The future is analog, p.25
The Future Is Analog, page 25
Every Saturday, for the next year and a half, we repeated this routine: Bake challah, go offline, eat challah. Get outside and do something (hike, walk, bike, swim). Come back and do nothing. We weren’t militant about technology. I was the only one who consistently went offline every Friday night. The kids were free to gorge on cartoons all morning, and we’d often watch a movie together in the evening. But the sabbath ritual held true: bake bread, power down, get outside. I baked braided challahs and round challahs, little challahs and giant challahs. We hiked on dry land and wet land, in the snow and in the sun, on official trails and, when those trails were closed, on secret paths my brother found. We dragged the kids out without fail, even when they protested, and were always better for it. The longer the pandemic dragged on, the more I looked forward to the moment on Friday night when I turned off my phone. It was a finish line at the end of the weekly marathon, and if I could just make it there, to that second when I pulled that loaf of bread out of the oven, then I knew I could keep going. It didn’t matter what was happening online that week, whether it was good or bad… this moment was the highlight, without question: bread, wine, family, food, fresh air, true relaxation.
Tiffany Shlain, a writer and filmmaker in Berkeley, California, began doing her own version of tech-free Shabbats after attending the same Jewish retreat I had and wrote about the experience in her wonderful book 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week. When lockdowns hit, she kept up her tradition. “It still made the day special,” Shlain said, when I asked her how the unplugged Shabbat ritual had felt different during the past few months. “As my kid said, it’s the one day that didn’t feel distant.” Before the pandemic, Shlain’s family life was a blur of travel, activities, commitments, and bodies passing each other in transit. “Then the pandemic happened and time kind of stopped, but in a very monotonous way that was claustrophobic,” she said. “But our Shabbat suddenly felt expansive and relaxing.” Time without screens felt so different now, because the fatigue that screens brought the other six days—when work, school, socializing, entertainment, culture, and conversation were all accessed online—was so acute. By turning off those digital devices and surrendering to the analog rhythms for twenty-four hours, Shlain found that time actually grew. “Here’s the thing,” Shlain said, “you never hit a wall with Shabbat. Where I hit a wall was being on Zooms. But I never hit a wall with Shabbat.”
The wall we all hit was digital. It was a wall of video meetings, Slack threads, text chains, and emails. A wall built from Netflix and Disney+, Facebook and TikTok, Instagram, and the endless onslaught of urgent tweets. It was the wall in our hands, on our desks, and beside our pillows, a wall that we turned to for salvation but kept smacking into and then wondering why on earth our bodies were so damn beat at the end of each day. The wall was the full unleashed reality of the digital future as it completely consumed our lives.
At first we tried to deal with it by turning to other digital distractions: documentaries and livestreamed concerts, binge-worthy series, YouTube surfing videos, Roblox and Fortnite and other immersive video games, trivia with friends and online improv, Zoom cocktails and virtual happy hours—but these left us feeling more drained. The exhaustion simply enveloped us. Our eyes were red and dry. Our heads ached. Until, that is, we reached out beyond the wall for the first time in weeks, put down our phones, and seized an analog alternative. We grabbed what was near: a paperback novel on the shelf, an old jigsaw puzzle in the back of a cupboard, a bag of flour whose value was now priceless. We built LEGO cities and learned to woodwork. We fixed bicycles and mucked around in gardens. We tinkered with guitars and amplifiers. We started sourdoughs, first because all the yeast was sold out, and then because we became obsessed with its primal, fermenting joy. One Saturday I painted a Bob Ross–inspired watercolor landscape and then spent three hours making chocolate eclairs. We turned away from digital and sought solace in things we could touch, feel, and sense with our whole bodies.
