Why You Need to Disconnect From the Grid Regularly and Completely

100 years ago only the most important people had phones.

50 years ago only the government and a few of the world’s smartest people had computers.

30 years ago internet was little more than a tool of the military and, at Al Gore’s urging, a way for hospitals to share records.

25 years ago cellular phones were big boxes with shoulder straps. People had car phones, phones literally built into their cars with cords and all.

20 years ago only top executives or the rich had handheld cellphones. The average person had a pager.

15 years ago only the very rich or very influential had access to their email on expensive PDA’s like Palm Pilots.

10 years ago the only way to communicate over the web was via email, limited Instant Messenger programs, or web bulletin boards.

Today nearly everybody has immediate and 24/7 access to emails, much less to social websites like Facebook and twitter and instant messaging like Meebo and BBM. We’ve developed addictions to this connectivity, to the constant ability to call to or be called or texted or messaged or emailed or commented to or on by somebody regardless of where we are, what we’re doing, what time it is, what state of intoxication we may be in, so on…

A crazy drug-addled experience which formerly would’ve been little more than a blurry memory and maybe a funny story from anonymous bystanders now becomes a viral video, a part of the eternal records in all of its repugnant glory, and turns some innocent mind-bending into a detrimental (try to get a job after people see you humping a tree; also, certain things are better half-remembered as wild times than caught on tape by camera-phone-wielding voyeur jackholes) entity that haunts a person her whole life. Thus convincing people that the mistakes made in youth might never be forgotten. Which makes youth into a constant reminder that anybody can be watching, that it’s better to stay on the straight and narrow than to venture out of the comfort zone into something that could end up being video blackmail; breeds a future generation of self-conscious paranoiacs too afraid of looking foolish to ever truly let go, even for a second. How will people ever be able to be intimate again if there is no longer any such thing as guaranteed privacy?

As we speak children are growing up with every moment of their lives, from the first seconds after leaving their mother’s womb to their first naked steps, plastered across the Internet. Privacy is being violated before kids can even understand what privacy is and, again, no way can we know what the long term affects will be but I for one don’t think anything good can come of having a picture of yourself with a massive load in your diaper being instantly accessible by your peers and bullies. And eventually the thought that your whole life is a public record will wreak havoc on those children who maybe had some parts of their past they would rather leave behind.

Apart from the loss of privacy, there’s the constant bombardment of imagery, information, stimuli, and distraction inherent in constantly being plugged in. We’ve all become walking, talking accessories for our gadgets, just a few steps away from those sinister Borgs in STAR TREK lore. Often in social settings somebody pulls out his or her smartphone to show some video or picture or news reel or whatever auto-tuned bullshit remix I absolutely need to see.  Rarely do we make it through dinner without glancing (if need be, furtively) at our cell to see who that text or email was from, the one that vibrated our pocket since we chose to put it on vibrate instead of turn it off. Drinks meetings. Meetings meetings. A night out on the town. A fucking date. We always have to be updated on everything going on outside us, have to respond to everybody immediately, have to reply promptly even if it’s just a string of nonsensical smiley faces. But Constant connectivity can get in the way of our real relationships as it weasels its way in like a drug, adding a concrete physical fixation to the virtual ones - a compulsion to respond. I constantly get irritated with my wife for texting her friends when she and I are talking, reminding her to be here, here with me; if we are to spend our limited time together, I want all of her, not just a part; I don’t want her to be 2/3 on Las Palmas and ¼ in Baltimore and 1/6 in a condo in WeHo, no, no, be here, among the living, breathing, human flesh in the room beside you. Do we get a druggy release when we tap our nonsensical and oh so amusing quips to people through the air? Does it trick us into making ourselves feel like we’re still social in spite of the actual and real distance between us and these “friends” who have been reduced to LED words and pictures? Can you call somebody a good friend if all you have of them are the select calls and messages and online identities they choose to project? Perhaps. Perhaps. But the value of actual human interaction easily trumps these virtual relationships. It makes me a little sick to think of being so tied to a bundle of plastic and lights and circuits but even more of having many friendships that are so similarly constricted.

