Introduction
Last Friday afternoon, I stumbled across a news article online about the Global Day of Unplugging, which you can read about here. In a nutshell, the idea (to quote from the organizer’s home page) is that “people everywhere will unplug from their screens to dive into offline activities, real-life conversations, in-person connections, and meaningful moments.” I decided, on a whim, to participate. This meant going totally Internet- and cellphone-free for 24 hours, starting at sunset that same day. This I did, as recounted below.
Trigger warning
If you are expecting something really exciting that will shake you up and make you rethink your entire life, please be aware that nothing in this post will do that. (Does such a disclosure really merit a trigger warning? Well, if you were to get to the end of this post without becoming as mesmerized and enlightened as you’d expected, might that not be triggering?)
Battening down the hatches
Having learned of the existence of this event about half an hour before it started, I had to scramble to batten down the hatches before unplugging. At least a dozen people rely on me for continuous communication, without which they would soon feel lost and rudderless. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha! Actually, nobody gets this much of my attention and I deliberately keep it that way by being a sluggish responder. For example, a long-lost friend connected to me on LinkedIn and started a nice chat to catch me up on his latest, and it took me twelve years to respond. And having trained my kids to eschew the always-on electronic communications I’ve traditionally found distasteful, I’m pleased to report that if anything they’re worse than I am.
Still, I thought I’d let a few people know. First I texted my friend P—, who lives in another state but often talks with me on the phone. (So old school, right?) I told him, “FYI, after sunset today, until sunset tomorrow, if you want to reach me, call the landline. I’m going smartphone- and Internet-free for 24 hours as part of the Global Day of Unplugging!” He replied, “Dude, you’re a douche.” Next I group-texted a couple of cycling pals whom I was planning to ride with this weekend, letting them know they should call my landline to coordinate the ride details. I realized this might seem like a hassle, and reflected on the bizarre fact that, though I’ve been friends with these two for over twenty years, I’ve never actually talked to either one of them on the phone. Not once! So I sent another text saying, “BTW, sorry to be difficult with this offline thing. I have already been called a ‘douche’ over this.” C— texted back, “Oh no worries! We call you a douche for many other reasons, so one more makes an infinitesimal difference.”
Rules of engagement
It then occurred to me that having my friends phone me on my landline might be breaking the Unplugging rules, because my pals would almost certainly be calling on their cell phones, thus I would still be participating in the connected culture. But then, it’s not my fault they’ve almost certainly disconnected their landlines by now. Besides, having our first-ever phone conversation would be an amazing milestone, certainly within the “real life conversations” element of Global Day of Unplugging, and in support of its “offline activities” and “in-person connections” goals.
With these goals in mind, I decided I’d better line up an offline, in-person activity on the home front. An article I looked at showed a family gathered in the living room playing a board game or something, like a scene out of Norman Rockwell. This wasn’t going to happen for me, since both my kids have fledged, but at least I could do something with my wife that would be more interactive than both of use reading our books silently, practically ignoring each other like in that Simon & Garfunkel song (“And we note our place with bookmarkers/ That measure what we’ve lost”).
One of our go-to activities is Netflix, but that was off the table. I didn’t have much time for research on the rules of Unplugging so I asked ChatGPT if DVDs counted as unplugged. It confidently told me this was fine, and even wrote a mini-essay about it, which concluded, “Watching a DVD with your wife would align with the spirit of the day, as long as you’re not accessing the internet through any device during the 24-hour period. Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear. Don’t be alarmed.” Yeah, I made up that last part. (Well, I stole it.) Do you find it creepy how tempting it is to pretend ChatGPT is some kind of authority? And yet I took its advice and raced over to the library. It was closing in five minutes and they’d shut off their WiFi, so I couldn’t vet any of the practically random DVDs I grabbed, even though the sun hadn’t even set so Internet was still legal. I was flying blind, no IMDB, no Metacritic!
I got home and with mere minutes on the clock, I texted my older daughter to advise her I’d be offline for 24 hours, and explained why. About all she had to say was, “You use cookies now?” (referring to my last blog post), and “Enjoy your 24 hours off the grid.” And just like that, I was all-in. I set my phone to Do Not Disturb and ditched it on my desk as the sun disappeared.
Friday
Unplugging did not affect my dinner, as we never use our phones at the table anyway. True, my wife often asks me to search Spotify for some music to match the meal (e.g., “How about some mellow Japanese jazz?”) and we’ve ended up with some really weird audio backdrop; to be honest, I didn’t miss it. After dinner and a bunch of chores we settled in to our DVD movie, “Saturday Fiction,” a foreign film about spies in China in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. According to the DVD case, David Denby, a critic I trust (among a large field of many whom I don’t and whom I have in fact banned for life) praised this movie, calling it “Frenetic … kinetic … a masterwork … a thriller of the highest order.” OMG. I haven’t been this bored, and lost, in a movie since “Andrei Rublev.” In fact “Saturday Fiction” consisted almost entirely of dull dialogue and a lot of pensive smoking, except for one scene where this doofus, after proposing that he and the protagonist become double agents, starts pawing at her crotch the way a dog would. After at least five seconds she slaps him. Five seconds? Really? Was she making up her mind? Or did the actor playing her forget what she was supposed to do? My wife and I both fell asleep before the halfway point. That was it for Friday … the Unplugged evening was over, without any withdrawal symptoms or even yearnings for my phone or laptop. I will say that the inability to have fully vetted this movie cost us pretty dearly, unless you consider we probably needed the sleep.
