Ev Bogue"Each refresh takes us one refresh closer to death." -- G.B.
It's time for a digital sabbatical.
What I won't be doing for the month of July:
Checking or replying to email Hitting refresh on any sorts of streams Googling Tweeting
What I will be doing: Reading Photographing Exploring my world Writing Letters
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Last year, I took a month off from the Internet in order to look at myself.
I had read a blog post by G.B. about digital sabbaticals. After catching herself mindlessly flipping through her iPhone Apps on a bus ride through Boulder, she decided it was time to take a break.
This time last year I was running a blog, Far Beyond The Stars, with 70,000+ monthly readers (at the time), where I was receiving 50-200 comments on an average blog post. I'd caught myself waking up in the middle of the night to make sure no one had trolled my blog comments. I was constantly on Twitter distracting myself from my life.
When I saw G.B.'s blog post, I intuitively knew I needed to get offline.
So, when my granddad called me up and asked whether I was coming camping in Wisconsin, I said: "hell yes." and booked a plane from SFO to ORD in order to spend some time with my family and 10 days in the woods without the iPhone.
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Untethering from the web gives me perspective.
It's an opportunity to step away and look at my habits online.
Whenever I step away from something online, I notice how habitual my web usage has become.
In December, I quit Facebook. The site was keeping my mind on 1,000 people, none of whom were in my life. I wanted to be able to focus on the person across the table at the coffee shop from me, and not worry about what was going on in the lives of friends all over the world. So, I let it go. No more Likes for me.
I noticed quickly how often I opened up my web browser only to type the first two letters of Facebook "Fa" into the URL bar.
I find myself wondering if we're becoming slaves to certain services on the Internet. Addicts to machines wired to bring us back, make us click, and show us advertisements.
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When I came back from my digital sabbatical last year, I had a little more perspective.
I turned comments off on my blog.
A relationship I was in at the time came to an end.
I signed up for Yoga Teacher training at Yoga to the People in San Francisco.
When I look back, the distance of the digital sabbatical turned into one of the most pivotal times in my life.
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This year, my digital sabbatical is starting from a different place.
I'm not endlessly distracted by blog comments -- I have none.
I'm not mindlessly being drawn into my iPhone. I'm not receiving very many emails. I haven't been on Facebook for 6 months. I recently untethered Twitter.
My relationship with the web seems to be healthy.
The web however? I wonder about how healthy it is. I feel like we're in the eye of the storm in the evolution of the Internet. We're about to see a huge evolutionary leap, but it's not here yet.
This fall, things could get incredibly exciting online.
It also could be that I'm just looking out the window, seeing the Seattle sunshine, and wanting to play in the parks, drink coffee in the sun, and enjoy my short life on this Earth.
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I believe that every time I hit refresh, I die a little.
Have you ever been having a conversation with someone in person, only to have them flip on their iPhone to hit refresh on their email/twitter/facebook?
Have you ever caught yourself doing this while having a conversation?
When we hit refresh on anything, we're in effect saying: "do people like me? what's going on? do people like me?"
When we're hitting refresh over and over again, it's usually to avoid looking deeper within ourselves for what actually needs to be worked on.
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Taking a digital sabbatical is about looking within myself. Without the constant outside stimulus of incoming data.
The paradox of continually suggesting that my readers look at their information consumption habits is that they might just listen to me and go enjoy their lives.
A reader recently wrote me to say she was printing off The Letter to share with friends who weren't online readers.
Maybe this is how we need to share in the age of information overload -- in a deliberate way.
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This site won't be updated again until August. I'll let you know when I'm back!