And yet when was the last time you left home without your cellphone? I’m not talking about by accident or due to loss or for a walk around the block but literally put down your cellphone, walked away from it, and did some stuff for a bit without instant connection to the world? Just the thought makes you a little nervous, right?

After millions of years of evolution without ‘em, in just a decade we’ve built into ourselves a nervous fear of not being connected. An inability to be alone. Get lost? Use the GPS on the iPhone. Bored on your drive? Call somebody to talk you through it. Find yourself catching a beautiful sunset from a clifftop? Capture it (capture that sunset, like it’s a wild animal to be caged) and send it to all your friends. God forbid anything ever happened with the satellites. And natural disaster, something that cuts out all electricity, all phones, all of it – what then? We’ve become so dependent on these machines that I wonder how we would function without Serie to tell us what to do in case of a flood or without being able to Wikipedia on the fly what types of wild berries are edible. Encyclopedia Britanica is closing its doors. Phone books have shrunk to nothing. How will you find the closest gun shop for a post-apocalyptic lock and load if you don’t have addresses offline or know how to read a Thomas Guide? 

So we can’t survive without our connections, frightening, sobering, but so be it. Thus is the modern age, right? It's the nature of the beast considering all the good things these tools give us. So then I ask, are we actually thriving with them?

When we’re at home the TV has to be on; or if not the TV then definitely the computer, possibly playing a game on the phone, Face-stalking, all of it, and perhaps all of it at the same time. I work at a job that often finds me answering phones while writing emails and reading scripts and watching YouTube videos. Multi-tasking, in the parlance of our times, and we all take pride in our ability to multi-task so damn well. Like a goddamn octopus listening to a phone call with one ear while having a conversation using our other ear and watching a snowboarding trailer with the eyes while Youngbloods play in the background and we type up an email, a submission, a contract, and a signature request with each of our suckered tentacles. We think that all of this constant over-stimulation will make us stronger, better – I mean, if the greatest ideas usually come from the combination of several previous concepts, if we’re constantly pulling from every resource at all times we’ll simply become the future best and brightest, right? No, no, not at all. No, if anything as we become saturated with information we risk losing the ability to innovate and to create. In this noisy world, we rarely just sit in silence and think anymore and that makes our brains, instead of being the great School of Athens or archetypical library we wish it to be instead makes it resemble more of a junkyard.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason for the constant noise. We don’t want to think. Thinking makes our heads hurt. Thinking might turn to self-awareness and we might find that those insecurities, failings, and feelings of self-loathing we’d been trying to ignore are there ready to rip us apart. A cathartic and beneficial experience in the long run but most people would rather just push it down and hope it goes away (thought it never does, like those herpes we picked up at Hedonism). We might have to realize that we hate our jobs or we hate our life choices or we hate who we’ve become; that we’re furious with the world our parents have handed us or that we never really got over getting picked on in grade school or that we’re never going to live up to the projection everybody’d always had for us. The noise outside cancels out the noise inside. But we need that noise inside. We need to know who we are and what we are and what we want and whether we’re actually getting it or just going through the motions.

Even more, if we wish to create, to innovate, to solve the problems presented to us in life we need to just sit there and think. Take the data we already have, which I assure you is already better than anything any generation before us had, and apply that to our daily lives. You can’t chase a thought to a dream to a plan to the realization to the future if every time you get going in a hot direction your phone beeps. Steve Jobs never would have invented the iPhone if he hadn’t turned on (dropped a bunch of acid with his first girlfriend) tuned in (with Wozniak, tuning into this new computer craze) and then, most importantly, dropped out (in which he went to live in India and hang out with guru Ram Dass, Google philanthropy king Larry Brilliant, and others getting lost in the woods). If you’re constantly busy processing the clutter you’ll never break through it. And the only way to ever truly break through it and make something new and great, to be the fully-actualized person you want to be, to have the real relationships we all desperately want (isn’t it amazing how this seems to be a real problem, everybody wanting “real relationships” now in this virtual age?), to ensure your human self-reliance and to be able to live free from concern about anybody’s judgment but your own and that of your close family and friends (the only people whose judgment really matters anyway) is to learn to drop off the grid. To turn it off. To get out and escape the noise of our modern age for the silence we seem to have forgotten about. To put aside all the distractions so easily available and then, only then, will we actually create something ourselves.

