I spend a lot of time looking at screens. If I’m not on my small screen (phone), I’m on my medium screen (iPad), my large screen (laptop) or my huge screen (TV). I’m sure a lot of you are exactly the same.
On top of this, for the good part of a decade, it has been my job to be across the news cycle, mostly tech news. This means news accounts litter my Instagram feed, Reddit serves me up a lot of tech content “based on my interests”, so does TikTok, and Twitter, well, Twitter is used only for work.
This has meant that whenever I take holidays or a sick day, I’m still kind-of doing my job. It’s a frequent occurrence that I’d still check emails or reply to Slack messages – even if it’s just team banter and not actually work work.
I also suffered something that I hadn’t heard of until watching Brooklyn 99 – FOMOW. Fear of missing out on work. Over the years, the day I’d take off would see something massive happen – a data breach, passage of a law I’d been writing about for months, even years, or an outage that would wipe out a popular Aussie bank. It seemed like there was always something. But that’s the nature of the news cycle, there’s always something.
All of this is then coupled with the fact that COVID-19 and work-from-home orders made a lot of us unsure of when the work day ends and the personal time starts. Of course, take a 10-minute break to hang your washing out at 10.30 am then stay back 10 minutes at the end of the day to make up that time so you’re not taking the piss, but then when that happens frequently throughout the day and all of a sudden it’s 7pm and you’re still working – you start to then just work because there’s always something that needs to be done. That last example is something one of my close friends is guilty of.
Before I digress any further, I want to bring this back to the point: I just took a week off and I made the conscious decision to go on a “digital detox”.
I didn’t succeed.
But not because I wanted to scroll Instagram for the eighth time in an hour, or because I wanted to check Slack, but because so much of my life is dependent on the internet.
For the first few days of my leave, I was staying with a dear friend who has two children under two. While mum was on baby #1 duty, I was with baby #2 in the same room, and so as to not wake them, we communicated via Messenger. She also sent a screenshot of me and baby #2 hanging out on her nanny cam.
We watched nanny cam constantly while we hung out in the lounge room.
Back home, my partner was dealing with introducing two cats to each other, so I was receiving messages, photos and videos from him – and I also had to Google answers to a few questions on how to make cats like each other (spoiler: you can’t). It was getting hot, so I turned their thermostat down (controlled via an app) and once baby #1 woke up, he was keen to binge some Cars, which is on Disney+. This all happened in less than an hour. It was impossible for me to not use technology.
I could have switched my phone off, yes, but I wouldn’t have known a family member had passed, that my bank had detected fraudulent activity on my card (I forgot to tell them I was overseas) or that my flight time had changed to being six hours later. And these are just three examples.
I didn’t open Slack, nor work email and I had removed all news pages from my Instagram (they’re on a separate, work-specific one now) and I managed to avoid the news cycle, mostly. So while I had a proper week off work, I didn’t get the digital detox I set out to have.
The idea of a ‘digital detox’ is just one manifestation of the now widespread notion that to live well in a digitally dependent world, we need to disconnect from technology. You don’t get into tech journalism if you hate technology, so it’s a big part of my life. The exercise was a good reminder that tech has made our lives easier, that it’s not going anywhere and that I’m thankful I can be over the other side of the world to my family and friends and still be in contact the same as I would be if I were in Sydney. As is the case with everything, if it becomes a problem, limit your exposure, this is simply my own personal experience.
As corny as it sounds, this attempted digital detox revitalised my love for the industry I get to talk about with you all each and every day.