A Life Offline
aaronsw.com
aaronsw.com
I have no land line and a cell phone, but it's not a smart phone. I carry it to work or out of town, but nowhere else. If I visit someone else, run an errand, or go out to eat, you'll have to leave me a voicemail. Sorry about that, but I devote my full attention to the people I'm with.
I have a laptop, but it leaves my desk once or twice a year. If I'm on the road, I probably have a file folder full of papers and a thumb drive, but no electronics.
I check email many times per day and I visit hn many times per day, but only when I'm already at a computer. I never IM, Facebook, Twitter, or text. If you want to communicate with me: if it's important, call me, if not, email me. Either way, I'll get to it when it's convenient for me, and I'll respond fairly quickly.
I went out to dinner with a group including my 22 year old niece. She texted the entire time (under the table, but we all noticed). How sad, I thought. What was so important that she ignored the rest of us for an hour?
I almost feel sorry for you, Aaron, but then again, I know better. I'm curious to see how the next month will affect your lifestyle afterwards. Hopefully, I'll be able to welcome you back to the real human race (by email, of course.)
you don't have to be on the computer when you're not working. you don't even have to be on the computer for work -- you can find another job outside the industry if you really want to. you don't have to take your cell phone with you everywhere.
its obviously not always quite as simple as that, but often times, it is. if you're tired of something and don't want to do it anymore, find a way to stop doing it.
Or at least give them a popularity meter according to their text frequency ;-)
...anyway I'm sure all of us here are stellar examples of tactfulness...
Actually, there are rules, and they're called "etiquette".
It's a cached lookup table of what millions of other people have already decided is tactful, and what is not.
Etiquette, like lookup tables, serves two purposes:
1) it spares you a lot of computation to arrive at results that are already known
2) it implements the DRY principle
Etiquette serves a bonus third purpose:
3) helps you avoid the temptation to justify whatever sort of selfish bad behavior appeals to you at the moment via bogus reasoning. If people "just DO NOT EVER text at a funeral", then you can remember that fact and avoid concluding that "if they really really need to check on how the WoW guild raid is going, they can".
I have to turn the radio down, and I have to pretend that I'm not listening to your conversation. When you're finished, am I allowed to comment on what you were just talking about?
Here is an idea, if the two of us must share a dinner table, or a car, put your freaking phone on silent, you are not THAT important and neither is anybody else.
On another note, I am starting to believe that our generation is becoming culturally dead. I was recently at a "Rabbit in The Moon" show. Its a visual/audio spectacular/rave type of thing. Think big flame throwing half naked women, a guy in a giant hamster ball, and just general craziness.
YOu know what drove me absolutely, completely, positively insane? It wasn't the teenagers on ecstacy in their "cuddle puddles" or the half-naked dudes running around trying to sell me drugs, it was the morons in the front row more pre-occupied with trying to pop off a photo with their telephone than with the absolutely fantastic show they could have been witnessing.
WTF Is wrong with people? Is the crappy, grainy video with bad sound of the show that you can post on your myspace page so that your friends thing you're cool REALLY more important to you than actually EXPERIENCING what is going on around you?
Is that what it has become now? It isn't the experience, it is bragging about the experience to people on the internet.
It makes me sad :(.
I'd say girls have the majority of the pictures on Facebook.
If you need something from me, you can either call me, or send me an email...
Chances are, if you're compressing it into 140 characters, that it isn't that important.
If it IS that important, why the HELL are you sending it to me over some stateless, hacked together part of the cell spec that was intended to be used for sending out signal strength info instead of...I don't know...CALLING me?
I still wouldn't get my phone out in 'polite' company, but am happily Tweeting/emailing/browsing when out with friends, largely because most of them do the same!
If you need to communicate a small amount of data in a fairly urgent manner, then texting makes perfect sense.
But I just don't understand the constant texting and vibrating. How is it socially acceptable to prefer the company of those not there over those who are? If you'd rather be with someone else, go be with them. Otherwise, enjoy the company of those you're with. You'll see the others soon enough.
Please note that I said Constantly. A quick look at the clock, or, as the case may be for me, the caller id of the incoming call, is a little rude, but most people will overlook it. They do not miss the event, however.
The best conversations, or even time spent, with anyone always have my full attention. To me, it's like the movie theater. I go there to suspend belief. If someone wants to talk the whole time, they are in the wrong place.
It can probably be linked back to Dale Carnegie's book. :)
You're out at a bar with a couple of friends. A few minutes after you've gotten there, another friend of yours comes in. He comes over, you say him, exchange a few quick words, and he nods to your friends and heads back to his group.
Now, by acknowledging him, you're not giving your other friends your full attention. It might have been a little insensitive of you not to introduce him, but he was clearly in a rush. I don't consider this particularly rude, and I fail to see how texting is much different. There is context - at a nice restaurant, you probably would want to introduce him to the rest of your friends. In most contexts, though, a quick acknowledgment of other people is entirely acceptable, and texting isn't much different.
