Untethered

Untethered

So I mentioned last week that The Social Dilemma, Netflix’s documentary about the dangers of social media, inspired me to go one week with no phone. So part of the newsletter will be some takeaways after seven days “off the grid.” Here are the particulars of what I did:

  • Turned off my phone for the majority of the day (exception being to listen to podcasts on runs and while walking to and from the office)
  • Did not use a single form of social media
  • Checked text messages and other messaging apps on my iPad at night

My average screentime, subtracting two Zoom calls and some troubleshooting of my Apple Watch, was about ten minutes per day, compared with an average of one and a half hours the week before. About ten hours of time freed up in my schedule. So how did I feel about the change?

Overall, my biggest takeaway is that I didn’t feel like I was missing anything. A few times I reached for my phone while at my computer during work, but that habit disappeared after a day or so when I got used to the idea that it was turned off. A few times I felt bad knowing I was probably leaving someone hanging in a conversation I had started the night before. And there were times when I fought the urge to randomly google something I had forgotten. But for the most part, it was not a huge change.

Some other takeaways:

  • I was much more focused reading at night with nothing to divide my attention
  • I felt more at ease on walks or waiting to meet up with people. No phone means no random stimuli pulling me away from the moment
  • For the most part (sorry friends), text conversations are not particularly substantive, and so eliminating them did not result in the feeling of loss or FOMO I had expected. But it would be difficult to stay connected with friends and family without responding to messages throughout the day

I imagine many of the older adults on this distribution are reading this thinking, “yea, this is how I live my life.” And for most people who got their first cell phones as adults, I’m sure that’s mostly the case. You leave your phone on the kitchen counter, or by the front door, and you use it to communicate with people when needed. You’re not using it for news, videos, texts, calls, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, health tracking, sports, email, work email, music, podcasts, banking, photos, books, games, research, etc… And you’re probably not using it for the more than three hours the average user does (a number that is much higher for younger generations).

And that’s the biggest lesson I’ve learned from this week. There is a very healthy relationship with our devices, sitting just beyond where we are now. It just takes some experimenting and discipline to discover what that is. For me, I am fully off of social media, full stop. I had gotten my usage down to a few minutes per day (app limits are useful for that), but even that time just seems wasted.

Beyond that, I’ve cleared out a majority of my apps. Only the things I need to stay in contact with friends, family and work – and listen to podcasts of course. I have also shut off the majority of notifications. No popups from anything that doesn’t need to be answered in the moment, which means everything but texts and calls are out – they’ll just have to wait until I choose to look at them.

Election Mania

At the risk of alienating some of my readers, I will say this: I don’t think that democracy is at stake come Election Day in November.

I read a reassuring editorial in the WSJ this week titled Trump Stokes the Transition Panic, in which the Editorial Board says this:

The notion that Mr. Trump could stop a peaceful transition of power is preposterous. On Jan. 20 his term legally ends. If Congress hasn’t certified an Electoral College winner on that date—or settled a tie— Nancy Pelosi will be President if she is still House Speaker… As for the notion that Mr. Trump could execute a coup—he’s been warring with his own security agencies as long as he’s been in office. He’s been denounced by dozens of retired generals…

This is reassuring, not because the WSJ is the definitive voice on electoral speculation, but because it’s a sign that the media is willing to entertain a narrative counter to the one running wild in the news today, that Trump is trying to steal the election.

The Washington Post homepage on Friday had five articles about a contested election. The New York Times had six. The Atlantic had only one, but it was a November cover story that was pre-released because the paper’s editor found the “authoritative and chilling” piece critically important enough to publish now.

Nothing being discussed at the moment is particularly outlandish. This will undoubtedly be a close election, and the pandemic has complicated our ability to count votes. Trump wants to win the election, so he is clearly hopeful that circumstances will lead to lower turnout among Democrats, sloppy counting of mail-in votes, etc… The principles of our democracy are certainly being tested. But so are the principles of our economy – can you shut everything down for over six months? – and our society – do cities still make sense anymore? Do universities?

I’m alarmed by what I see from the media for two reasons. One, they have turned a theory into an outcome, plain and simple. It is now common among multiple circles of my friends and family to discuss the likelihood of a contested election, and the likelihood that a victory will be stolen from Biden by Trump. No one seems to be talking about Biden’s lead in the polls, or the fact that democratic values remain very popular among all of us:

So a fringe theory is becoming more mainstream – so what?

The problem is that we only have so much space in our heads for thought about much of anything at all. And it’s all being taken up by this crap! Take a minute, you Biden supporters out there, and ask yourself how much time you’ve spent over the last month thinking about a Biden presidency. Telling your friends about it. Theorizing about the good that will come from it.

Not much coming to mind, is there? And that’s a problem, across the board, because while we go searching on Vox for the obscure history of the filibuster, and judicial nominations, and election fraud, we completely ignore the once-in-four-years opportunity of the presidential election itself.

