Offline Observations: some things I’ve noticed from trying to live an intentional and offline life
Right before the new year, I wrote a piece about reclaiming our humanity. To date, that’s probably been my favorite thing I’ve written. It helped me crystalize what feels so odd about living in today’s world and figure out how I want to live. Since then I’ve been trying to live up to what I wrote, and trying to take control back from the algorithms. A lot of it has been just slowing down and trying to do more “analog” things. I’ve tried to actually engage with the world and what I’m doing without letting everything be mediated through a screen. Of course, it hasn’t been perfect and I’d be lying if I said I was some monk who found nirvana. Living a more intentional, slower, and offline life is hard. It’s not just social media algorithms that prevent us from connecting with our humanity and our lives. The way our systems have been designed and optimized has put us all on auto-pilot trying to keep up. Unfortunately, If you don’t want to live in a monastery you have to be somewhat plugged in, but that’s not to say there aren’t ways to escape the algorithms and unplug from time to time. This piece may be long and you may just skim over it but I wanted to share what I’ve noticed in trying to connect with the way humans are supposed to live.
What spurred me to try to live differently in the first place was that I didn’t feel like I was doing things organically and that everything was being decided by algorithms. So my first mission was to do a social media detox. I’ll admit that social media really does have an iron grip on us and there’s a lot of FOMO in trying to stay off it. That FOMO isn’t just with friends but with announcements of things like concerts or events, like I mentioned our world really does revolve around these systems now. I made it two months and felt clearer than I had in a long time. I felt like days meant more. There wasn’t the constant impulse to check whatever the algorithm wanted to show me next, and the pull to keep scrolling. In the end, though I chose to get back on. Which in some ways felt like a failure, but I still had a new perspective. I chose to go back so that I could better connect with the people I care about. After returning, I’ve noticed the way I use social media has changed, now it’s more like the original idea of a social network. I set alerts for posts from people and organizations I care about so I don’t have to rely on an algorithm choosing what I see. I’m also much more cognizant of my time on them and notice the more I use them the worse I feel. Some days are better than others though, and sometimes I do fall into the algorithms vortex. That’s ok though because that is how these platforms are designed. I can’t fault myself too much for that, and I just have to remember my intentions.
Areas like music and entertainment have been a little harder, algorithms are baked into all of those products as the core experience now. Yet there are ways to get back a little freedom. We can create our own daily mix by going through our libraries and creating our own queue for the day. Sure it takes some time but it feels more rewarding. We can also seek out real people to get new recommendations whether it be friends or through music publications. The same goes for anything we enjoy. This is what I meant by reclaiming our humanity. It’s about choosing to actually engage with the world and making conscious choices about what we do in it. It goes deeper than just consuming things though. Part of the reason we all feel so lost is that we’ve lost our agency. We’ve turned over so much of our lives to the algorithms that we don’t even know what we like to actually do anymore. That was tough for me as it most likely is for you. I still don’t have all the answers there, but I know that you start finding them once you choose to consistently get away from the algorithms. We should spend time out in the real world, going to events, meeting people, and actively doing things we enjoy instead of just having everything spoon-fed to us by lines of code. By doing that we can actually find ourselves and get in touch with our lives instead of just touching screens.
While my original goal was to unplug from the algorithms, I became more aware of how other parts of our lives have become impacted by the design of technology. Work is an area where we see digital distractions amplified. It’s all ever-present and online, notifications, requests, and updates are inescapable. We run from one task to the next with no time for true deep work. “Breaks” are breaks from active typing or meetings, but not breaks from the onslaught of information hitting the inbox. The pandemic accelerated things to a point where if you work a professional job you have to plug into this matrix. Though we do have choices we can make to align things more with our values. We can go for walks to break up the day. If we have some downtime we can choose to not fill it with more screen time. That’s tough but it’s so much more rewarding to do something real rather than just endlessly switching between typing emails and doomscrolling. We can cook real meals. We can set “working hours” that mute notifications. There has to be something that works for you. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learned, nothing will ever be perfect but by slowing down and having the intention to live a certain way you can notice what’s not working and try to find things that help move you in the right direction. We may not be able to escape the system but we can set boundaries around it so it doesn’t consume us.
