Pop Philosophy

Getting Good at Going off the Grid

I just got back from going off the grid. No, I'm not a black ops agent like Jason Bourne, nor am I fulfilling a Matrix-inspired fantasy. I’m not trying to evade the NSA either. I actually was recently on holiday, like most of you. But these days, my vacations are increasingly about completely disconnecting.  I need a break from the constant grind of an always-buzzing smart phone, an endless email inbox and a fragmented attention span.  

Sound familiar? That’s because I just described the daily reality for a lot of knowledge workers - as well as almost everyone living in the Internet age. We live in a swirl of limitless distraction, but that is not a new story. The real insight I got from my holiday from hyperlinks is two fold: that we need digital down time more than ever, and that reaching that nirvana state takes skill, practice and planning. Simply put, we should force ourselves to disconnect regularly, but realize that it takes time to get good at it.

For 10 glorious days, I decamped to a cottage and left behind TV, txt messages and Twitter. I swapped car horns and cable news for loons and lakes.

It was peaceful and incredibly pleasant ... but not right away. It was hard to take it easy. I struggled to turn off the digital drug dealer that is my iPhone (and keep it off).

I had to consciously slow my heartbeat to synchronize with my simpler surroundings. It took almost a week for me to stop looking for WiFi in the woods, and what I learned is that having a restorative holiday requires both art and science. Actually, you might even consider it a skill.

What do you need to do? It involves 3 phases as I see it.

First, you have to recover. I dialed down my media intake gradually, first limiting and then swapping out activities like web and channel surfing for longer-form reading (ideally, print magazines and books, sans hyperlinks!) and even writing. Just as the body needs a cool down after a vigorous workout, your mind has to power down as well.

Next is the reset phase. My sense is that people want a Pattern Interrupt when they go on vacation; the whole point is to break away from the day to day. So since my life and work involves a lot of emailing (a recent study estimates that the average knowledge worker spends 28% of their work week on email alone), screen time and juggling other distractions, I tried to break that habit (if even for ‘just’ the holiday).

Finally, use this newfound focus and discretionary time to reflect. Why is it that most people don't get serious work done at “work”, and have to leave the office to do that kind of intellectual heavy lifting? Our lives have too many interruptions.

We can’t attend to 'the important but not urgent' when 'the urgent but not necessarily important' is always appearing in the form of a new email, txt message or tweet.

I used this opportunity to think BIG PICTURE. You might ask yourself the tough questions - the ones that you’ve been meaning too but haven’t yet. You know which ones I’m talking about.

I believe the future of leisure - if not luxury - is escape from ubiquitous connectivity.

People are going to pay big money to get out of mobile phone range in the near future. I predict that “No Signal” will be as common a sign of our generation’s vacations as “No Vacancy” was to our parents’.

Canadian author Michael Harris’ new book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection, makes an eloquent plea for people to take "Analog Augusts”. He argues that doing so will “break the spell” the web has on us. I couldn’t agree more.

So as the summer comes to an end and you contemplate future holidays, consider going off the grid next time. I guarantee that if you do, the break will be both restorative and, in the long run, more productive. 

The Great Disruption

What the global economy, Blockbuster, going solo, hook-up culture, asynchronous intimacy, the Apple Maps app and ‘Homeland’ all have in common

We live in a world of broken models, columnist Robert Samuelson noted recently in The Washington Post. In his essay, Samuelson speculated that “to understand why world leaders can’t easily fix the sputtering global economy, you have to realize that the economic models on which the United States, Europe and China relied are collapsing.”

Samuelson confined his analysis to macroeconomics, but he's actually on to something. We find ourselves in a world turned upside down.  The Greatest Generation had to survive the Great Depression; our generation, I believe, is being asked to navigate (rather than survive) the Great Disruption.

Let me explain. It's now conventional wisdom that companies from Blockbuster (RIP) to Borders (RIP) have seen their traditional business models disrupted. In the case of the former, their video stores were challenged by the advent of DVDs by mail, courtesy of Netflix. In the case of the latter, the transition from retail to e-commerce (and, soon, e-books) pioneered by Amazon hastened Borders’ demise. Even 'new' companies like BlackBerry (RIP soon?) are seeing their once mighty technological advantages being leapfrogged in the space of months, not years. It’s often said that “a week is a lifetime in politics.” This is increasingly true about business. For almost every company, the world as they knew it no longer exists.

But what if that described the rest of “life”, as well? What if our 'living models' are being disrupted today as much as business models have been?  This is exactly what's happening, only it may not be as obvious.

From the way we live, date, mate and marry, traditional pillars of society are being transformed.

Taken together, it seems that we’re living through a revolution just slow enough to slip by almost unnoticed, but significant enough to upend our world.

