Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (3 page)

My evenings changed that week as well. In general, my nights usually consisted of a dinner and two or three stops afterward, at least two of which I would finalize over text once I was already out (if I was drinking, I would make plans to go to five and end up at one plus the Pisa Pizza around the corner from my apartment). But during my experiment, I made one plan, confirmed in advance over the phone, and once I was at my destination, I could devote all of my attention to being there instead of thinking about where I was heading next.

I know that I missed events and get-togethers because I wasn’t on e-mail, text, or Facebook, but I didn’t feel left out
because whatever I was doing, I was wholly immersed in it. I wasn’t distracted enough to care about what my
other
friends were up to that night. I was able to enjoy what I was doing rather than wondering whether the twenty other events or hangouts I knew were happening that night would have been more fun. And the best part was that I couldn’t see on social media all of the amazing things my friends were doing and how many of them were hanging out without me. Ignorance was bliss. The information overload was gone.

My romantic relationship fared better too. We weren’t relying on incessant texting, e-mailing and Gchatting—where messages lack tone and often lead to confusion and conflict, or worse, lend themselves to unexpected minute-or hour-long lags in conversation that can send you down a rabbit hole of panic—so we had far fewer misunderstandings.

I tend to “talk” a lot faster over text, which often means that much less thought and much more impulse seep into my responses and comments, and they don’t always read as humorous, especially if I take only a few seconds to compose them. I’m most clever and witty in the beginning of relationships because I take time and put real thought into my responses, whether they be over e-mail, text, or Gchat. As relationships progress, however, we all begin to care a little bit less about the impression we make because, well, the first has already been had. I take less time with what I say, and in texts that means jotting down the first thought
that comes into my head. My comments aren’t well crafted anymore. It’s just what happens when you’re texting one hundred to one hundred twenty times per day.

Believe it or not I have passable social skills in person and on the phone. But in texts, it seems that every single thought that comes into my head ends up on the virtual page (it’s much easier to type terrible things than to actually say them!). So now, with our smartphones and e-mail out of the equation, my girlfriend at the time and I did not argue once (okay, we argued
once
, but that’s pretty good!). And because we were communicating less frequently during the day, we were more excited to see each other and recount the stories from our respective days. Our nightly reunions seemed like an old television show, as if I were Desi in
I Love Lucy
coming home after work and exclaiming, “Honey, I’m home!” (Also, I recently found out that my mom once went on a date with Desi Arnaz Junior? She’s so much cooler than I am. But anyway, I digress.)

One day during my experiment, I was talking on my landline to a friend six years my junior who was studying for her foreign relations midterm at NYU. We were discussing one of President Nixon’s policies when she told me she had been absent the day her professor had covered it in class. She didn’t seem anxious about this at all, whereas I remembered how I would manically attempt to get every classmate to share their notes with me from any class I’d missed so I could be fully prepared and then would talk to the professor during office hours, just to be safe. Perhaps I was on the extremely meticulous end of the curve, but I
was still alarmed to hear my friend’s indifference. “I can just read about all of it online,” she told me. “I don’t need to be in class to find out what Nixon’s policies were.” She was certainly right, but I was also in the midst of an Internet detox, so I was acutely aware of the hazards of technology. What if she wasn’t getting her information from accurate and reliable sources? And what did that say about how we valued professors if we disregarded their crucial role in education? Certainly the man or woman teaching her course was better regarded in his field than Wikipedia. Wikipedia, of course, is notoriously unreliable. I once checked my own Wikipedia page to find out that I had died the week before. It was a very existential experience. And it marked the only time I modified or wrote anything on my Wikipedia profile—it seemed like bad luck to be dead on the Internet.

