Hamlet's BlackBerry (23 page)

After six months or so, we reached the point where, instead of dreading the weekly cutoff, we looked forward to it. One Friday night, Martha said she needed a special exception the next morning. There were some urgent work-related e-mails she had to answer before Monday, and she couldn't rely on the library, where the screens are often busy. I skipped my rendezvous with the off switch and went to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I checked to make sure we were still on for a connected morning. “No,” she said blearily from under the blankets. “It was so depressing, the thought of waking up on Saturday to e-mail, that I stayed up late and got everything done.” I made for the modem, but she'd already taken care of it.

We slowly came to understand, in a visceral way, the high cost of being always connected. At the same time, because we were now away from our connectedness on a regular basis, we grasped its utility and value more fully. We now experienced the two states in an intermittent rhythm, so each could be appreciated in contrast to the other. When I returned to my screen on Monday morning, I was still in a Sabbath state of mind and could do my digital business with more calm and focus, at least for the first couple of days. The inner stillness tended to fade as the week progressed, and by Friday I was ready to go “away” again. A few times, we've sneaked in a spontaneous one-day Sabbath during the week, when one of us needed to clear out the digital fog for an important task.

We've been at it for a few years now, and it's become almost
automatic. Sometimes we forget to turn off the modem on Friday and it doesn't make a difference. Having fallen out of the habit of using our screens on those days, it doesn't occur to us to try. An artificially imposed regime has simply become the way we live. On the weekends, the house is a kind of island away from the madness, our disconnectopia. And the good energy we gain from our time there flows over into the rest of life.

This is not to say we're lying around doing nothing. Martha and I still work a lot on weekends, and we keep a full schedule of family activities. The Internet just doesn't figure in any of them. Though digital devices are meant to impose order on our lives, when you remove them, a more natural kind of order returns. It's far easier to be in a room with others and stay there. It's easier to maintain eye contact and have meaningful conversations. It's even easier to be apart from one another. When one of us does drift away from the group, it's to be truly alone with a book or music or just our own thoughts, which now feels healthier. To put it another way, both togetherness and solitude used to be problems for us. Now neither is.

We aren't the only ones who have discovered this. Friends occasionally send us articles and links about others who have tried similar regimens, sometimes calling them Sabbaths. Mark Bittman, a food columnist for the
New York Times
, wrote about a “secular Sabbath” he'd instituted after he checked his e-mail on an airplane flight and realized he was a techno-addict. He'd sworn off for one day a week and now, after six months, was amazed at the transformation: “This achievement is unlike any other in my life.” Author Stephen King said it was when he realized he was spending “almost half of each day's consciousness” facing screens that he decided to cut back. “I don't think any man or woman on his or her death-bed ever wished he or she had spent more time sending IMs.”

Not every household is in a position to try this. There are jobs and family circumstances that just won't allow for two unplugged days a week, or even one. Still, I think there are many who could try it without a great deal of inconvenience. When you do something out of conviction, the world has a way of rallying round and lending a hand. I now often get e-mails with subject lines like “I know you won't see this until Monday but…” If more people started building alcoves and terraces within the digital environment, new customs and protocols would inevitably arise around them.

Were this idea to spread, it would change the life lived not just inside each home but
between
homes. Another benefit of our Sabbath is that we wind up spending a lot more time outside, seeing the neighbors and enjoying the natural world. According to
A Pattern Language
, the healthiest, most vibrant communities are those in which people meet and mix casually in public squares and other common physical spaces. There's a pattern called “Dancing in the Street,” which the book describes as a lost art: “All over the earth, people once danced in the streets…. But in those parts of the world that have become ‘modern' and technically sophisticated, this experience has died.”

Digital society affords a kind of street dancing, through social networks and the like. But it feels more like the Saint Vitus' dance that Thoreau talks about, frantic rather than joyful. If more modems were to shut down on Friday nights, I can see windows being thrown open and people wandering outside the way they do when there's a power outage, meeting neighbors they barely know. There might even be dancing in the streets.

Back to the Room

N
o matter how carefully you think about it or how assiduously you work on new approaches and habits, there's no getting around the fact that we live in a very busy world. So busy that some days you inevitably wind up back in that hectic place where existence is all about tap-tap-tapping, and the very idea of escape feels quixotic.

I had one of those days not long ago. It began with something ostensibly unrelated to digital technology, a summons for jury duty delivered the old-fashioned way, by our mail carrier. When I opened the envelope, my heart sank. Though it's never a good time for a jury call, this one was especially unfortunate. I had a deadline approaching, Martha was working hard on her own book, and various family matters had us both stretched to the limit. And it wasn't the typical order to report to the local courthouse ten minutes from our house, or to the state superior court several towns away. It was a federal jury summons stating that on the appointed morning I was expected to appear at the U.S. District Courthouse in downtown Boston. That meant a two-hour drive each way, possibly more, depending on traffic. I'd be a prospective
juror for three weeks, but if I wound up on a jury, it could go much longer.

In the fine print was another unhappy twist: no computers or mobile phones allowed in the building. Based on the ideas I've laid out in these pages, I should have exulted at this out-of-the-blue mandate to spend most of a day disconnected. But to be honest, I didn't. I had a mountain of work to do and much of it required a connected screen. As it is, I get only five digital days a week, and this was a time when I really didn't want to lose one of them. While notching down our connectedness has been fantastic for our family life, and I would never go back, it occasionally presents brand-new dilemmas. In this case, my frustration about not being able to connect during jury duty was mixed with self-loathing about feeling that way. As I lay in bed the night before, pondering all this, I realized I was trapped in the digital room again, and the walls seemed to be closing in.

