Hack the algorithms. They favor outrage.

The pandemic. The social injustice. Corrupt systems. Wildfires. The elections. It seems there is no escape from the maddening turmoil and the inanity of human folly refusing reason. “Why won’t you do the simple thing so I don’t have to suffer?!” you want to scream at your computer. Our screens serve us a view of the world that is scary and hopeless, telling us most people are selfish shits that would put us in harm’s way to get a second helping of pie. But is that true?

Once upon a time, the news was something the vast majority of us consumed via our local newspaper and a 30 minute broadcast on one of three networks. As such, we had a shared, objective view—although imperfect—of our community and nation. Then came the internet and as its availability and influence grew, it eroded both the prominence of name-brand journalism and news outlets’ ability to stand firm with non-sensational news.

Slowly but surely, our resistance to news-all-the-time and stories/sources that just confirm our own world views has eroded. By our own behavior (abandonment of paid subscriptions and faithful viewership as well as feeding the beast of clickbait), we have created demand in the marketplace for… how do I put this politely? Bullshit.

We may say that we want unbiased and less sensational journalism but do we put up then shut up? We do not. Instead, we click and share the endless parade of crap. We follow and retweet the National Enquirers of our time: TMZ, Trump, VoteProgressBlueEtc, and friends that share the information equivalent of crappy fast food. And it’s not just making our brains and souls unhealthy. It’s rotting our society—and not just in the polite “sense of propriety” sort of way. It’s tearing us apart.

What do we do about it? Well, it’s not going to be easy. Each of us will need to start how we can, where we can to filter out the noise. The good news is that it is relatively simple and mostly free to do. And it has the dual benefits of improving your outlook and cumulatively telling publishers/platforms that you don’t want systems nor content designed to anger you.

This blog is filled with posts on how you might take steps to have your devices and platforms intrude on your life less, but here are some more granular ways to adjust your settings before you are ready to get off of them entirely.

• Turn off customized/personalized ads on each social network you use. This will clear out boosted posts and ads from showing you more of the views you already have.
• Start your day with a traditional, legacy print-based news source—ideally your local newspaper (which truly needs and deserves your modest subscription fee) but you can also get digital newspapers through your library membership, ResistBot, academic credentials, or just go to Rueters or Associated Press websites. Then end your day with a little offline reading.
• Hide/mute your connections that share a bunch of news and/or stop seeing links from the sources they share. You are probably unknowingly forcing lots of opinions based on a relatively small amount of “friends” who over share news, screenshots, memes and other outrageous content meant to confirm what you think: people are nuts.
• When something makes you angry, take a few minutes to see if it is even true by looking it up online. If it is not true, let the person that posted it know and report the link as false information where you saw it.
• Hack your feed with benevolent and fact-based content by following accounts that have soothing posts like about nature or poetry or history, a “good news” source you enjoy like UpWorthy, an expert that talks about why people act they way they do or how we can—ourselves—adjust our thinking, etc.
• Talk to actual people and get directly involved in other ways to be a part of the solution and to verify that people are good. This is tricky with the pandemic precautions, but you can call/Zoom someone you care about, offer your own expertise or mentorship to a person or organization that needs it, sit across the yard from a neighbor, or just take a walk/bike ride/drive and actively look for simple moments of possibility and beauty vs. trying to spot people without masks. You might be surprised with how it changes your feelings about the world.

I invite you to do at least one of these things today and see what it does for you. Regaining control over the flood of mis/information will look different for each person, but will inevitably improve your sense of wellbeing. After all, if you just give yourself over to the algorithms, you will have nobody else to blame when you can’t find your way out of it.

See also: Excellent series by The New York Times on their podcast “The Daily” called “Rabbit Hole“. Listen to the whole damned thing.

Is this thing on? Ten years of The Off Switch

September of 2010, I had hit a wall. Smart phones, email, and social media were taking over my psyche and I could see no end in sight. So, I pulled the plug. The Off Switch blog here, was a sort of public diary on why and how I would curb the role of technology in my life. Ten years and 70 posts later, I wanted to take a moment to look back on how the experiment has changed me and what work I still have to do.