Saturday
Unplug Collaborative, who organizes this event, has the mission of “Powering human connection over digital engagement.” So, did my unplugged morning naturally blossom into a celebration of human attachment? Well, no. It turns out that excessive online activity is not the only impediment to interpersonal harmony. Another is the tendency of marriage partners to squabble. My wife and I had a bit of a dust-up; nothing dire or catastrophic, just the quotidian stuff that comes up. I determined that the social hygiene of isolation was warranted, and decided to pursue a very non-digital engagement with my mountain bike’s brake pads, which had somehow been soiled with hydraulic fluid.
Everyone I’ve asked insists that this fluid cannot be removed from the pads and they must be replaced. I would prove these doubters wrong! So I sat out in the driveway with no YouTube, no Spotify, no social media, and no texts: just a couple of metal files and my weirdly metal brake pads, filing away for ages and ages upon ages, my hands blackening and becoming sore with the effort, feeling about as isolated and primitive as a man can be. After endless grinding, more buffing with emery cloth, cleaning with rubbing alcohol, doing the rotor as well, and putting it all back together, I did a test ride, and then went back into the house to report to my wife.
“You know how they all said it couldn’t be done?!” I challenged her. “Well—they were right.” Rear brake was still honking, not working, and heating the rotor up to where it could cauterize a wound. Went back out, replaced the pads, and felt the entire morning must be shot. But amazingly, it was only like 9:30. Time had slowed to a crawl. Is this what offline life is like? OMG, the non-digital life could be so productive!
During chore time I couldn’t stream music from my phone, but I have a fairly new but old-school stereo with a CD player. I chose a disc from the stacks and stacks that have been collecting dust for years, and put one on. It skipped. I tried another. It skipped too. The stereo is defective but surely out of warranty. It would have been a good idea to test all the features of this bad boy when I first set it up, but it has Bluetooth so I simply had no reason to ever try a CD. Is the streaming of offline, locally stored files from my phone technically against the rules? Well, yeah … because once you unlock a smartphone all hell breaks loose. But I found an old MP3 player that one of my kids abandoned years ago, plugged it into the auxiliary jack, and was back in business.
Look, I’m probably boring you. I’ll try to go faster. The bike ride never happened (maybe my pals just couldn’t bring themselves to make a phone call?). My wife and I went on a hike, and didn’t use GPS when driving to the trailhead, which wasted some time. But my old-school non-phone camera was awesome—check out how well I was able to zoom in on this coyote:
I got some nice landscape photos as well. Here’s one now:
It was a long, tiring hike and when we got home I flopped down on the couch with a good book. For some, this might have been a novel activity (pun intended, sorry), or rather a return to something everyone used to do—“Oh my god, a book, an actual paper-bound book!”—but actually, I read all the time anyway. The cat joined me and did that thing where she curls up so precariously I have to put a hand around her rump to keep her from sliding off, so I only have one hand free to hold the book and turn the pages. (I put up with it because she’s a rescue cat and really needs this.) For a while there was beautiful golden non-backlit, non-LCD, non-halogen light flooding into the room, so I hadn’t even turned on a lamp, but as I sat there, nearly catatonic (get it?), the light gradually diminished until I was reading almost in the dark. And then it dawned on me: the sun had set! The Day of Unplugging was over! To sum up its effect on my day:
- Abusive “douche” comment from friends – PLUS/MINUS (hurtful but also the very essence of male rapport)
- No weird dinner music – PLUS
- Non-vetted abysmal DVD movie – PLUS/MINUS (I want that hour of my life back, but we surely needed the sleep)
- Isolation and primitive existential void of endlessly filing brake pads – PLUS (hubris must be punished)
- CD player - MINUS
- MP3 player to AUX jack – PLUS (a blast from the past!)
- Inefficient route to trailhead due to no GPS - MINUS
- Gorgeous offline hike with coyote – PLUS
- Quality time with cat, book, sunlight – PLUS
- Final verdict: EPIC PASS
So with the digital prohibition over, did I race down to the home office and fetch my phone, or wake up my laptop? Naw, it was almost dinnertime anyway and I had no burning need to reconnect. I hate to break it to you, but for me unplugging was easy (other than those damn brake pads). My question for you is: would you also find this easy? Or at least doable? Are you going to do it next year? Mark your calendar … it’s the first Friday in March, starts at sunset.
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