Going boldly offline
Trains, planes, and dopamine receptors
The little phone in my pocket is increasingly a portal to pain and suffering, so I decided to do something about it.
Since January, notifications have flooded me: FEMA is being “eliminated.” Another economist predicts a full-blown recession by the end of the year. A French scientist is turned away at the border simply for criticizing Trump. Critical health science funding drops off a cliff. The job market is dead for 21-to-25-year-olds. The Secretary of Defense flirts with the idea of changing the Department of Defense to the US Department of War (I wonder what that one implies).
There has almost never been a moment these last few months when I am enjoying a cappuccino on my couch, or between meetings in my office, or laying in bed waiting to fall asleep, when I am not tempted to doomscroll (she said it, the newsletter name!). I sometimes wonder if there is something deep within the recesses of my brain that craves horror, but as I hear these pains echoed back to me through friends, coworkers, family members, and of course the thousands of internet people I see content from everyday, I know that I am not alone.
It’s not just political doomscrolling — the relentless intensity of modern life often leaves me craving a “screen time” vortex as a refuge from long stretches of work and stress. Occasionally, it actually helps — I’ll come across an update from my friend Alice, an art historian writing a book in the Alps, via a cool Instagram story from her snowy hike, and I feel closer to her for having seen it. More often, though, I find myself trapped in the world’s most pathetic cycle of air-fryer crispy chicken recipes.
Our susceptibility to broadly viral online and especially to apocalyptic political content (the very material that fed Trump 1 and is now spiraling out of control in Trump 2) appears to be somewhat innate, as it resonates with inherent cognitive tendencies that makes our brains enjoy slot machines. All of it bears real consequence. Increasingly, the relationship between smartphone use and lower attention spans has been better understood. Some researchers have begun to use the term “digital dementia” to refer to harmful cognitive changes associated with excess screen time. Research continues to suggest that social media, the 24/7 news cycle, and especially the short-form video content that exists online in so many forms, actively rewires our brain.
Sort of ironically, while scrolling through X one day, I read about a study that found blocking internet access on smartphones for just two weeks “improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being.” Intrigued and never one for half-measures, I slashed my daily screen time and dove headfirst into an offline vacation, where the only kind of thinking available to me was slow.
I have great admiration for people who make a full-time switch to a “dumb phone” but let’s be real — I am a 28-year-old city dweller powerless to lose the device that connects me to my family and friends, directs me from the coffee shop to where I’m meeting my friend for dinner tonight, pays for local transit and hails cars home after long nights out, all while serving as the personal all-knowing butler that modern life is inscrutable without.
Yet I felt powerless watching afternoon after afternoon get sucked into a vortex of misery, or just something dumb. As long as my phone was on me, no matter where I was, the potential for it to hound my attention was infinite. Every second spent waiting in line for an iced coffee and every moment spent on BART was “phone time.” I watched on as my attention towards the outside world dwindled, in favor of getting mad about something online that I may not remember the details of the next day. How could gazing out a BART window ever compare? “We know they’re numbing our feelings and experiences,” the sex and culture writer
writes in “it’s obviously the phones.”In the Biden era, I could sort of manage this state of being. Now, I knew I needed an intervention.
After a friend told me that all her friends had been raving about it — and one of them had even credited it for helping her write her novel — I bought a device. The Brick sits behind my refrigerator. After a morning check of news sites and social media, I tap my phone against it, and it removes my phone’s ability to use those apps. I’m still able to listen to Spotify, use my phone for dual factor authentication at work, and navigate to the bar after it — but I’m completely incapable of opening Reddit when my brain tells me it is time to check Reddit.
Something about the physicality of the Brick registers much differently in my mind than other time-limiting apps I’d tried in the past (I promise this is not a paid sponsorship). It’s the sort of device so good at addressing a contemporary issue, it could only have been designed by a 23-year-old, which it was.
Almost immediately, my mornings, afternoons, and evenings opened up again. Since purchasing it, I finished reading Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing (aptly) and have nearly completed Norman Rush’s beloved 496-page novel Mating. I re-started learning and practicing German, because I suddenly had time for that. Sometimes I get bored in my apartment and just go for a walk. Just like that.