If you're materially distracted by texting or phone conversation, that's different. But I see no reason to say that I have to ignore everybody else I know when I'm with you.
Unrelatedly, I find it very difficult to resist using "link" in the same way I used to use "reply", since "reply" is no longer reliably there (intentionally on a delay, I know). Maybe it's just me.
Haven't you ever been called into a manager's office, only to have them be constantly interrupted every few minutes by a phone call, pager beep, email, or somebody coming by while you tried to explain something detailed to them? Was this a practical use of time for either of you? Is this something you would want to use as an example of a normal conversation?
I admit to being annoyed when I'm trying to have a deep conversation with someone and their devices keep interrupting, though, and it can seem rude if there's anything more than small talk involved. I've been chalking this up to being over 30, though, and suppressing my irritation. :)
It is my way of going "I'm bored with you. I'm going to make the situation so awkward that you want to leave".
Here is a tip, friends, if I like you, either my phone and its battery are in physically separate locations, like one in the glove box and one in the trunk, or my phone is shut OFF...not on vibrate, not on silent, not on sleep; powered. off.
If it ISN'T, it means that I'm just using you to occupy my time...my phone is on because I'm hoping somebody more interesting calls me.
What I'm saying is that my phone is usually OFF when I'm with friends. This is why it infuriates me so much when people use theirs around me.
Then again, I agree very much that if all you have is those friends then how can you find depth in any relationship if everything and everyone is allowed to interrupt your time together?
Every now and then I run across a story like this where someone is overburdened with communication and technology and wants to give it all up for a fixed time to cleanse themselves from the toxicity of modern life. Then they come back renewed, with new energy to conquer it all, and tell everyone how great it is and that everyone should give solitary confinement or meditation a serious attempt. Then a few months later, they get back into their old overloaded lifestyle of stress and constant work.
No, you don't need to give it all up for a month or year to find yourself. This is reaching out to the other extreme because you hope to end up in the center eventually. How about just slowly moving to the center from where you are? Get rid of the email+text features from you cellphone. Billions of people live perfectly fine without it. Keep GPS/web on your phone but only use when needed. Feel free to check your email whenever you have a few minutes but don't reply to it immediately. Shape your routine so you get to do what's important and not just what's urgent.
When not doing something productive or relaxing on the computer, step away. Go kayaking, hiking, camping, or jogging. Go to the movies, mall, museum, theater, art show, or a theme park. Get a backyard project, build something in real life, get your hands dirty. And while you do all of this, make adequate use of the technology available to you without feeling crushed under it. The purpose of technology is to solve real-life problems. It is not to replace real-life with a 24/7 stream of stress. People are good in general. Don't ignore them for a month because they contact you too much using different mediums. Spend more time with them in person, even if they annoy you. And use your knowledge of technology to enrich your and their lives. What good is 15 years of computer knowledge if you renounce it instead of sharing it with others?
Connectivity is not bad. What is bad is not knowing what form of communication to give more value to. Figure out your communication medium hierarchy and live by it. Mine goes:
Face-2-Face > Video chat > Phone > Email > Message boards > Social Networks
There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.
I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle, things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.
You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency, or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.
Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend, or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this year for me, and that's unfortunate.
But everything he said resonated with me.
I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like all the time before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s (when I got a dialup connection).
Now there's the omnipresent temptation to read that little blurb about some random guy on the internet. There's hours upon hours of interesting, yet totally pointless anecdotes that can easily consume your waking hours, yet contribute nothing to the richness and quality of your life.
I suffered from this greatly - I was spending hours a day on reddit, for example, and reading what? Yet another article about yet another stupid subject that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, or anything worthwhile.
I enjoy being connected on my terms - my iPhone is indispensable, and I love having maps, restaurant reviews, and all of that at my disposal - but my appreciation of connectedness is pretty old-school, I prefer to fetch my information than to have it come to me (e.g. twitter). There are too many unimportant things happening on the internet that will endlessly distract you if you let it "push" info to you.
However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it.
Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom.
I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)
The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.
It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.
You can't bring much when you have to be able to portage all your gear and don't want to make 2 trips. It is really great getting away from it all and enjoying the slow life without SMS and RSS.
To all of you that haven't camped or backpacked before, there is only one way to learn. Start doing it.
That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.
Isolation is about as non-human as it gets. What this person sounds like is that they need some major therapy, not isolation from the real world.
There's nothing wrong with paper and books, but they should be understood as the exact same concepts, in their time as email and the internet today.
This is intended as tangential to your argument and not a dispute of your argument about isolation.