How the fuck do you do that? The most basic is to get out in nature but there are a few others, to get started. 

• Going for a surf is one of my favorite exercises in disconnecting. You can’t bring computers or blackberries or iPhones out there. There might be some shore rustle but usually not much and if the surf’s pumping the waves crashing drown it out. Or bodyboard if you can’t surf. Or bodysurf if you don’t have a bodyboard. Most of my greatest epiphanies have been encountered in the lineup. Along the same lines is going snowboarding. This is getting harder, especially in smaller resorts as they build in speakers and more and more people clog the limited runs. But if you can find some way to get out of bounds, away from people – some of my best days were ones when I went hiking in the Rockies or the Tetons alone, silent except for the rustling of the wind through the trees and the sounds of raptors above and the sun on my back. 
• Go for a hike. A lot of people don’t have the luxury of living next to an ocean or a ski mountain. Fine. Then just go for a hike. And I mean a hike, not some half-assed 3 mile walk at Runyon Canyon. I mean some long trail, 6 to 8 miles at least and ideally up a mountain or at least a tall hill. Leave your phone behind – especially since a lot of wooded trails block coverage and you won’t get reception anyway. It’s like soap for the soul allowing yourself to be alone with nothing but your thoughts, the sound of your breath, and the feel of putting one foot before the other.
• Find a grassy knoll and simply leave the phone behind. In the olden days people had these things they called picnics, where they would go out and spend all day in a sunny, grassy field. “What if somebody needs to get me?” you may ask. Life existed long before constant connectivity. Life still exists in many parts of the world without it. If somebody needs you they can leave a message and you can get back to them later, when you’re done. For now just relax in the sun, breathe in the fresh air, and pretend you’re back in the 50’s, when everything (irony) made sense.
• Just turn it off at home. Resist the temptation to turn on the TV. Leave the computer off. Turn off your phone. I like to start most mornings without any bit of external anything. Just the sound of the world slowly waking up, the smell of coffee brewing, and the newspaper. Resist the temptation to kill the frightening silence with anonymous rabble
• Go for a long drive without your phone. It’s liberating and for some people certainly frightening, why not? If you get lost, stop and ask for directions. If your car breaks down, take a walk back to the last service station. Walking along an empty backroad is less dangerous than driving down a busy avenue and much more fulfilling. Most likely all that will happen is you’ll remember what it’s like to feel the wind on your face, to feel the motor churning. Time slows when you allow yourself to concentrate on less. Everyday things become more important. I like to drive in complete silence a few days a week, just to decompress after the daily drudge.
• And finally, if you go on vacation, LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT HOME. For my wedding and honeymoon my wife and I got married in St. Lucia. Our phones didn’t work. Nobody’s did. And we reconnected with the family and friends there better than we had any opportunity before or since. We spent a lot of time swimming, laughing, napping; being happy. Knocked on the doors of our guests’ cabanas instead of calling them, adding an extra element of excitement to the routine – will they be there or won’t they. I’ve never felt so relaxed as I did after 10 days of the world, the troubles and frustrations and stresses of life, being far, far away. You don’t need to get those pictures up immediately and if you can’t go a few days without texting your friends you might have dependency problems. Leave the phone in the car parked at the airport and just fucking go.

 It's like all the hipsters with their analog cameras. Sometimes the way we used to do things can produce amazing results if we apply them to our modern lives. I'm not saying you have to disconnect completely and at all time, that you have to permanently leave the grid. But you should leave it regularly and frequently, if only to remind yourself of your own humanity. Break the addiction, people. Learn to embrace the frightful state of silence in the natural world. Learn to disconnect. Because for us to innovate, to create, to be great, we need to learn to sit in silence. Alone. And just think. 

It's worked for the last few thousand years. Why ruin a good thing?

-Ryan