I’ve just returned from two weeks walking in the bush and fishing on the coast. I told family members I’d be home in a couple of weeks; I needed a holiday – a real break away – so I took my fishing rod and some tackle, a bit of food, shelter, warm clothes and walked into the wilderness for two weeks.
I left my mobile phone at home. It was like life before cellphones. Remember? We did actually cope well without them, but could I now?
I did it to prove to myself that our lives are too complex, driven by that stupid device we all grip onto day and night like our lives depend on it. I’m not a fan of the mobile phone because, to me, it represents the world being able to reach you nearly anywhere, anytime.
Sometimes you just don’t want to hear from the tax department, the debt collectors, your partner, your employer, the bank, the council, the government, or whoever else can always get you when really you just want to be left alone. Unless someone close to you dies, is there really anything that can’t wait?
I walked into the bush to celebrate being seven years clean of an online addiction that was ruining my life and my relationships with family and friends while fast turning me into a basket case. It controlled all aspects of my life and I found myself in online rows with anonymous Twitter handles, sending long emails to people who may not even have existed.
One of the last straws was spending three hours on one email to someone I didn’t know and turning up late to pick up my son from school. Then there were times when I was brutally abused and effectively kneecapped online. I won’t repeat any of it because it was vile, unpublishable and in breach of the standards of any decent media organisation.
The internet, something that once had such promise for uniting the world, and social media, have descended into a vast well of bile, overseen by companies that avoid not just tax but any form of courage or responsibility towards their fellow human beings.
Work means I’m still on social media, but I employ someone – and she’s a rock star – to help me deal with it. Even I admit that in this day and age, social media cannot be ignored. You might say it’s the ultimate victor, especially as traditional news media outlets close their doors and lay off hundreds of talented people.
Maybe that’s democracy at work. After all, people have been voting for it for years now but not so much with their feet, as their fingers. Our addiction to the lazy browsing of social media platforms has simply stoked the demand and profits of these big players who, ultimately, pinch, steal, lift, take for free the best content from other people and organisations who invested handsomely to create it.
Because we’re so addicted, the technology giants know everything about you and follow and feel your every move, even down to how hard and fast your thumb and fingers are moving across your device.
That addiction to scrolling now dominates households, relationships, workplaces, the bus, the train, the car, the dinner table. Yes, we may be better informed, but it’s information overload propelled by an addiction up there with other nasties like cigarettes, drugs, sugar, and booze.
So, that’s partly why I took two weeks off. I also wanted to stretch myself, solve a few problems on my own rather than reaching for the phone to find the answer.
I caught bait, which meant I caught fish. I used the guts as berley and repeated the process. I could see the rocks metres under the water and caught snapper, kahawai and a trevally 20 metres off the beach. The food was in front of me, rather than “created” in the aisles of supermarket giants that, once again, have us in an ever-tightening economic headlock.
At night, with little light, the options were limited so, as I drifted in and out of sleep, I kept reflecting on how this simple life is now so hard to find. Simple, but not easy. Wilderness survival might be paradise to me, but it’s a full-time job all of its own.
I ended up using the stars, the moon, and the sun to guess the time and the tides. It was wild guess work, but a setting sun pretty much tells you it’s close to 8pm and the rising sun told me it was around 7.30, give or take.
Going offline gave me a lot of down time to think, contemplate and conclude, once again, that we’ve got it wrong. My two-week tap-out confirmed to me that our society is designed around a mad rat race.
We’re all too busy looking down into the digital abyss, eyes glazed over. Just because you’re on Instagram or TikTok doesn’t mean you’re connecting, on a daily basis, with an actual human being. Can you believe some will be on their phones for hours at a stretch. Imagine that time in the gym or out meeting people? The opportunity cost is real.
So, I didn’t miss my phone. I did miss a couple of people, though, and I guess I wondered and worried about them, what they were up to and whether they were okay. But deep down, I knew they would be, even if I couldn’t check on them.
Stuff that I might ordinarily worry about, and be preoccupied with, drifted away. We might think the world revolves around us, and our daily concerns, because social media creates mini vacuums that suck us in, so we think what we see is the only thing that matters and is the only thing everyone else on Earth is concerned about.
It also made me realise how damn lazy we’ve all got. I turned 50 recently and my best mate forgot! He texted me a few days later, apology and birthday wish wrapped up in one. I predicted this might happen, partly because I don’t do social media so there was no digital reminder sent to him that it was my birthday. Like I say, everyone is busy and entrenched in their own lives, egos and digital devices. Stuff we used to know we no longer remember because if a digital device doesn’t remind us, we’re likely to forget.
It turns out during my self-imposed digital detox I missed … nothing, really. Our dopey government voted for a Labour Party bill and said they can live with it, the Crusaders were still losing, and the Warriors had won two (it’s early in the season, things can change). My son’s rugby team played a warmup game, but he was away with his mum.
I didn’t know anything about things that I might have got uptight about or reacted to so, as they say, what you don’t know can’t hurt you. My heart rate and blood pressure dropped (I know, because I checked). I lost weight. I walked.
When I got back and turned on my phone, I was greeted by a string of messages regarding a carpark that I rent where I live. While I was away, action had been taken to try to deal with the matter, but it wasn’t good enough for the person who left ever more angry, attacking messages on my phone.
So, I replied then deleted the messages, the number, and the aggro. After having such a great time, I didn’t need it and I wish this person could start to think about living – really living – and deleting from life the things that we simply don’t need.
The fortnight away confirmed for me that we have too much, we want too much, we’ve made our lives super complex, and we continue to make things harder by designing our communities and country in such a way as to reduce our quality of life and standards of living.
Not only are we hustling to get by, but we’ve also lost our neighbourly spirit and, along with it, our empathy for others.