Sure, people bought fancy Peloton internet-connected bikes and tons of other home exercise equipment, but more than that, we got outside. We walked until our legs ached and at all hours of the day. Bicycles, cross-country skis, snowshoes, surfboards, tennis rackets, anything to do with camping—if it got you out, it was in high demand. Lakes and rivers filled with paddleboarders. Slackliners and spikeballers congregated on every field. Parks and beaches and campgrounds swelled with the sudden discovery by humanity that we needed to go beyond our screens if we were going to survive this. Hiking trails felt like rush hour on a downtown sidewalk. Our bodies wanted out.
“I would suspect that it’s not just the fact that people got out of the house that they’ll remember,” said Richard Louv, about the sudden boom of outdoor recreation during the pandemic. “I think they’ll remember how they felt when they got out.” Louv, a famed nature educator and author of The Last Child in the Woods, among other books, resides in the remote hills of Southern California, where he walks at least five miles a day. He will frequently start off in a bad mood, often driven by something he’s read in the news, and by the time he crests his second hill and spots a mountain lion track in a dusting of snow, Louv’s outlook will have improved. That’s his hope for the legacy of the pandemic… that billions of people around the world experienced something similar, overdosing on what he called the “downsized life” of indoor digital comforts, then rediscovering the beautiful discomfort we felt outdoors. “I think they’ll remember the bonding they did with their families,” Louv said. “They’ll realize that’s a different feeling from when they were watching Netflix. People were watching TV in the beginning, but how many are watching it as much now?” Probably not as much, Louv guessed. The experiences that stuck with people the most were always the ones outside, in nature, away from a screen: hiking in a surprise Mother’s Day snow squall, the first clean wave I caught on that crazy December day surfing, jumping off the dock with my kids into the cold water of Georgian Bay. “No one remembers their best day of watching TV.”
Louv saw himself as a futurist rooted in the outdoors. “I’m not antitech,” he said. “I just think the more high-tech our lives become, the more nature we need. It’s an equation. It’s a budgeting of time and money.” That means not only setting aside time to get outside in the future but prioritizing nature’s preservation and people’s access to it. It means building more parks and nature trails, protecting forests and shorelines, and, most urgently, tackling the climate crisis threatening the natural world that makes all those things possible. It means building a future where green and blue spaces are more highly valued for human health than any emerging digital technology. “In our bones we need the natural curves of hills, the scent of chaparral, the whisper of pines, the possibility of wildness,” Louv wrote in Last Child in the Woods. “We require these patches of nature for our mental health and our spiritual resilience. Future generations, regardless of whatever recreation or sport is in vogue, will need nature all the more.” We have always known these things are good for us. Even a small patch of park increases community health, economic prospects, and other markers of human flourishing. The pandemic just made it obvious, as we clambered for refuge in whatever natural space was nearby and felt its instantaneous transformation of our bodies and souls.
“What we know is the brain develops based on how we use it,” said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, the neuroscientist from Chapter 2, when I asked her about the role of nature in our mental health. Our brains have two states of processing: active engagement and unstructured thinking. Digital’s constant barrage of stimulation is all active engagement, but this actually blocks the nonlinear brain activities that are necessary for unstructured thinking. Each incoming ping, text, and notification is like a tennis ball flying at our brains. Returning those shots requires constant vigilance, and that impedes our effortful construction of creative ideas, which come from nonlinear activities, like daydreaming. To restore balance between our two states of thinking, we need to get outside our heads, and the best way to do that is to actually get outside in nature.
“Doing that is restorative,” Immordino-Yang said. “Putting yourself in a position, like hiking in the middle of nowhere, you’re just enjoying the scenery there, but green space is naturally restorative, and you’ve removed the possible interruption of stuff that’s going to come to you digitally. Instead you can just be here now,” she said, referencing the mantra of the late countercultural guru Ram Dass. Be here now may sound like a neat turn of hippie marketing, but from a neurological perspective, your embodied presence is a genuine physical reality, the default setting necessary for our minds to construct a bigger metaphysical world. This is the world of our imagination, Immordino-Yang explained, which allows humans to process complex intellectual concepts and build new pathways between the brain’s neural networks.
