The Observer
Could you survive for a week without checking your email or looking at the internet? How about no mobile phone and making it two weeks?
So, I called someone up the other day. An acquaintance, of sorts. Someone I've spoken to by email countless times over the past two years, discussing work. Halfway through the conversation, it became obvious that we'd never actually spoken before.
"We must have spoken at some point," I say, a little awkwardly.
"Yes," she says, meaning no. "Maybe, a year ago?" Meaning never.
There's nothing shocking in that. I'm sure you've experienced much the same situation yourself. But surely the fact that it isn't shocking is something we should be shocked by? Why is it acceptable to not actually speak to the people we deal with on a daily basis? Why do we prefer faceless anonymity? Is it cowardice, or mere laziness?
Of course, the stock defence is efficiency. We're so busy, the line goes, that we don't have time for idle chitchat. We live – as we're constantly told – in super-accelerated times. But no one seems to have decided what to do with all this extra speed in our lives, apart from emailing each other amusing YouTube videos. We're so intent on consuming the new that we don't give ourselves the time to properly absorb it, let alone reflect upon it.
Ironically enough, this is something I've been reflecting on a fair bit recently. For a variety of reasons, top of which was an almost perfect alignment of stress-inducing greatest hits (trying to move house while my wife was pregnant, and having to deal with the worry of unexpected complications) I felt the need to slow down a little. And there doesn't seem to be an app for that.
I'm not just being facetious: more and more people appear to be thinking the same thing. Mobile phones have made us permanently contactable; remote emails mean that the work week stretches into the evenings, the weekends and even holidays. Under the barrage of tweets, Facebook invitations and instant messages, it has become almost impossible to switch off. The idealised version of social media is that it is like a river – you can just dip your toe in or you can dive in and get fully and joyously swept along with the current. Increasingly, I felt like I was drowning.
Already, as I discovered while wasting time on the internet, a report by Leeds University has claimed a link between increased internet use and stress. Recent research by Microsoft reveals that 99% of men use the internet every day, 80% would feel lost without it and 18% checked social networks on their phone before they had even got out of bed. Cosmopolitan even found that three out of four teenagers claim to feel stressed if they're not online.
But the internet isn't the problem: it's the people on it. In other words, me. I spend so much time on my laptop that my wife's taken to calling it my "square-headed girlfriend".
So I decided to do something about it. And in true self-help style, my road to redemption began with a single step: I quit Twitter. I'd already been worrying about how easily I let myself get swept up in predictable online flashmobs of moral outrage. For a nanosecond, joining a campaign against a Daily Mail columnist might have seemed like a worthy thing to do. But step away from the stampede of indignation and you realise you're just another one of the dumb cattle they've successfully prodded. And I'm not convinced by the supposed innate liberalism of Twitter – not if a vigilante campaign to out Jamie Bulger killer Jon Venables can become a tweeting trend.
But the tipping point came when someone who I thought I admired started announcing to me in 140 characters or less that Marvin Gaye was overrated. Pathetic, I know, but the mere fact I'd allowed myself to get annoyed by something so petty only hardened my conviction. It was obvious that I was the only one making myself angry. So I decided the best option was not to look, and cancelled my account. And then I just kept going. This need to wipe the slate clean, to de-clutter – or at least de-complicate – my life, took over. I needed a holiday from the world of stuff. So I decided on a very literal form of regressive therapy: I was going to go offline, to see if I could last a week without looking at a website or checking my email; to somehow re-connect by disconnecting.
Symbolically, my iPhone was the next thing to go (partly thanks to a friend's disdainful description of it: "Are those the things I see men stroking like little pets on the tube?"). My constant, portable window to the internet was too much of a temptation to carry round with me if I was to seriously attempt life offline, so I "de-simmed" it. (This is not an easy exercise in itself – you need a paperclip to get the sim card out and, as I discovered, paperclips aren't as abundant as they used to be in pre-digital days.)
If quitting Twitter and ditching the iPhone was relatively easy, Facebook made it as hard as possible, tugging on all the virtual heartstrings they could dredge up from their data. Having selected "deactivate account" from my settings, I was faced with a gallery of family and friends who I was told would miss me. Fortunately, as someone had tagged the contents of a barbecue grill with my friends' names, this was less of an emotional strain than was intended ("Andrew will miss you," pleaded a photo of a forlorn and slightly singed chicken drumstick). To alleviate my worries, I was given a final reminder: "Remember, you can reactivate at any time…" But by then the deed was done.
Next came the hard bit. For this to really work, I shouldn't tell anyone what I was doing. But then again, one of the great things about setting yourself an arbitrary task is that you get to decide on the ground rules, set the parameters and cheat accordingly. So I emailed a friend to explain why he wouldn't be getting any more emails from me for a while. His reply was to the point: "How on earth will you do any work?"
It was a fair question.
So I decided I'd wean myself off. On the first day, I allowed myself to look at my inbox, but not to send any replies. To start off, it was a doddle. I walked around the office and talked to people. I delegated. I rang people up. The first person I called – honestly – rang off with the words, "Thank you so much for calling me." See? Being offline was making me a nicer person already. And it's amazing how quickly misunderstandings can be defused when you put a voice to an anonymous email. For a start, there's no sarcasm font on email, and typing "ha ha!" does have the tendency to make you look a little unhinged.
But I won't pretend it wasn't without its difficulties. As time went by and I got into the habit of checking in with the people I needed to talk to, hopefully pre-empting any electronic conversations, I found ever more subtle pitfalls lying in wait. For instance, I'd never before considered the implied rudeness of talking to someone when you've clearly avoided reading their last email. I soon learned to brazen it out by saying, "Oh sorry, I've not opened my inbox yet."
It wasn't long before another one of those acquaintances-I've-never-met asked, "Don't you have it on in the background all the time?"
"Er, no, I find it easier to just check it occasionally – otherwise I never get any work done."
"That's a really good idea," they said.
Come to think of it, it is a good idea.
