How long can people ‘unplug’ without going crazy?
I enjoy laughing at people who put everything about their life on social media. I’ll cut right to the chase in the opening sentence.
Last weekend, I got together with a friend I hadn’t seen in about a year. We ran into a former friend I hadn’t seen in about 20 years. The three of us, after their introduction to each other, sat and talked for two hours — without ever looking at our phones.
We’re all in our 40s so we didn’t grow up posting in real time the play-by-play of our lives. I’m not saying people our age don’t do that (because we all know people who do) we just don’t have that need for attention.
None of us post lovey-dovey ooey-gooey messages about/to our spouses on birthdays and anniversaries. We don’t do the “I love you more and more each day, I’m so grateful you’re in my life, you complete me” gush that goes on for three paragraphs and is accompanied by 27 photos. Our relationships don’t require “likes” and acknowledgement from an audience.
Why? Because we tell our partners to their face. We don’t communicate with our significant others in public on social media pages. People do it and that’s fine but we’re not living our relationships for others to be envious of or to applaud.
We do post photos with our partners but not in real time. Meaning, if we’re out for dinner, we’re not doing a selfie and posting it right away. We’re enjoying each other’s company and if at some point it’s worthy of a post, then we’ll do it.
It’s the same for vacation photos. If your immediate thought is, “Take this picture and post it” then your focus isn’t on enjoying the moment for what it is. Your mind is elsewhere. You’re thinking about creating content for other people’s enjoyment. If that’s your job, then hey, have at ‘er.
If I’m paying a ton of money to go somewhere and do something, I’m taking it all in right in front of me. Telling and showing everyone is an after thought. (There have been viral videos of Adele telling off people at her concerts for watching through their phone and not looking directly at her since she’s right in front of them.)
I’m one of the few people who has a no-phone rule in my bedroom. The upstairs of my house is a loft, so it’s technically all bedroom. Phones stay on the kitchen counter overnight. We sleep well. We don’t wake each other up with the glow of a phone or reach over to scroll because we can’t sleep.
You often hear from people who “unplug” for a day or a weekend and feel a sense of freedom. I wonder how often they do that. Could they do it every weekend? If not, why not? They could survive before. Why is it so vital now to always be reachable to anyone anywhere any time? Remember when you had to wait eight hours to get home from work to know if somebody called you? It was survivable.