The whole notion of humans being "social animals" is a recent invention. (Even the notion of humans being just "animals" is about as young.) For most of human history, there has been an underlying impulse for humans to distance themselves from each other for periods of time. (Monasticism, colonization, and rural farming were the majority lifestyles until recently.) The only reason the contemplative lifestyle is being looked down upon nowadays is that we've simply run out of enough land to give everyone enough room to be so at the same time. Until we develop some means of overcoming the space distance barrier, we're stuck with each other.
For Aristotle, to be more virtuous was to be more human. Many virtues - patience, forgiveness, generosity, thankfulness, love, courage - are either best achieved, or only achieved, in community. Hence he reasoned that a full humanity requires a community, that therefore "man is a political animal".
This presents and interesting answer to the following:
>> That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.
Sometimes one might need to get away from the buzz of the other's communication to listen to the community we carry around in our heads.
As for Monasticism: While a completely individual monastic lifestyle has been practiced, it is rare in the history of Western monasticism. Also, as I said above, an individual withdrawing from human contact does not mean she is not in "community." Medieval Christian monastic communities, for their part, were just that, "communities." Monks in these communities lived together and depended on one another for survival. And while they did feel the urge (maybe more properly understood as a 'call') to separate themselves from the community at large, they normally did not cloister their communities far away from urban population centers and were often an integral part of the Medieval economy.
Even the "Desert Fathers," one of the earliest forms of Christian Monasticism, though often viewed as making a radical break from their society, distanced themselves from society in general but not from all humans specifically. Furthermore, these communities depended heavily on links back to the community they had originated from for food, water, and the prayer they thought necessary to exist in the harsh climate of the dessert.
I would go so far as to say that Monasticism, though it does necessitate an intentional distancing of oneself from society at large, is actually a form of a radically <i>social</i> community not experienced by most humans. I think the same can be said about colonialists and rural farmers. Individuals in both of these groups can be said to depend heavily on support from the other for their survival.
Finally, urban existence can be a very lonely for many people. Industrialization and urbanization both create a feeling of what Max Weber termed "anomie." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie In the history of colonization especially, I would think one thing colonists sought to escape was not social interaction with other humans, but the felt sense of anomie created by living amongst too many humans at once in an oppressive environment. Seen this way, colonists, monks, and farmers all escape from environments hostile to the human "social animal" and arrive in an environment more suitable for the social interaction we cannot help but crave.
Footnote: I should add that I know there are rich traditions of monasticism other than Christian monasticism but I'm not qualified to speak on them.
I just don't see the point of categorising myself as a person who has, for example, a hierarchy for ranking social interactions or as a person who checks mail many times a day and doesn't go to the store with a mobile.
Why is this important? Is it? I just can't see the importance.
But maybe that's just me... When I was growing up I realised that I didn't know, or even care, for "how I wanted my eggs." It just didn't seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.
If pressure and constant stimulation has you down, how exactly is ignoring your friends and the outside world going to help, I wonder?
I don't understand the more critical comments here. He's obviously doing what he feels he needs to do to stay sane. Why so many judgmental statements? I think some of this may come from folks feeling a little guilty about their own technology addiction. Or maybe they're just feeling a little superior now that they've 'outlasted' Aaron Swartz. I donno. It's just weird that people would suddenly become so concerned with someone else's techno-fast, as if he's mentally off because he wants a break from it all.
Not all of us can be moderate about everything all the time. Some of us need to take extreme and immediate action to break out of a downward spiral or perform some other life-affirming action. Sometimes we need friends to push us to do this. Seems perfectly healthy to me. And I don't understand the comparison people are making to crash diets here, as if living off the grid is somehow equivalent to cutting off the flow of essential nutrients. Come on.
Let's do an experiment and take HN offline for one month. It'd be interesting to see what happens.
However, if kyro is serious, then he really should take a monthlong retreat away from HN, crank up the soccer-times lifestyle, and get away from it all.
I will say this: I've spent a lot of time both online and in the social world. And I don't know how to properly answer kyro's lifestyle query.
A personal month long retreat from HN does sound tempting though.
In my mind social is the opposite of computers and isolation, so trying to remove both is going to push in the wrong direction.
Communication technology exists to help satisfy the innate human desire and <em>need</em> to communicate. So it isn't reasonable to become anti-social to be human "again". Moderation and maybe a more sophisticated approach (letters maybe, I liked that in the article) is what we need.
I would simply call this a holiday, so why is this so ground breaking? I'm not trying to stir anything up by saying this..I just don't get why this is such a revelation.
One of the recent polls here suggests something like two thirds of us are working on startups either full-time or part-time. Startups don't generally allow for taking a month off (a month is often enough time for the competition to catch up if you stop working).
Although I prefer just taking a few days off the computer at a time myself. Like a weekend, or not hacking anything in the evenings for a week or so. For me, the problem isn't being online per se but the balance of being online AND offline.
When I'm offline, it will eventually energize me to get back online for a while. And when I'm online, it will do SO good to cut off the lines for a few days when I find myself only being online.
Bastard.