Did you know that for the first time ever, a majority of Americans (51%) today are single? How about that 1 in 3 of Americans live alone? That number, by the way, rises to half the population in cities like Washington, DC and Manhattan. It’s not just that people are increasingly “going solo” or are putting off getting married; in some cases they are postponing that milestone - forever. Holy matrimony is not happening as often as it used to. When weddings do occur, they’re no longer necessarily between a man and a woman ( that's a good thing), and the unions are not lasting as long as they used to (that’s a bad thing).

Even the road to marriages and baby carriages has changed. These days, finding that partner - let alone a future husband or wife - is more complicated than ever before. Courtship, if it does exist, is far removed from the Ritchie Cunningham era of dates, dances, making out and going out.

Today, young people are txting instead of talking, sexting instead of playing spin the bottle, surfing internet porn instead of sneaking peeks at Playboy magazines.

This is all part of Hookup Culture. But when did it become A-OK for girls to announce that they were DTF? We live in a brave new world of what I call ‘asynchronous intimacy’. People used to get know each other, then have sex. Today, it’s not an exaggeration to say that they have sex, and then get to know each other (if at all). 

Time-honored social norms have been abandoned. Some of this is progress, to be sure; but even desirable advances represent a double-edged sword. For instance, there are more women than men attending college now, and women are increasingly getting ahead in the classroom, the boardroom and the living room. The flip side is that soon it will be difficult for a university degree-holding female to find a similarly-educated boyfriend, or a husband who earns as much as she does. 

There are what economists call externalities to all of these developments - broader social costs that we rarely factor in when contemplating the full impact of such changes.

More people living alone means greater self-fulfillment, but probably an increased risk of social isolation as well. The notion of what constitutes a couple is simultaneously being defined down (hook-ups and “friends with benefits”) as well as more expansively (same-sex unions, common law partnerships). Girls feel more free to hook up, but it’s eliminated the requirement for guys to court and emotionally connect with them first. Women are moving up in the world, but they’re going to be forced to “date down”.

More generally, people don't have the benefit of "social GPS" anymore. They don't know where they are, they don’t know where they stand, and they don’t have directions to where they’re going. It’s as if all of  us are iPhones 5s, and we just downloaded the terrible Apple Maps App: the Statue of Liberty simply isn’t where it’s supposed to be.

I'm a student of history. When it comes to change, I believe that much of what we say is du jamais vu has, in fact, been seen before. Globalization is one such ‘new’ development … that's been happening since Jean-Baptiste Colbert (no relation to Stephen) and the emergence of 17th century mercantilism. But what is new is the pace of change. Cars replaced horses over multiple decades; TV overtook radio in 15 years; Facebook went from a way for a nerd to meet girls to a 100 billion dollar company (at its IPO, at least) with one billion users in just 7.

How much have things changed in those last 7 years?

As Thomas Friedman remarked, in 2005 "when I wrote The World is Flat,  Skype was a typo, Twitter was a sound, 4G was a parking spot." Today’s ascendant generation - the Millennials - has never known a world without YouTube, PVRs or iPhones.  

Not only is every aspect of life getting fstr, the cycle times are getting shorter. We have less time to adjust to these deep and wide changes in society, and they're coming at us like a Twitter feed.

This is not a stable state, nor an end one necessarily. The old rules are out of date, but new ones haven’t been set yet. So what can we do in the face of this Great Disruption? First, grab tight and hold on.  Then, just as businesses had to reinvent themselves to adapt to new economic models, we need to rebuild our social models to adjust to the new realities. 

On one level, we have to become comfortable being uncomfortable.

We have to make peace with being a little lost. But we also have to make sense of this emerging landscape, and develop new (or old) ways to navigate it for the long term. This might mean moving forward, by redefining how society looks at single people and the state regards civil unions. It might also require, however, looking backward - and returning to a bygone era where people met, dated and mated in that order.

We can’t be trapped by the tyranny of “progress”, nor by the orthodoxy of the past. Perhaps most importantly, we can’t simply sit still. “Life” is being disrupted before our eyes, and all of us, individually and collectively, risk the fates of Blockbuster and Borders - of being left behind. 

I’m not arguing for a return to a “Happy Days” world, or an acceptance of a “Girls” one for that matter, either. But I do think that we need to snap back to a more thought-out and sustainable posture vis a vis this Great Disruption. My new favorite TV show is “Homeland”. It’s a taut psychological thriller that spins dark webs of deceit amid double-clutch plot twists and revelations. The two central characters - CIA agent Carrie Matheson and ex-POW and possible Manchurian Candidate Nicholas Brody - live in a lie-within-a-lie world. The show’s central appeal is the thoroughly disorienting sensation of not knowing what is real, who is the good character and the bad, and how both Carrie and Brody periodically lose and regain control of their lives.

In a sense, we all now live in a “Homeland” world - not one in which a Congressman may be a Muslim mole, or the CIA agent pursuing him may be mad - but one where good and bad, progress and regress, control and chaos all sit side by side.

Welcome to the Great Disruption.