feeling to have that resource available on such a trip, especially when responsible for others.
I wonder what state-of-the-art submarine communications technology is nowadays.
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Most of the time in the Olympics, we don’t have cell service. Back to the real wild…. That is a hella commute, too far! The one time I came on a car wreck in Colorado, people were running around trying to get their cells to work. I sent the next driver down to call us an ambulance as soon as he had service. He did.
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Older relatives of mine still have a reaction to a ringing telephone; it is like an unexpected treat or an emergency, and they get angry when I respond with “Don’t worry, it will wait until tomorrow.”
I tend to do all business with email; there is a record for everything. No SMS for me.
But I’m sure that will change.
My escape is just going outside, but I agree — there is always that nagging feeling that one should take the phone along for safety’s sake. Then, perhaps one should just go swimming, at least for now; soon we will have underwater phones.
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I’m more the cringing type when the phone rings. I much prefer email so I have a chance to think as I’m writing.
I suspect Apple watches and Fitbits and the like are worn while swimming to keep track of your exercise. I find the phone hard to leave behind, even if that means in the other room for a few minutes. Not having the connection gnaws on me. That’s something I need to break.
When I lived in Brussels for three years I didn’t have a phone. The cost was extraordinary over there and since I could communicate with my family and friends back home via the office phone or Skype in my apartment, I opted not to have a phone. Only a few times was it a problem. One time a partner in the firm I worked for back in DC got angry because he couldn’t reach me at midnight my time to tell me that in two weeks he needed me in Bulgaria. After that the firm pressured me to have a phone, but I refused because they were not going to even reimburse me for the cost. It was one of several incidents that convinced me I needed to get out of the consulting business.
But the real lesson was that I rarely missed anything by not having the cell phone on me at all times. I need to heed that lesson now.
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Over the last few years, I’ve made it a point to disconnect. My cell phone no longer receives text, and I don’t carry it on my person anymore. And since I get frequent junk calls, it only vibrates for recognized numbers; everything else goes directly to voicemail. I check everything once or twice a day, and that’s it.
Last year, while we were in the Japan Alps, I almost completely disconnected for about two weeks, with just a single mid-way check-in. I was actually surprised at how quickly it became comfortable… and how much it lowered my stress-level.
As an aside, there’s presently something of a debate going on about whether or not to cover the nearby Desolation Wilderness with cell service for safety. The idea just makes me cringe. However, I’ll admit to having once made an emergency cell call from a wilderness area (for someone else), and that I frequently carry a Cospas-Sarsat rescue locator beacon.
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I just walk down to where I garage the tractor and I’m disconnected. So that is fine. Going out to the Apalachicola Forest or to Lake Seminole area is also totally serviceless. That’s OK with me too.
Phones and voicemail are just too inconvenient for me. Important to have for business, health, and safety, but I have replaced by voicemail greeting with “If important, send an email to xxxxx” and I will respond ASAP.”. I think too many people think that leaving a garbled, rambling voicemail is sufficient to warrant a rational reply.
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I’m not a phone person and would rather have an email anyway, so that may be a good way to avoid the 90% of my calls that are scammers. Maybe I need to spend more time in the forest (or the Japanese Alps).
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Excellent ideas. I suppose when you’re in the wilderness a cell phone most likely wouldn’t work anyway, so it’s a good time to break the dependence. I like the idea of having it only vibrate for recognized calls; I’ll have to figure out how to set mine up that way.
More importantly, maybe I need a trek in the Japanese Alps. 🙂
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Closer to home, there’s also the Green Banks, West Virginia, “National Radio Quiet Zone”. They even have a “Radio-Police Officer”.
Hmm… I see a whole tourist industry. (-_^)
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Reminds me a bit of the TV detector vans in the UK that were used to find folks that had not paid the TV tax (for funding the BBC). Curious technology.
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Green Banks; now there is a place I need to check out.
And I will vouch for your being first with the “no wifi” tourist industry. 🙂
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