“We need to get off our screens.” This is the first line I wrote in a journal on a camping trip to Grover Hot Springs in the Eastern Sierra Nevada. The note was scribbled hastily, almost desperately. Isaac Newton invented calculus during a plague, and similarly, I returned from the mountains with this Eureka gemstone. I’ll take my Nobel over Zoom, thanks.
Perhaps the reason this simple thought struck me as a grand epiphany in the moment was that getting off screens wasn’t actually the intention of the trip. This was no digital detox (a term I’ve always despised). My campmates and I didn’t run into nature to get away from phones; we just wanted to get out of the house after weeks — nay, months — of sheltering in place.
Camping seems the only ethical vacation fun you can have this year. California’s online campsite reservation system flooded with requests as soon as a handful of parks reopened, however quietly they tried to do it. After all, the activity is ideal in a pandemic: lots of cross breezes, plenty of car lengths between you and your neighbors, UV light galore — at a certain point, pitching a tent in the dirt and roasting marshmallows six feet from each other sounded far safer than going to the grocery store.
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But digital detoxing wasn’t the point for me, at least not explicitly. It was a trend I never wanted to participate in before Covid-19, and to do it now felt like sheer lunacy. In an age when all bars, festivals, parties, events, and clubs are canceled or closed and even backyard gatherings with close friends are executed with the furtiveness of speakeasies, who on Earth would choose to shut off their last remaining lifeline to the outside world?
When I arrived at the Grover campsite, I stepped out of the stuffy car interior into the fresh air and into a wonderland of floating light beams, warm, pine-scented updrafts, and granite-enforced silence. I looked at my phone and saw that I had no service. At this discovery, I panicked. I hadn’t thought about this.
Then, I felt something unclench inside my rib cage. A lifting. A lightness.
I would no longer be subject to the whims of anyone trying to reach me, get a rise out of me, or pull me emotionally — and it wouldn’t be my fault. In the Eastern Sierra, nothing was needed from me; I just got to be a passive visitor.
Getting away from the internet wasn’t the intention, but it was a welcome addition.
Later that day, I realized, swinging from a hammock under the angelic sigh of the pine boughs, that this was the most relaxed I’d been in a year. At the time, I assumed it was the tree bath. When was the last time you opened your eyes and all you saw was green and blue? I was drunk on nature’s splendor and my own snobbish pity for all those city kids who would never know the true healing of Gaia’s embrace because they fear dirt under their fingernails.
I just drove over 100 miles from a state of being I called “quarantine” to plant myself away from my work or in any way connect with another human not with me in the middle of nowhere. It occurred to me that the term “social distancing” had been comically misused by those of us faithfully trying to execute on it. Maybe we hadn’t seen people in person, but we were inundated by social interaction online.
Before terms like “quarantine,” “lockdown,” and “social distancing” had personal meaning in my own life, they conjured up images of solitude and silence. An implied danger, yes. Fear and loneliness, yes. But also room for things like reflection, isolation — boredom even. Ultimately, no matter how emotionally fraught, I had imagined there would be a distinct element of peace and quiet.
But “peace and quiet” doesn’t exactly describe my social distance/quarantine experience at all—nor yours, I’m guessing. In fact, I would say, judging by the polls about mental health, most of us have never felt less peaceful in our entire lives. This crisis is often cleanly attributed to rising unemployment and fears of infection. It is what I would prefer to believe, and it makes sense. But I don’t think the mental health crisis is as simple as what’s on our minds. It’s also how we’re expressing ourselves and reacting to others’ expressions.
In the time of public pressure for zero physical contact and in-person gatherings, we have dived headfirst into our screens, a not-so-underground railroad of human connection to keep us from feeling as alone as we physically are (or, depending on your circumstance, to mentally distract us from the people we can’t be alone from).
We do this despite the fact that it’s no great secret that social media is kind of bad for us. The communication channels are deceptively shallow and lead to misunderstanding. Disagreements get personal quickly, and although the interactions can seem superficial and unimportant, the consequences can leap irredeemably off the screen to affect real-life relationships.
In the time of public pressure for zero physical contact and in-person gatherings, we have dived headfirst into our screens, a not-so-underground railroad of human connection to keep us from feeling as alone as we physically are.
This includes the few in-person relationships you probably have left during social distancing. You can live with someone in quarantine, see each other’s bodies every hour, sigh on the same couch in the living room, and stare at your faces in the same chipped mirror, but based on what you’ve consumed online, you can have had two wildly different days. This fact usually presents itself around dinnertime when one of you is vibrating with rage due to a Facebook fight about masks while the other is in a paranoid frenzy after doomscrolling through news reports about how post-infection immunity is impossible. You eat in silence, or, somehow, the minute one of you opens your mouth, you are fighting even if you have the same politics or even if you share the same beliefs about hand sanitizer. The emotion is too high, our brains too full of the remnants of 50 incomplete, unsatisfied conversations with robots that we’re trying to remember represent the 3D people we love.