But while I scoffed at the notion of replacing a professor with a basic Google search, I quite commonly forewent a doctor’s visit in favor of trip to WebMD. One day during my experiment, I woke up with a very strange pain in my neck. On any other day I would have typed my symptoms into a search engine to find a name for my ailment (which more often than not would come up as leukemia, cancer, or AIDS). Now, as I was banned from the Internet, I had no choice but to do things the old-fashioned way: pick up the phone and call my physician. (I even had to call 411 first, as his number was stored in my iPhone.) After just a few minutes on the phone, Doc prescribed me some medication, and I felt better in a day or two. I was alarmed that the ease
and simplicity (and lack of expense) of conducting a Google search had often replaced the wise counsel and expertise of people who’d actually been trained to diagnose medical ailments. I could have saved myself a lot of anxiety about small pains that could metastasize into brain cancer if I’d bothered to pick up the phone and call an MD rather than typing “neck pain and cancer symptoms” into my browser. The Internet is a great equalizer. But it’s useful to remember that just because someone has a domain name doesn’t mean he or she is an actual, qualified expert who can tell you whether your life is basically over.

After my doctor cured me of my neck cancer, which was actually just a pinched nerve easily addressed by a few pills and a great massage masking itself as a physical therapy appointment, I settled in to work on an article. I was writing it by hand, on actual lined, loose-leaf paper—I didn’t trust myself to use my computer—and needed some information on a particular policy. Normally I might have just taken my question to the Web, but this time I called my friend who happened to be a government professor at Columbia. Having had a real conversation with a (reliable and credentialed) human being, I didn’t have to cross-check my facts against three different online sources because of the risk that some whack job had made something up on his website. And even better, I got to catch up with a friend and discuss something that we both found interesting. Imagine.

The entire week I found that I was exercising my mind much more frequently, thinking of answers to questions that ordinarily I would have found on my smartphone. I
also relied on my brain to do math—tipping a waiter, basic addition and subtraction—when in any other case I would have pulled out my phone for the same purpose—despite the fact that I’m actually really good at math.

Why should we retain any real information? The preamble to the Constitution? Look it up online! Multiplication tables? There’s an app for that! I had gotten so dependent on my iPhone and Gmail calendars to tell me when I had appointments that during the experiment I missed two meetings, four casting calls, two auditions, and one potential freelance assignment. This lapse in memory isn’t just because I’m getting older—it’s happening to most of us. Apparently, short-term memory loss is one of the many widespread effects that smartphones, social media, and the Internet have had on our minds. According to a
San Francisco Chronicle
article, our dependence on smartphones for even
“the simplest programs—such as spell-checker . . . are short-circuiting the brain’s ability to process details.” Some people have forgotten how to spell simple words because they know the program they are using will catch any errors. In college I was able to rely on my memory for important dates, but I can’t do that anymore. (At least I can still spell. I really am a great speller. Thank you, Brearley!)

After only one week unplugged, I realized what an incredibly high percentage of my exchanges with my friends were about reality television shows and reality stars, and was astounded that by missing just one week of television (about two hours per night), I was useless in at least half of the discussions that took place around me. My week
of detox happened right around the time that everyone was obsessed with watching YouTube videos about kittens. Remember that? What a terrible time in America. I sat down to dinner with a few coworkers and friends and was inundated with blow-by-blow accounts of the best kitten videos of the day. I’ll admit it, I am not a cat person (i.e., I hate cats), but even if I were, having been detached from YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, where everyone was sharing these videos, this still would have seemed like an outrageous dinner topic. I guess I had liked “Panda Sneeze” (the mom was so surprised!) and the grape crushers video (that painfully tragic but hilarious moan!), but even those YouTube videos I once blasted to everyone I knew seemed uninteresting now that I had begun to live my life as Thoreau had prescribed. Everyone also wanted to talk about Snooki (remember her? Man, she really fell off the map hard). At some point, I found myself unable to remember whether or not Snooki was a kitten or the
Jersey Shore
girl. That was probably a low (high?) point. Before reality television, I would discuss politics, film, and relationships with these same friends; we rarely had in-depth conversations about television. Sure, we talked about celebrities back then, but they didn’t dominate our interactions. After a few days off-line, our celeb-obsessed conversations unsettled me on so many levels; I knew my friends were smart and funny, but these discussions made us seem . . . dumb.

