I was on vacation in a beautiful place. I’ve been lucky to be able to get away to a really gorgeous location with my family year after year. My oldest daughter has had almost every birthday there. It’s a simple place, a cabin by a lake. I used to go to a cabin very nearby when I was a kid. My father worked in advertising on Madison Avenue in New York City, and he desperately needed some downtime once a year. He found an ad in Yankee Magazine for a place away from everything, up in northern New England and we drove long hours to this lake to stay in a simple cabin with no phone, right on the water. It took him a week to relax and that left him a week to enjoy it. My brother and I had a blast running around, swimming, canoeing, playing Spite and Malice with our parents, doing jigsaw puzzles, and enjoying a world without garbage trucks, idling buses, or police sirens for miles in any direction.
A couple of the years we got away to this magical place, my dad was called up to the main house to take a phone call from work, and once, he had to fly back to the city to manage some campaign or other. This was tragic for him, I think. The frenetic pace of his work was punishing, and his time away was essential to his health. As a kid, I was blissfully unaware of this, but as I look back now, I get it. His job kept us in our apartment, sent us to school, and eventually, to college. He took the hit for us, as I would do in a second for my kids.
Decades later, I’ve found myself with my kids at this same lake with one major difference: the cabin I stay in has wi-fi.
I scaled down my work while I was there, but I didn’t completely stop working. I kept in touch with my clients via email and did a couple of meetings on Zoom. I know. It was a missed opportunity, but I run my own company, and going completely dark was not an option if I didn’t want to lose some clients. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my mac suffered a terminal breakdown while I was there, and though I replaced it quickly with a trip to the closest major mall, my backups were all in my office in Boston, and it limited the sort of work I could accomplish, so I had more time to just relax.
Except my phone kept working, and the news of the day kept churning and I had just joined Threads. Twitter was becoming X, indictments came in, stuff was happening out there beyond the edge of the quiet lake, and I couldn’t keep myself from finding out what it was, and leaving my 2¢ on the various socials. My thumbs kept moving, my finger kept scrolling. I spent less time than I could have just watching the water and listening to the loons.
We still played cards and did the jigsaw puzzles. My mom taught my girls how to play Bridge, a game I do not enjoy as much as Spite and Malice, we cooked, we baked pies, we swam, we kayaked, but I kept itchingly commenting on the news of the day on the socio-net whenever there was a gap. The whole trip was all meant to be a gap but I just had to fill it with my ineffectual opinions and pictures. By the end of my stay I had to wonder what the hell I was doing.
So I quit for a month. It was too late to enjoy a social network free vacation, but I was disgusted with myself for not putting it aside while I was there. Honestly, I don’t know if my various projects (I write novels, I play and record music, I run a podcast, I run a web development company, and I teach meditation (oh, the irony)), really benefit from my constant weak promotion in these spheres and whether the small boost I might get from being present on these twitchy platforms is worth my general peace of mind.
Because it is more peaceful out here away from that mental noise. When I read a book, I don’t need to tell anyone about it right away. When I see something or hear something, or someone says something funny, I don’t need to instantly share it with all my fellow opinionators. I can just hang on to it for myself for a while. Maybe I’ll say something about it later, maybe not.
It’s day 22. I no longer reach for the apps when I have a moment. I don’t have to check them when I wake up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. I won’t be checking back to see if you read this. It’s only 9 more days, after all.
Then I will be back. I have a new video to promote in September, I continue to write my 3rd novel, I may have a vinyl release party at a local club coming up. September 1, I will slip back into my habit of adding my feckless thoughts to each and every event that happens in the larger world. For all of its negative effects, I think it’s a net positive that we are all connecting, information bubbles not withstanding, and that we might come to the understanding that we are all interconnected on a beautiful planet called home. But when I get tired of it down the road again, I’m gone. After all, a vacation is good for the soul.