To fight isolation, we have completely overindulged in online communication.
I have ended each day of “quarantine” feeling like a person who has eaten six-course banquets at each meal and still has the audacity to say they are starving.
But I’m not naive enough to think we can stop social media entirely — or to argue that we even should stop. For all its problems, we owe an element of gratitude for what it’s done, both now and before the #WorstYearEver, to raise awareness about the pandemic, police brutality, systemic racism, and Donald Trump’s continued siege on democracy. Social media draws important attention to issues, democratizes and decentralizes critical information, and lets government officials see, in real time, what they should pay attention to in order for us to keep them in power.
I don’t believe anyone should advocate for the abolition of social media because at this point, it is tantamount to advocating for political apathy.
But what this time during the pandemic has made clear to me more than ever is that getting into a multiple, daylong, tear-stained, work-distracting Facebook arguments with Aunt Mabel, who frankly just doesn’t want to see what’s in it for her if she changes her mind about Trump, isn’t the same as showing up to a protest (in a mask), emailing a mayor, or calling a chief of police — all of which require far less time for significantly higher gains. Both actions get their origins on social media. But one is a far easier trap to fall into than the other.
So we’ve been fighting all day. We’re not coming together; we’re more polarized than ever into red or blue, good or bad. There is very little room for purple. We don’t have the patience, time, or desire to see people as people when they are simply names on a screen. It’s hard to see them as containing multitudes when you can’t actually see them at all.
Philosopher Robert Pirsig said, “The only Zen you can find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.”
I don’t want to peddle the term “digital detox” or any other asceticism designed only to be bragged about on the wagon you are departing from. We’re all a bit sick of watching pious announcements from friends that they are departing to “focus on me for a little bit” — a flood of TED talks and life-hack essays bestowed to us by people who have overcome their dopamine addiction and made it look easy, making us feel a bit like morons for not being able to figure it out.
As much as I want to tell everyone to just drop what they’re doing and go outside, just turn off their phones and go camping, I know it is not that simple. Besides, I genuinely believe that burying our heads in the sand would not be good for society either. If the current moment has taught us nothing else, it’s that we are helplessly interconnected and dependent on each other’s choices even if we can’t stop screaming about what to focus on.
Our need for some peace and quiet, however — for an ascension, a gasp of air from the social media sea we have been drowning in and calling “human connection” — is valid. There is a middle ground here.
I gave it a try the Saturday after returning from camping. I wanted to see, quietly and without preamble, if I could bring the Zen at the top of the mountain into my home.
I woke up, checked my phone for anything urgent, and then put it on silent. I felt a jolt of doubt rather than the relief I’d felt when I first saw a lack of service amidst the trees; sometimes choices are easier when someone makes them for you.
I went into the kitchen, made my tea, and instead of hopping online, I picked up a book I’d been meaning to read. Seven pages later, I realized the book was trash and ditched it for another. But the point is, I read one thing for more than three minutes.
The day moved in a way that didn’t feel slow. After reading for what ended up being an hour, I looked up and felt uncharacteristically calm. I noticed the boring things around me you normally don’t notice unless high: the detail of latticed threads on a gray couch pillow, the smear of an ancient brushstroke of paint on a door hinge, the magic of the pearlescent green leaves of a pothos. Simply laying down for a few moments with no goal, no pretext of intention, meditation, mindfulness, or sacredness felt like something I hadn’t done since childhood.
The boredom I thought would arrive never came. I wasn’t swimming in someone else’s thoughts or life. I was swimming in my own. This wasn’t as traumatizing as I thought it would be. Hasn’t the internet proven how vain we all truly are no matter where we are? How could I have thought it would be boring to be myself for a day? I didn’t have some grand revelation about the universe or my childhood or my future. I just felt calm.
The next day, I checked in again and found out I was the last person on a group text to get a photo of a friend’s baby in a chicken onesie. And that Breonna Taylor’s killers were still free. And people thought Bill Gates was trying to microchip people via a Covid-19 vaccine. The internet war between red and blue was still healthy with mutual public shaming, name-calling, and moral grandstanding.
In short, the revolution was still alive and well and simultaneously still needing me while not missing me. We could all peel off for a day, I realized, and exhale and come back, and it would still be here. What I had done wasn’t apathy or neglect or escapism. It was a day of rest from being social.
It was the only true day of social distancing I had probably had in years.