When I left the house at 4:30
A.M
., the waxing moon was enormous in the western sky. Driving along with music playing, I gradually relaxed into a better mood. I had no choice in the matter, after all; might as well make the best of it. Traffic was no problem and I arrived quite early. I parked at the courthouse on Boston Harbor and wandered on foot into the city in search of breakfast. There were few signs of life until, crossing Post Office Square, I noticed overcoated figures converging from all directions on a certain doorway on Milk Street. This being Boston, it naturally turned out to be a Dunkin' Donuts. There was a newspaper vendor out front and, noting that the regulars were all buying his wares, I did the same.

I got a doughnut and coffee, grabbed a stool at the front window next to a young woman submerged in a
Boston Herald,
and opened my
USA Today
. These days, the act of reading a hard-copy newspaper feels curiously out of phase, in two quite
different ways. On one hand, it's absurd to be holding these inky sheets in your hands, deciphering words formed by atoms rather than bits. Part of you wonders,
Why on earth am I doing this?
News is supposed to be
new
, and a hard copy is dated long before it arrives. With a screen, you can race around the whole world in seconds, getting all the latest developments in close to real time. The buzz of online news is one of the great pleasures of this era.

On the other hand, a printed newspaper is even more useful now than it was twenty years ago. Like a Moleskine pad, it's a disconnected medium that takes you out of the digital swirl into a calmer, more patient mental space. Buzz is good and important, but so is de-buzzing. There we were, just the pages and me. I could browse lazily, pause over anything that caught my eye, and take the time to think about it, as I rarely do on screen. In this high-speed world, a physical newspaper is a still point for the consciousness. It's also a reminder that
any
room, even a humble doughnut shop, can be a kind of refuge if you know how to use it. It didn't hurt that at this early hour there was no action whatsoever coming from the mobile in my pocket.

“We're Killing Communication,” said one headline on the op-ed page. The column was a hilarious rant against all things digital by Bill Persky, a seventy-eight-year-old television writer, producer, and director who had been spending a lot of time with the latest technologies, including social networks. This had brought him a barrage of new “friends” he didn't need and updates about their lives he didn't want, such as “Eating leftover lasagna” and “Getting a colonoscopy.” Now, Persky announced, he was quitting the whole scene.

I knew just what he was talking about, and I also knew that he was overreacting. Like the mob attacking the printing press in Shakespeare, in his frustration he perceived only the oppressive downside of the new tool, not its many benefits. It's a natural reaction when you feel cornered and see no way out. But, as I could see clearly now from my window seat on Milk Street, there
are
ways out, and they're all around us.

When I got to the courthouse, the other prospective jurors were arriving. Inside the front door was a checkpoint where we had to surrender our phones and computers to armed security officers. There were seventy-five of us in the jury pool that day, but even as the waiting area—an open space with spectacular harbor views—filled up, it remained quiet and still. A crowded room is different when the rest of the world is out of reach. The usual ringtone-initiated yak sessions weren't breaking out every few minutes. Some of us struck up casual conversations with one another, while others read books and paperwork or just stared out at the boats and seagulls. We were
present
in a way people are seldom present anymore.

Many of us had come here reluctantly, convinced we had far more urgent things to do. Under normal circumstances, we would have been spending this time toiling in offices, schools, hospitals, restaurants, and other settings, at tasks we felt deserved our full attention at least as much as jury duty. But if we were in those places now, would we really be giving those tasks our full attention? Doubtful. Too often, devices like the ones
we'd left downstairs would be calling the shots, interrupting, distracting, and generally ensuring that our minds never
quite
settled down.

I wasn't placed on a jury, and by midday I was free to go. When I retrieved my phone at the front door, there was a handful of new messages waiting, and I went through them before driving off. Nothing urgent had happened in my absence—and how often does it, really? I'd expected to be in a foul mood now, frantic to make up for lost time. But sitting in those disconnected courthouse rooms had been as refreshing as a long walk in the woods. I'd done some useful thinking and stumbled on several promising new ideas, and I was eager to get back to work.

Experiences like this are crucial, and finding them shouldn't require federal regulations and armed guards. As life in the digital room grows ever more intense, I see a dawning awareness of this need. Not long after jury day, my academic friend—the one who had complained about her nervous system being “interlinked” to those of her colleagues—e-mailed me a news story about colleges “encouraging technology-free introspection.” Stephens College in Missouri has revived a long-dormant tradition of vespers, an evening chapel service, but with a digital-age twist. Where the old vespers gatherings were religious, the new ones are secular, expressly designed as contemplative time away from digital devices. Smart phones and other devices are placed in collection baskets so the students can just sit quietly in the pews for an hour. The president of the women's college “fears all that time spent in the twenty-first century's town square leaves few opportunities for clutter-free thought,” and she wants these young women to learn self-reliance. Amherst College in Massachusetts organized a “Day of Mindfulness” to give students, in the words of one professor, “a complement to the very hurried world of gadgets they normally live in.”

A week later, one of our local newspapers reported on an effort to restore dilapidated houses in our area that are considered historically significant for their twentieth-century modern designs. Many are in isolated spots in the woods, some overlooking tranquil ponds. A nonprofit organization has raised money and begun turning them into places where artists and scholars can live and work for a few weeks at a time. The first artist to stay in one of the houses, a woman from nearby Provincetown, said of the experience: “It's nice to be away from the Internet.”

Technology makes the world feel smaller than it really is. There are all kinds of rooms in all kinds of places. Every space is what you make it. But in the end, building a good life isn't about where you are. It's about how you decide to think and live. Place your index finger on your temple and tap twice. It's all in there.