I’m sure many people could just put their phones in their backpack or hand it off to a friend or just check it less; but respectfully, I’m not built that way. I can’t just read headlines — I also have to read the more apocalyptic Reddit threads on the matter. Tools like Brick aren’t for everyone (I am grateful for my laziness, which stops me from strolling to my fridge and “un-Bricking” my phone every day).
But what is important about tools like these is recognizing that they are some of the few means available to reclaim our focus and steer ourselves toward a healthier, more human direction. It is not always easy but it is worth it.
Somewhere in this newly discovered volume of time (we have so much of it, I feel all of the sudden, when my phone is “Bricked”), I decided to take a 19-hour train ride alone.
Taking the slow (slowest?) route somewhere is a pretty new idea to me. I appreciate speed, and like the ideas I often rail against in this newsletter, I have an innate desire to optimize myself out of my problems. But something about the train ride appealed to me.
My friend Alexandra chose to fly to Portland, Oregon and meet me on the other end of my Oakland-Portland train journey — certainly wise of her, and it offered me the opportunity to ride solo and romanticize my life like a book character lost in their internal narration, part On the Road and part Mrs. Dalloway.
At just $150, my coach ticket turned out to be much nicer than I expected. I’d heard the dining cars and lounges available to roommette and bedroom passengers were comfortable, but I’d heard nothing about coach, so I had mentally prepared for the equivalent of an airplane seat with a view.
Instead, I found the seats to be surprisingly roomy (I’m 5’10”, so this is saying something), the food and drink to be fun and retro-feeling, the people around me almost universally in a pleasant and chatty mood, and the observation car (which was two cars ahead of my officially assigned seat, even though I spent most of my time there) to be something of another world. Its floor-to-ceiling window made the hours spent hovering through the mountains of the Cascades unbelievable — I spotted a half-dozen waterfalls and countless rivers and lakes permeating the ever-changing snow and pine-covered landscape.
We really underestimate how happy our brains can be without much stimulation. (And this is coming from someone who has been known to have their work laptop, personal laptop, and cell phone out on my desk at once.)
I planned to “Brick” my phone the entire time (and succeeded), so in my fear of becoming outrageously bored for 19 hours, I brought a half dozen books and even drafted journal prompts in advance. But sitting with a black coffee and the tunes of Elvis Costello in front of the massive windows, I made it through most of Astral Weeks before it even occurred to me I could do something else with my hands, like hold a book or send a text. My Oura ring even registered me as “relaxed” for the entirety of the journey (unfortunately, it also registered the extent of my sleep to be less than three hours).
At one point, sitting phoneless and with just a copy of The New Yorker on my lap, an older woman sat next to me and started chatting me up. The crazy part? She was so normal. We chatted about her life in Nebraska and mine in California, and before long, two other men joined our conversation (neither knew the other), and the four of us conversed for almost two hours about our jobs, our relationships, trips we’d done that had been worth it and trips we’d done that had not. No one flinched for their phones or computers once. When lunchtime came, we said “great talk” and parted ways, no one jockeying for someone else’s Instagram handle. In this post-pandemic reality, extended interactions with strangers like these feel sparse. The idea that a conversation does not have to lead to something else, and can just contain meaning in and of itself, feels somehow radical.
My favorite image of the slow trip was among the first that I saw. At around 7 AM, I overheard the woman in front of me yawn and I awoke from my poor night of sleep. I peeled off my eye mask and was greeted by low, blue walkway lights and near total silence – the only sound being the low hum of wheels rolling against tracks. Outside my window, the landscape had transformed from the previous night’s boxy industrial buildings to a frothy snow-covered glen surrounded by dark green pines. A few hundred yards in the distance, six or seven deer huddled tightly together, as though hugging each other. It was one of very few landscapes I’ve encountered in my life that I physically experienced as “breathtaking.” Even as we zoomed by, the movement of the train didn’t seem to disturb the deer, who mostly stood still, and so I decided that neither would I with my phone camera.
This was refreshing to read. Recently I've been trying to do less, but do it better. Thanks for writing it.
Brilliant