Our imagination, the stories our brains build to give context to our lives, is as important to our survival as the physiological controls that regulate eating, sleep, and other physical functions of our bodies. The essence of life, Immordino-Yang said, in terms more Darwinian than spiritual, is to survive and manage your survival in conjunction with others. “Our basic life-giving function is the same platform we build our mental subjective lives on,” she said, and we need to regularly recharge and reinvigorate those functions by taking ourselves away from homes and screens, immersing ourselves in the full reality of nature. “When we give ourselves the space to reinvigorate [our thoughts], it gives us space to reinvigorate the organic nature of ourselves.”
The first vacation we took during the pandemic was a canoe trip with another family during the first week of August 2020 in Massasauga Provincial Park, two hours north of Toronto. The weather was the coldest and windiest it had been in a month, and we kept looking at the forecast to see if the next four days would deliver the wet mess that was promised. After an hour of hauling, debating, and last-minute rearranging, our bags were nestled in our canoes, life jackets were strapped on, and we cast off from the dock. We glided past cottages, drifted underneath large cliffs covered with red pine, and soon arrived at the portage, where we unloaded the canoes and carried all our gear over the short, steep trail that separated us from Spider Lake. More wrangling, more twisted spines, more whining from children who were silenced with granola bars, and then we were off again, paddling into the heart of the park. There were no motorboats here. No cars, electricity, or buildings. Just water, rock, and trees. If you couldn’t fit it in a canoe, it wasn’t coming with you. Most important, there was no phone reception. This is why we came. Four days of unlimited green and blue, without digital walls to restrain us.
We pitched our tents and built a fire, ate a decadent Spanish tapas meal, and lit the big number four sparkler on a giant rice crispy square we had made for our son’s birthday. Over the next four days we roasted marshmallows and huddled against the wind, explored around our campsite and went fishing (but caught nothing), listened to loon calls, carved sticks, and gathered wood. We debated how to hang tarps. We took dunks in the water, which was much warmer than the air, and ate glorious meals that my friend Vanessa prepared (kimchi steak fried rice, handmade bean and dehydrated queso fresco sopes, wild blueberry pancakes drenched in maple syrup). We paddled along the shoreline or just stared out at the perfectly still lake, which reflected the ragged pine, maple, and birch trees like a mirror. Somewhere in the midst of this, lying on a rock one night, looking up at the stars, I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Here. Now.
Software promises us limitless variations too, but even the most “immersive” digital environments, like the games Minecraft, Roblox, or Fortnite, have firm limits. You can only do and see what someone has programmed, and no more. There are walls you run up against all the time, and there is simply no going beyond them. “When you’re really reliant on someone else designing your world for you, which is what all digital is, you get a set of rules and a platform and a way to engage with it,” Immordino-Yang said. “But the natural world is open ended. It’s just endlessly fascinating. You can look at a grain of sand or a vista, you can see how things are alive, and all of that offers much more freedom than anything digital, which has been designed and curated to present something to you and make you react in a particular way. By removing yourself from that system and that curated context of digital, you free yourself from it! And then you can kind of reinvent yourself, and doing that feels really good.” We all need space to think—real, physical space.
“I am convinced that nature is one of the great healers, in part because it’s quiet and peaceful,” said Michael Rich, whose work at Harvard focuses on the effects of screens on children’s mental health. “You can look at a forest, you can look at a tree, you can look at the bark, or even the insects burrowing in the bark,” he said. Nature presents us with infinite perspectives. Because nature is constantly changing, it is simultaneously dynamic and stimulating. “You can do this constant zoom in and zoom out, and you have full control over that. You and I can be walking in the woods next to each other and have wildly different experiences, because of the alchemy with our minds and lives, and the endless variability in nature.” I look at a tree and see serene beauty, but my kids see a jungle gym to climb.
