Something Has to Change

Everyone reaches a breaking point when it becomes crystal clear that something has to change. Some behaviors are just plain unhealthy. I knew, for instance, when to quit smoking (the first time, anyway) and I knew the day I should start skipping that butter scone with my café latte every morning.

I will always remember the day I decided to rescue my mental health. It became obvious I was beating it to a pulp.

It happened over a lunch date. Before dessert, I had wound myself up into an uncontrollable rant about the news. My companion appeared to be hearing everything for the first time. How could she possibly be so unaware? Didn’t she read the news? Well, no.

My girlfriend didn’t have time for that. Her husband of more than four decades had just died. She had lovingly nursed him at home for three years, helped only by her two daughters, her son-in-law, and our provincial care health system. She didn’t have the band width to mindlessly doom scroll on her phone like me. She’d been keeping her family together, enhancing the quality of her husband’s life before cancer finally took him. I was ashamed of myself.

Something has to change.

I had to stop obsessively reading the news and I knew it had to start with my phone. I began by deleting all of its so-called ‘friends’: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Substack. Then, I muted the browser to prevent news sites from delivering constantly refreshed outrage to me, like a cigarette delivers nicotine to an addict. All of these apps were poisoning my brain, making me catastrophize about everything.

These drastic steps were necessary to rewire my aging brain. I’m a baby boomer. My circuits were not constructed to process so much information at once. 

I quickly discovered it is possible to build a more sustainable way to stay connected and informed. I began reading only Canada’s two national newspapers (the print editions) for less than thirty minutes every morning. I avoid our national broadcaster altogether. On Sundays, I enjoy the New York Times. No way I was giving up the Book Review. I felt calmer almost immediately and my focus returned. I also stopped worrying I was developing some form of dementia.

My husband, Rodney, would say I’m exaggerating my behavior. After all, I never brought my phone to the dinner table. I always hated people who did that. And, he would probably remind me how supportive I had been to my girlfriend during her difficult years. Inside my own head, though, I had been thoughtless and disrespectful.

Something has to change.

This wasn’t my first ‘let’s shoot all the computers’ rodeo. Digitally opting out was an old story of mine. I had never been a Luddite, just a technophobe trying to co-exist with new tools of technology. I created my first website in the late ‘90s, long before websites proliferated, and was a pioneer in weblogging. I signed on for the early versions of the self-publishing platforms for the books I wrote about global living.

But I was a very late adopter of a mobile phone. I just didn’t want one. I couldn’t stand people with cell phones. I only broke down in 2010. A BlackBerry was a necessary tool for the communications role I was taking on in our family’s global education company.

My antipathy towards technology really started years earlier. Like any sane person could see, there was a tech train wreck was coming down the tracks. I had wanted to report on it. Publishers turned me down when I pitched “Me, Myself, but Mostly, I: The Rise of Narcissism and the Waning of Empathy in the Internet Age”. (I wasn’t a neuroscientist they told me, just a journalist.) Likewise, I let the domain name lapse, the one I had booked in frustration over obnoxious cell phone users: Shutthefuckupplease.com.

Meanwhile, as I travelled extensively in the early ‘aughts, lecturing internationally as The Expat Expert—without a phone I like to point out—I witnessed first hand the dangerous intersection of smart phones and helicopter parenting. In fact, I began lecturing about the latter subject around 2003. Watching the anti-social behavior of BlackBerry users up close (mostly men), I admonished them: “This will bite your ass one day.”

From where I stood at the podium, they looked like pompous dicks. They wore their phones like gunslingers on their belts, their devices in a holster, making them feel big and oh-so-terribly important.

And then, in 2024, vindication arrived. Jonathan Haidt’s: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Health was released. It validated, with hard, longitudinal data, everything I had suspected. An entire generation of Zees, growing up on phones, not play, and enabled by their over-protective parents, didn’t know how to speak to one another in person. Their anxiety levels were over the top. And empathy? It seemed to have vanished.

I was sounding the alarm years ago that children who can’t see the eyes of a friend when they hurt their feelings (texting to refuse a birthday party invitation or later, breaking off relationships) will grow up to become adults deficient in empathy. I was proven to be right. At the time of the publication of Haidt’s book, many college-aged Zees were protesting the war in the Middle East, displaying little if no empathy for women brutally raped and murdered. I thought my head might explode.

None of this was rocket science. It was painfully obvious it was going to happen. (Think of allowing cell phones in the classroom. How’d that turn out, eh?) Alas, like the other Cassandras issuing warnings about the dangers of technology, I was sidelined by a population mesmerized by the latest shiny bauble.

Something has to change.

At this stage of my life, I know I’m not going to change the world. But my daughter Lilly probably will. She’s going to help save the planet from climate disaster through her work at Finca Cántaros. My time will be much better spent helping her, rather than trying to convince anyone else to put down their phone. I can only change my own digital behavior. Moreover, I want to be present for the beautiful grandchildren she has given us, without a phone in the way. 

This book, above all other titles, helped me. It convinced me that resistance is not, after all, futile. Published in 2019, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World has been a game changer. I consider it to be the bible on this subject. 

The author, Cal Newport, brilliantly frames digital minimalism as a philosophy, one I can get behind. That’s why it’s quoted on the masthead of this new blog. Newport also writes that this way of living is “rooted in your deep values, that provides clear answers to the questions of what tools you should use and how you should use them and, equally important, enables you to confidently ignore everything else.” Works for me.

It was my son, Jay, who first turned me onto digital minimalism and Newport’s book. For years, Jay had been begging me to escape from Internet world, the one his father compares to the open line radio show he produced back in the ‘70s in Winnipeg. Those local talk shows allowed idiots with too much time on their hands and nothing better to do than to call in and rant about anything and everything.

We ignored them back then but embraced those same twits in this century.

Jay reminded me that life in the real world is nothing like Internet world. It’s just off-stage noise I can choose to avoid. When I step out of my house in the morning for a walk, there aren’t any noisy crowds of angry, self-righteous, preening people. There’s no negativity nor endless, performative, insincere declarations of humility.

In the virtual world, everyone hates someone else. In my real world, there are only my neighbours giving me shout-outs for my husband’s magnificent flower garden. Positivity, hope, and optimism exist. So do acts of kindness.

Jay’s words broke through my digital haze. Why the heck didn’t I do it sooner?