Our relationships for better or worse also live online. We stay in touch through group chats and DMs, with algorithms dictating a lot of what ends up getting shared. We still talk about other things and connect but despite being tapped in so “closely”, we don’t quite feel the same pressure to have more meaningful interactions. We’re still “hearing” and “talking” with people consistently so it makes it easier to go longer periods of time without truly connecting with them. Real human connection isn’t done through fleeting texts and emojis, it’s done through meaningful conversations and experiences together. Things that are hard to replicate in the mediums we have today. So that’s what I’ve tried to curate with the people in my life. I still use technology to help plan things, but I don’t view it as a substitute for real connection. The same thing goes for dating, online dating is not a substitute for meeting people in the real world. I wrote a lot about this in a previous piece, so if you want to go in-depth I’d dig that up. The short of it though is that letting algorithms choose our partners is not a vibe. Real connection involves going out in the world doing things and sharing lives together, whether it’s socially or romantically. We also need to put our phones down so we can truly give attention to not only the people we’re with but ourselves in those moments. That’s what makes us truly able to live in that experience and feel more alive. It’s also what makes those moments mean more.
The last thing I’ll mention is that because all of our systems are so fast-paced and constantly connected, everyone is ludicrously busy. We have to be busy or else we feel like we’re not doing enough. We feel like we’ll fall behind somehow, or worse we’ll have to sit still and just be. So in order to bury that fear we try to fill our calendars with as much as possible. Just like algorithms and other communication systems, we’ve tried to optimize our lives. The thing about life though is that it’s not meant to be micro-managed or optimized. I want to be clear that there’s a difference between wanting to do a lot of things in your life and this micro-management. I have a lot of friends who truly are busy because they’re out there living a full life. A fulfilling life is filled with lots of experiences and pursuing different things. We shouldn’t just sit still doing nothing all day. There are also certain things like concerts, weddings, and vacations that need to be planned, but what are we doing if we can’t improvise life? There’s value in slowing down a bit so that we can actually focus on all the things we’re doing and get more out of them. If every minute is booked and we’re trying to be busy just for the sake of being busy, we lose the value of life which is experience. Experience not just with yourself but those that you care about. You can’t experience something if you’re on auto-pilot and moving from one calendar block to the next. Life is not a social media feed either. I get having obligations, working hard, and wanting to stay organized, but this never-ending drive is preventing us from experiencing the organic nature of life, experiences, and relationships.
Balance and living organically were missing from my life for a long time. Due to growing up in an adverse situation, I was keenly focused on not falling behind and doing everything I could to stay ahead. I was constantly trying to make sure I was being productive, and in that, I couldn’t find myself. In the moments in between that productivity, I would just doomscroll trying to take in as much as possible. I let the algorithms decide what an “optimal” life looked like without ever letting myself just embrace the moment and my life. Despite being super “productive” I wasn’t really living. In fact, I was just numbing myself to how I was actually feeling. I had to do a lot of work to get past that and get to the point where I could be more aware of how I wanted to live and disconnect from the algorithms. After that period and making the choice to slow things down, unplug a bit, and have intentions around connecting with my humanity, I feel more alive than ever. Sure some things aren’t for everyone, like once a week taking a two-hour-long walk without headphones, but those are the moments where we realize what being human is about. It’s about hearing the birds sing, talking to people you meet along the way, petting a dog, or just feeling the wind on your face. That’s what we’ve been robbed of by letting algorithms choose where our attention goes. With all of these distractions around us, we forgot what it meant to be alive. We forgot what’s it like to be in the world and actually do things in it. I’ve gotten back in touch with it and felt the difference. While it seems like I’m on a different road than some of my friends and peers, my relationships with them have only gotten stronger because I’m no longer distracted. I’m not perfect. I still go online to read the news, listen to podcasts, and get stuck on social media from time to time, but being offline isn’t really about being offline. That may sound corny or paradoxical, but being offline to me is more about having the intention to live a certain way. It’s about being aware and truly engaging with the world. It’s about getting off our screens and leaning into the human experience. It’s not the popular choice, but it makes life a whole lot more interesting and meaningful.