After spending the morning reading through every post on this blog—some of it self-indulgent and some of it still important personally—I am stricken mainly with how much is the same. I chuckled at some of the technology references (Gowalla, anyone?) certainly, and some of the minutiae is laughable, but what’s unchanged is that this idea that one benefits from being mindful and even vigilant about technology still has great power and utility.

Ten years on, most of my habits are simply the norm for me now. I don’t miss the things I no longer use but at the same time, I still have to be careful not to slip toward the beeps and buzzes invading every moment… because that’s what they are designed to do. The development of hardware and software has not relented and in the past decade, it seems like the march towards omnipresence has accelerated. Alexa, Siri, smart TVs, doorbells with cameras, and a whole host of devices and internet services continue to flood into our lives but I continue to resist.

Am I better for it? I believe so. Especially as this pandemic has raged on and so many friends are consumed by social networks and clinging to their phones and computers, I have clung to my sense of balance. Even before all this, I have re-learned to live without it and created work-arounds so that I can have many moments of peace built into my days. Like a lot of people, I find myself returning to things like walks, baking, music, and writing—and I do as much of that without technology as I can.

But as I’ve said before, this is a discipline I pursue ever-vigilantly. I am perpetually playing wack-a-mole with notifications and other settings, people still give me funny looks (currently on Zoom), and I do my fair share of slipping into bad habits. Through it all, I maintain that it is the mindfulness and the predilection to not defaulting to the default settings that is the real benefit.

As for where this might take me next, I am not sure. Some of you may have noticed that I started blogging here more regularly in the past few months. I am thinking more again about the devices I do have and what I can do without. Since I am not going much of anywhere, my phone hasn’t been a burden and gets a lot less use, but I have been giving side eye to my Apple Watch and even my iPad. I long for the times when a computer was the device. I have been working on bigger chunks of my day not online and always working to avoid the internet an hour before and after sleeping. It seems that buffer is more important than ever.

Of course, the real gift of this set of habits has nothing to do with technology. Quite the opposite. In the countless hours, days, and months I have cumulatively reclaimed, I have witnessed unspeakable moments of beauty and humanity. The look in my son’s eyes as he watches me with wonderment. My wife’s unguarded strength and beauty. The quiet grace of our dog. Tiny, fleeting details in the city scape, nature or on a stranger. My mother aging before my eyes. How the horizon never changes but the skyline does daily. Mainly it is the sort of details one wishes they had paid attention when they had the chance. Well, I had the chance and I took it.

Before I continue on, I did want to look back on my top ten posts from the past ten years—not on how many were read or shared but ones that represented something important to me personally. For those of you who have followed along at any point, I appreciate you stopping by. Whether you realized it or not, you have been part of keeping me accountable to my commitment. I hope that you have taken away a concept or a setting that have given you back a little bit of your own autonomy.

In chronological order…

1. Finding the off switch—and using it

2. Folding a fitted sheet

3. Phoning it in

4. Keep it in your pants

5. Courtoisie

6. The fortitude of denial

7. Even less is even more

8. Which came first: the decline of decency… or the internet to show us?

9. Addicted

10. Don’t look away

From a safe distance

It’s pretty amazing how this pandemic has awakened us to the way things are. Almost as if a giant chasm opened up in the earth, a line was drawn down the middle of our society: on one side people, industries, businesses, and spaces that were safe to operate and on the other… ones that were not.

Then a few months in after weeks of lockdowns and other safeguards, the Black Lives Matter movement erupted in protests and dominated news and conversation. Everyone had some reflecting to do and it seems like most people took that opportunity to do so. I thought about my layers of privilege as a straight, white, American man with a middle-class up bringing and career. Try as I may, understanding the experience of others is elusive and I can never fully “get it”.

But a layer of privilege I have also thought about—and appreciated—is that I can safely and effectively work from home on a computer. Thanks to fast internet, a reasonably new computer, a willing employer, and no shortage of communications work, I have been as busy as ever. That’s pretty amazing. I am thankful every single day for the ability to stay at home with my family.

Many are not so lucky. Either they work a hands-on job out in the world or they work in a facility that must (or can’t) operate in-person. Or worse, they have service jobs or tech-based jobs that just aren’t feasible right now. That’s heartbreaking.

