I'm quitting the internet

an announcement

Winter hike, 1/28/2024

I’m halfway through leading the online class The Map to Inspiration and not coincidentally, I just finished reading Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again by Johann Hari. This class is all about reconnecting with our intuition, and in many ways, that's what the book is about too. I’ve had this book for a while, and once I tried to read it but realized fifty pages were missing (unfocused book maker? we’ll never know), and then finally I read it this past week, which is when I needed to anyway.

I haven’t been on social media for a long while now. I still have accounts but I haven’t been ON it on it, haven’t been scrolling. Because there was a point where I realized I was thinking about social media instead of thinking about my stories. Also, every time I went on it, I felt terrible. This is the caveat I always give when I say I got off social media, because I know some people are able to manage it better. I was not able to. 

But still, even though I’m not on social media, I’m distracted. I’m not focusing. I have a writing habit tracker chart where I make a mark in a box every day, and only a little more than half of the boxes have the cheery little dot that says I got writing work done. Many of the boxes have the angry X that means: no. 

What gives? I want this. I want to write amazing books. I want to go deep. What is happening?

The fault may be a terrifying phrase I learned in Stolen Focus: surveillance capitalism. The technology companies are tracking us so they can keep us on our devices and sell more to us. They hook us to our screens so we spend more money.¹

The byproduct is, I’m neither inspired nor writing nearly as much as I want to.

In the book, Johann Hari takes three months to go to Provincetown to disconnect from the internet and technology. He brings a laptop that has no internet, and a Jitterbug dumb phone. It takes him a while to re-learn how to think, focus, and pay attention without a smartphone and the internet. One huge eventual payoff is that his mind wanders. He had previously considered daydreaming a waste of time: Why just sit there thinking, when you could be on your phone, or listening to a podcast, or reading a book? But once he started going for walks without any devices, and letting his mind meander, he understood how important it is. “I realized I was having more creative ideas —and making more connections—in a single three-hour walk than I usually had in a month.” Daydreaming is an important kind of paying attention.

I do make time to do things without my phone, but I treat it like an item to complete. I can shoehorn daydreaming in after lunch and before calisthenics: CHECK.² I leave myself time to daydream, but nothing comes. Apparently I can’t force daydreaming. I can’t force inspiration.

Hari says, “I thought back over all the scientific studies I had read about how we spend our time rapidly switching between tasks, and I realized that in our current culture, most of the time we’re not focusing, but we’re not mind-wandering either. We’re constantly skimming, in an unsatisfying whir.” He interviews a professor of neurology and neurosurgery named Nathan Spreng, who says “to be productive, you can’t aim simply to narrow your spotlight as much as possible.” In other words, we can’t just focus tightly on one little thing, all day. We need to let our minds wander in order to be creative and productive, and also to make sense of the world.

Stolen Focus brings up something else that really struck me: the pandemic accelerated our digital distraction. Being stuck inside — constantly checking our phones, social media, and the internet for news, information, entertainment, and something to numb us from all the horrible things going on around us, “supercharged the factors that had already been corroding our attention for years.” Hari interviews Naomi Klein, who says, “we got slammed headfirst into a vision of the future, and we realized ‘we hate it.’”

This was certainly my experience. My ability to focus had slowly been withering, but it was 2020 and 2021 that really made me realize how bad social media made me feel and how much it had taken over my brain, and how much time I spent clicking around on the internet and coming up with nothing. I weaned myself off social media, and I got so much time and attention back. But I didn’t give up the internet. I mean, come on. That would be ridiculous.

Or would it? 

I realized after reading Please Unsubscribe, Thanks last summer how much time I had been spending managing emails I didn’t want. That situation has gotten a lot better (thanks to me unsubscribing from everything) but I still reflexively check messages way more than is necessary. Hari interviews a professor of learning sciences named Guy Claxton, who studies why slow activities like yoga and meditation help us focus. “‘We have to shrink the world to fit our cognitive bandwidth’…Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

And so I am going to try an experiment. It feels both radical and also radically sensible. I’m going to step away from the internet.

For a while, at least. 

I’m going to close my email and “messages for web” browser tabs. I’ll check email once a day, maybe. Maybe once every other day. I’m going to turn on Freedom for hours every day. I’m not going to read articles linked from other articles linked from other articles. I’m not going to scour this digital space for the perfect thing which will inspire me.³ There are billions of amazing things on here, but it’s exhausting trying to find them. Because there are billions of things that make me feel icky, or weary, or frantic, or irritated.

My plan is to take a month. I have a novel rewrite to work on, and I’d really love to go deep in this story and figure out what it’s about. What have I got to lose?

Well, all of you, I suppose. Maybe I’ll come back and I won’t have any subscribers anymore. To that I’ll say two things. First, you could do it too? Try it with me. Let’s give up the internet.⁴ And secondly, my report, in a month or so, on how it went, will be an essay that goes out to my paying subscribers. I am deeply grateful to those of you who support me this way, and I’ve been thinking about more ways I can keep up my end of the bargain. So this will be one of the ways.

The other day I pulled the lid off the bread dough that had been rising overnight in the fridge, and saw all of these big bubbles, and I thought, yes, that’s what it takes — time in the dark. The way the dough gets strong is time, and also to not have me poking at it constantly. The internet is nothing but inputs coming at me. Some of them are inspiring. Not that many, though. And the balance is off. I can spend the whole day absorbing inputs, being poked at, and never get around to writing. It’s time for me to be in the dark, growing and bubbling. Creating.

Soon to be Pain au Levain Moderne from Living Bread by Daniel Leader.

Thoughts and Links

• I watched this video of a person now, living technologically in the 80s for a week, and it was super nostalgic and also extremely entertaining.

• I like what Cal Newport has to say about slow writing.

• Rats are as interested as humans are in taking selfies, and they’re adorable.

• I love Rancho Gordo beans (I love beans in general, and get them from the grocery store mostly, but the Rancho Gordo ones do taste better) and lately have been getting the Ayocoto Negro beans, which are enormous. They look like olives, they’re so big. I feel a little pretentious telling you this is a show-stopping black bean, because, like, they’re beans, but I’ll tell you it’s fun how big they are, and delicious (and yes, I also get the Royal Corona beans, which are even more enormous, almost too big, like each one is its own little steak cutlet of a bean).

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• Sometimes there’s a scene in a book that’s so good, I think, “the rest of the book could be very bad, and this would still be an amazing book because of this one scene.” Simon Sort of Says by Erin Bow has more than one scene like that, but especially a scene where we first meet a dog named Todd. If it was just that scene, it would be an amazing book. But it’s incredible from cover to cover. And it just won a Newbery Honor, so I’m not the only one who thinks so. Thanks to Margie Myers-Culver for recommending it.

• Bookseller Steph from Print: A Bookstore recommended Lakelore, and she was correct about how amazing it is. She’s always correct.

• Ghost Book by Remy Lai was an unpredictable wonder of a graphic novel.

• Every Witches of Brooklyn book I’ve read has been such a delight. I just finished the third, S’more Magic. The fourth one is next in my pile.

1. There is also a section in the book that talks about how the technology companies want us to be sleep deprived, because if we don’t sleep, we’re on the technology more, and probably spending money on things we don’t want to — making irrational money decisions because we’re tired. That section was also scary, and feels true.

2. I’m not really doing calisthenics. I’m not even entirely sure what they are.

3. Hypocritically, I do include fun links for you, as always, in this newsletter.

4. I know some of you can’t because of jobs, but I also know many of you are checking the internet more than you’d like to.