Beyond regaining the ability to read a book and rekindling an interest in something other than Miley’s Instagram
account, I suddenly felt less antsy. To be honest (TBH), I’m someone who has a relatively high level of anxiety. That’s my nature. And for me, the constant possibility of receiving news—good or bad—through the device in my pocket makes me feel even more worried, agitated, distracted, and uneasy. Even if I stopped going through my phone every few minutes and set a regular time to check for e-mail or texts, I would probably start getting anxious three hours before.

In any relationship—romantic, platonic, or work-related—I feel an anxious obligation to reply instantaneously to a message that the other person knows I’ve read. I’m frequently tortured by the “read receipt” function on iPhones. If the people I’m messaging have theirs turned on, I can see that they have read my message and, if so, when. I check my phone constantly to see if the person has sent any sort of reply or is typing me back or is just completely ignoring me. I can’t fully capture in words the agony of seeing that someone read your message fifteen to twenty minutes ago and has not yet written you back. But what really leads me down an ugly path is when I’ve texted someone and gotten no response, and then I see them post a status update about something like being stuck in traffic on Facebook or upload a photo of the pretty clouds in the sky to Instagram. Are you kidding me? What a virtual slap in the face. I get completely irrational. And I tend to confront—regardless of the potential for awkwardness or friction. Then it gets really bad. I text them saying that I know they’re near their phone because I’ve seen the Instagram upload. Once they
receive that, undoubtedly they don’t respond again . . . ever. Because I’ve just made myself look like an obsessed, desperate freak. (But I’m not! The Internet did this to me.)

My wife and I don’t fight frequently, but when we have an argument over text, it is much, much more frustrating than in person. Not only do read receipts make us stay glued to our phones, waiting to see when the other has read our most recent jarring jab, but we can also play games with it. I think she would admit doing this as well (if she doesn’t do this, then I’m really backing myself into a corner here) but once in a while, when I’m feeling especially frustrated, I will turn off read receipts on my phone. That way, I can read the midst-of-battle texts (and then the predictable “Where did you go?” and “Why aren’t you responding?”) without giving her the gratification of knowing that I have read and been affected by them. Disabling read receipts is just one of many ways you can manipulate someone with your smartphone. It’s terrible. It’s sick! It’s brilliant. It’s not the way I want to be treated, and it’s not the way I want to treat people. But in the heat of a fight, when you’re not quite the most amazing version of yourself, it’s easy to slip into these kinds of evil tactics.

Yep, my smartphone usually has a lot of control over me, but the week of my detox, I could take a walk outside and know that nothing could change my emotional state with the press of a button or blink of a light.

After the first painful days, I was able to live a more positive and deliberate life. However, that wasn’t true of my glued-to-their-phone-type friends. After alerting people in
my life that I would be without my iPhone for the next seven days, one of my friends sent me this e-mail:

WHY
do you think its ok to not warn me about this shit!?!
HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO FIND YOU??
Do you have a landline? Do you know Morse code? Can you send smoke signals from your balcony?? I’m in a confined space on the subway and this is not the setting I’d choose for the panic attack I’m currently experiencing. Please let me know.

Interestingly enough, this particular friend who was so desperate to stay in touch didn’t call my landline all week. Years later, she and I laughed about how I obsessively called her the entire week without a single call back from her. She lived on text and Facebook, and so despite the fact that she was so freaked out that I was “going away,” she still didn’t communicate with me in a meaningful way. She didn’t miss “me”; she missed “digital me.” Once I was off the digital grid, she kind of forgot I existed.

As long as you have a stream of conversations going on online or many people looking at your profiles and liking your posts, it’s easy to feel like you are connected and liked and loved. But all of those micro-communications about . . . nothing: What do they really amount to? What do they leave you with at the end of the day? You’re not building or deepening relationships. You’re just chattering.