While we can grouse about how safeguards and protective measures have affected us, the nature of COVID-19 was nobody’s fault but it has disproportionately had an impact on people whose livelihoods don’t rely on technology. And I have seen first-hand how business owners, workers, teachers, and other essential laborers have adapted with astonishing speed and cunning to make their work safe and to keep bringing us the products and services we need.

Naturally, I am thinking about my chin stroking and musings on this vs. that technology or just the right kind of configuration. They are preferences that affect only my state of mind and I realize that most of that doesn’t matter. But in the run up to the 10th anniversary of The Off Switch, I am remembering how many ideas about presence and connection were actually prescient. Technology has saved me in many ways. It has connected me but it has also kept me apart. While making it possible for me to work and see friends, I long for nothing more than uninterrupted face to face time that’s physical and tactile and blissfully not digital.

I can’t help but to wonder if—as we emerge from this public health crisis—we’ll prioritize time away from the internet and devices, whether that’s in nature or embracing loved ones or undulating together at music venues or parties. It is hard to imagine now, but I long for that sensory experience at an almost cellular level. I am in no rush to socialize for the sake of just doing that, but I do think a reckoning is coming in terms of our physical connection.

Getting a signal

A month ago, I went primitive camping in the Davis Mountains by myself. It had been around ten years since I’d been backpacking (although I “car camp” around once a year) and more than twenty since I’d camped alone. The pandemic was a big motivator to get away but being off the grid is always rejuvenating. As it turned out, I got more than I bargained for.

Long shadows on a morning day-hike in Davis Mountains State Park

I chose Davis Mountains State Park and primitive camping for the cool nights and remote camp spots. My plan was to carry everything I needed in (no water is available) and then I could hike back down the mountain in the hottest part of the day. Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way.

Since it had been so long since I had backpacked, I was very selective with what I packed, my food choices, and thoughtful about how much water I would need. But something about state and national parks is that if you dare to plot a trip the rangers rarely caution you against it. I planned for four days and three nights—reserving the most remote spot in the park in advance—and the ranger who checked me in said it would be a two hour hike in when I arrived a little after 4 p.m.

As it turned out, the 10 liters of water the guy at REI had advised me to bring was a lot heavier and more unwieldy than I had factored. Between my aging pack pack, my aging body, and the weight of that water, it took me nearly six hours to get all my stuff to that camping spot. It was partially the heat and incline, partially the rock-strewn trail, and mostly having to leave some of my supplies part the way up then go back for it at dusk. But I was there and grateful by 10 p.m.

The next two days were a mixture of glorious and harrowing—not because I encountered any daunting wildlife or ran out of something essential but because the cool desert nights gave way to sizzling hot days and no place to escape it. For the aforementioned reasons, I couldn’t just skip back down the mountain and go into town so instead I mostly sat and just existed.

Serenading the peak was a favorite activity

The antithesis of being lost in technology, I the spent 8-10 hours a day I had outside of meals and other survival activities doing things like playing the ukulele, writing in a journal, and mostly looking at nature going about its business around me. My mind went to all sorts of places it hadn’t been in many, many years. I thought a lot about my early twenties especially, likely because that’s when I drove around the country by myself on summer, camping in 19 states, and also when I backpacked across Europe—also by myself although I did make some friends along the way.

That was a decade in my life of independence before I spent my days in front of a computer and it was also blissfully before the internet, iPods, smartphones, laptops, tablets, Netflix and smart watches took over. I was just me exploring the world. So, for the first time in two decades, I was just with nature and my thoughts. And even with the heat, the sunburn, the water scarcity and the lumpy ground on which I slept, it was blissfully peaceful. No news. No COVID-19 concerns. No social media. No texts. Just glorious views.

To say it was rejuvenating would be a gross understatement. The experience was an important reminder about so many things. I remembered what center feels like. I remember that even things like water and food and shelter are neither promised nor easy for everyone. I remembered that technology is not essential. I remembered that there’s a whole world out there waiting to be explored and revered.

After three nights of glorious stargazing and quietude, I drank my very last sip of water after breakfast and packed up for the hike back down the mountain. This time, I made it in under two hours since I didn’t have that food or water weight. It was great to get back to the comfort of my car and air conditioning, then talking to my wife and friends on the phone. But I re-emerged more at peace and with a lot more perspective.