For children with acute digital media addictions, Rich told me, wilderness therapy is far more effective than psychiatric treatment or drugs. “We get them back as a sensory being to collect data from the world around them and work with it,” Rich said, describing a child forced to deal with the wind while paddling across a lake in a canoe and to interpret its visceral signals with their bodies. “With digital media, they’re constantly distracting and soothing themselves from fears and anxieties,” Rich said, but nature forces us to face our fears, which is healthy. Sleeping in a tent, in the absolute pitch black, where every scurrying chipmunk sounds like a grizzly bear, you have to either convince yourself it really is a chipmunk or cry yourself to sleep. That is not an easy or comfortable way to spend a night, but it is undoubtedly real, and facing that reality, one way or another, is a powerfully healing experience.
Rich framed the work he does around digital media health as similar to nutritionists promoting a healthy diet. Prohibiting junk food will only go so far, and the same is true for digital technology. We have to provide better analog alternatives to what digital offers us, rather than ban it. Too often we turn to screen time as a default activity—something to distract kids on long drives, between dinner and bedtime, or when we need a break. Rich suggested that instead of defaulting to the iPad or phone, we fill those times with positive offline activities, ideally outdoors. He told families to think about their day as an empty glass. “You fill the glass with this many hours of sleep, this many of school time, and this many of meals,” he said. “Then you look at the rest of your time and put in the things you really value.” Make it something to look forward to: basketball in the driveway, bike rides, building a tree fort, walking for ice cream, reading Harry Potter together, meeting friends at the playground, having a living room dance party. As long as the analog activities fill more of the glass than the digital ones, you are achieving a healthy balance.
Even if they protest, children want to be outside. They want to be on baseball diamonds, at beaches, or sledding down hills. Without question, the most bitter sight of the pandemic was the yellow caution tape placed around every single playground here in Toronto for months, and the sweetest sight was the tape coming down one day in June and my son sprinting toward the slide, shrieking at the top of his lungs with the purest joy. By that point, few kids were still celebrating how awesome it was to binge Netflix all day. On the last day of virtual school, my daughter slammed her laptop shut and told me, “I just want to smash this thing,” before running up the street to play with Archie the puppy.
When in doubt, get out. You will never regret it. And I never did. Even in the stinging rain. Even on the coldest days of January, when we forced the kids on two-hour ravine walks and they kvetched in disapproval for the first half hour. Even when I drove across the city to surf, only to find flat water, and instead went for a walk on the beach. Even during those dark months of virtual school, when I would drag the kids to the park around the corner three times a day, preceded by twenty minutes of kicking and screaming and crocodile tears. There were days when these battles left me shaken and weary, but I always persisted, because the alternative—staying inside, surrendering to digital’s distraction—was so much worse. Once we got to the park they would stop whining and sprint to a rope swing someone had strung up in a tree. My daughter would do five cartwheels, and my son would do seven ninja jumps, and we would toss a Frisbee, and they would see a friend and scream their name, and within minutes our bodies and minds would be restored.
Trapped inside, commuting between screens, each one of us threw up our hands at some point, shouted, “Enough!,” put on our shoes, and went for a walk. We walked briskly and urgently, swinging our legs with a righteous anger at the world. We walked on city streets and country roads and discovered parts of our world we never knew existed hiding right under our noses. We walked further than we thought possible. We walked until we felt better and returned home transformed. And every day, whenever that claustrophobic feeling returned, after the fourth Zoom call or an especially aggravating session of homeschool supervision, we put on our shoes and walked. “Walking was the only thing,” said Dan Rubinstein, author of Born to Walk, about the health benefits of walking. (Quick summary: Walking is amazing for your body in every way. Physically, mentally, there’s little that walking can’t improve.) In a period of life defined by its Groundhog Day sameness, walking provided a sense of time advancing, of seasons changing, of every moment’s uniqueness. Rebecca Solnit wrote that walks happen at the speed of thought, approximately three miles per hour, which is another reason why you think best when you are walking. Walk long enough, and you enter into what French philosopher Frédéric Gros called a dialogue between the body and soul. Walking puts things into perspective.