And so the second reason this hysteria worries me is because it’s a sign that we – and by we I mean liberal voters, the mainstream media, the Democratic Party, the upper class, the highly-educated – are headed straight into a second 2016. Only this time, instead of shock and anger over how wrong the narrative is, we’ll find every way we can to prove the narrative was right.

We’ll determine that Biden could not possibly have lost an election in which no supporters demonstrated an ounce of support or interest in him (compared to the MAGA parties and Trump flags raging across much of the country). We’ll say that all the small clues leading up to the election are hard evidence that the entire Republican Party colluded to subvert democracy, and ignore the fact that Republicans continue to attract a large swath of the country whose beliefs the Democratic Party openly derides – the right to life (some Gallup polling data) and religious values being two key ones.

And, worst of all, we’ll ignore the reality that there is another narrative being pushed by their media, in places like Fox News and Breitbart where we wouldn’t dare go ourselves: that Democrats are destroying America, that they’re making the country more dangerous, that they’re throwing out our common values, and that they are more antagonistic than ever towards specific races (white) and genders (male).

And guess what? Just like our coveted news outlets, Fox News and Breitbart have evidence they can point to that supports their views. They have videos of cities around the country burning throughout the summer. They have statistics that show rising crime in those cities, and examples of police officers being shot for the simple fact of being an officer, a “pig.” Their narrative is just as compelling, and while it may be easy for us to dismiss as wrong, it’s every bit as defensible with the imagery and reporting available to us today. The America after four years of Biden looks just as scary to much of the country as the America after another four years of Trump looks to us.

So do not feed either of these narratives. Have some respect for your fellow countrymen and consider that it might be harder to steal a nation than you think. It requires that hundreds of millions of people go along with it. It requires career generals, law enforcement and our dreaded politicians to allow the bedrock principles of the country they serve to be tossed aside. It may, in fact, require someone more competent and liked than Donald Trump to pull the whole thing off.

Instead, expend the same amount of energy preparing for what might come in November. The Stoics called this premeditatio malorum, or premeditation of evils. If Trump is your version of evil, then it goes like this: What will I do if Trump wins reelection in November?

The first thing may be to think about how that could occur. Trump may very well win reelection with slightly less than 50% of the popular vote, as he did in 2016 and as Bush did in 2000. That would reflect the reality that, while he still remains wildly unpopular in much of the country, the left did very little to convince the rest of the people out there that his vision was the wrong one for America. So we look to the next four years and determine what can be done.

The second may be to reevaluate how you plan to spend this second term of his. Maybe you felt like an inactive bystander during the last four years, and you decide the next four call for something bigger. So you visualize yourself becoming an activist. Maybe the last four years were really toxic for you, as you obsessed over every little thing that Trump did, and you vow to live this time around with a little more focus on your own sphere, your own nexus of control.

In this way, you prepare yourself for a Trump victory, which is still a fairly likely outcome. You aren’t taken by surprise if it happens, and you don’t feel like you narrowly skirted death if he loses. You take it for what it is, which is a presidential election that happens every four years. Remember that we have so much to be thankful for in this country of ours, regardless of our president.

If you disagree with what I’ve just said, this is a very effective and compelling piece from Andrew Sullivan arguing the opposite – that democracy is very much at stake come November.

One More Thing In the Judiciary

For those who are interested, two pieces I enjoyed, from two writers I admire, on the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court:

Will Democrats Fail the Amy Coney Barrett Test? – Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic

The Truth About People of Praise – Peggy Noonan, WSJ

As always, particularly when a newsletter is this politically charged, I welcome your thoughts and perspectives.

– Emmett

Recent Posts:

Let Me Tell You About Tom – (Fiction) An all-powerful being comes under the control of a once-in-a-millennia master

What I’m Reading:

The American Male at Age Ten – Susan Orlean, Esquire, 1992
At Danny’s, you will find pizza, candy, Nintendo, and very few girls. To a ten-year-old boy, it is the most beautiful place in the world.

Unhappy Meals – Michael Pollan, New York Times Magazine, 2007
“Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food ; stay away from these.

The Place to Disappear – Susan Orlean, The New Yorker, 2000
“It was as if the strangeness of where they were and what they were doing were absolutely ordinary: as if there were no large, smelly drunk sprawled in front of them, as if it were quite unexceptional to be three Scottish girls drinking Australian beer in Thailand on their way to Laos, and as if the world were the size of a peanut – something as compact as that, something that easy to pick up, shell, consume, as long as you were young and sturdy and brave.”

What I’m Listening To:

Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories – The Tim Ferriss Show, 2015
To me, America is the most incredible civilization that has ever been
created. Hundreds of years from now, people will look at this
place and marvel. There’s the bitch and the complaint aisle, where
everybody bitches and complains about every single thing. But the
one thing about America that is incredible is the evolution of
freedom, the change.”

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