The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

by Michael Harris

“Well . . . ,” he says. “Well, yes, there’s beachcombing.”

  “Beachcombing?”

  “I go with Gordon Smith [the ninety-five-year-old painter]. It’s our favorite thing on earth, beachcombing. We have elaborate trips. The thing about it is you’re walking, it’s physical in a nice way, and you’re gazing at the ground. Your brain goes into this mode . . . There’s one beach with barnacles, another where the Haida people have chucked all their old bones and the ocean has churned them over . . . You do it for an hour or two or three and your brain starts to feel like you’ve taken the best nap ever. You go nonverbal. To this place without words.”

  We’re quiet ourselves for a beat, and my gaze dodges reflexively back to my laptop’s screen. I look up: “You said once that the Internet could make you tired of knowing everything. Were you joking, or being serious?”

  “Maybe.”

  • • • • •

  Down the road was that green hill of mine. I still had some shaky memory of feeling at peace there in a way I’d never been since. And so, the next day, I walked the trail alone and took myself partway up the grassy rise. I patted my pockets, thinking I should turn off my phone, until I remembered that I hadn’t brought it with me. I lay down with an old-man groan and looked up at the blue above me, tried to imagine billions of phone calls and Web searches flying across the air, leaving colored jet streams, until everything above was a weave of tight connections.

  I thought of Kenny, who would be wondering about lunch; and my parents, to whom I should send a “Happy Anniversary” text; editors in Toronto and New York who wanted their updates; and all the messages I needed to send or receive in order to get what I wanted, in order to make sure. . . .

  I wanted badly, then, to have some revelation—even kept blinking at the sky, to reboot it. I thought it was time for my revelation, that I deserved by now some newfound silence or solitude that would close this book on a happy, even inspirational, lob. I was ready for my personal transformation.

  But let me tell you the truth, instead.

  If you look closely at the loss of lack, the end of absence—if you do some work to look past the fantastic gains of speed and manic social grooming—you’ll catch only glimpses of that earlier mentality. Lost absence flits from your gaze like the floaters on the eye’s lens, which we sometimes apprehend but can never focus on. To sense the end of absence is to intuit only.

  I can make my little changes now. I turn off the phone, I ignore the e-mail; I do seek out solitude. Not pathologically, but enough. It was just small changes, really. Those, and this larger one: the fact that I feel awake to the end of absence, now. It hurts a little more to be without it.

  So I take these small steps up the trail, I come back to the green hill. That’s the job I’m giving myself. Come back to the green hill, look around, look just here and just with my eyes, look alone. It’s as though absence were a supernatural jewel that I dropped somewhere in the grass. It’s that hidden—and that priceless.

  Joseph Weizenbaum, the man who invented ELIZA, predicted in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason, that the computer would now “intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world.” He believed that our computers were integral parts of our perception and being—that we truly are cyborgs. He foretold that ripping the computer tool from us would be as damaging to society as ripping out a lung from a body. But that can’t be the whole story.

  Each technology is born of a particular global context, rife with specific economic, political, and even doctrinal expectations. We need, as Neil Postman suggests, a “psychic distance from any technology” so that it always appears strange to us, “never inevitable, never natural.”

  Homeward bound. Here I stand on the bus, its progress shaking me a little in my place as I hang one-armed from the strap. And all around me, the young and not so young are banishing their boredom by pouring their attention into games like Angry Birds and Jewel Quest on their phones. The bus rattles around a corner and we all sway in unison, we bump into one another, but nobody looks up. An elderly woman, with perfect white hair, turns to look out the window and appears to disappear.

  • • • • •

  Jaron Lanier wrote that “one good test of whether an economy is humanistic or not is the plausibility of earning the ability to drop out of it for a while without incident or insult.” This seems a good gauge to me. And I know that dropping out of our current information economy would indeed damage my livelihood, put me at odds with the “ordinary” lives of my peers. It’s this fact of the hassle—the incorrectness of dropping off the grid—that solidifies my ambition to do it.

  I decide that I will take that sabbatical from the future. For thirty days, I will return to something akin to the technological circumstances of my childhood. No Internet. No mobile phone. No Twitter or Facebook or text messages; no self-diagnosis of pneumonia on Mayoclinic.org. I alert all my editors, family members, and closest friends that they can phone me if they want to, but if I’m away from home, they’ll have to leave a message because my phone is now duct-taped to a phone cord I found at Future Shop and that cord is, itself, duct-taped to the kitchen counter. And then I walk away.

  • • • • •

  MY ANALOG AUGUST

  August 1

  Every morning Kenny and I eat our cereal next to each other at the long wooden table, each facing our respective laptops. It’s nice. We look at our blogs and collect necessary narratives for dispersal throughout the day with other happy informed citizens. I’ll call Kenny over to check out a trailer for the new Hunger Games and he’ll pull me over to see a piece of animation from London’s The Line studio. We dip our heads in the ocean together.

  This morning K. went to his usual post and I sat at the kitchen table alone with my raisin bran. I blinked at the empty chair across from me and called to the next room: “You don’t want to come have breakfast?”

  “I am having breakfast.”

  “I mean with me.”

  “No, I’m okay.” There’s a video playing on repeat and K.’s cracking up.

  Torture.

  Feels like I just stepped off an incredibly fast ride and the sheer s-l-o-w-n-e-s-s of everything is freaking me out. Every five minutes my brain asks me to look up a fact or an image that it’s lacking. What does Kate’s baby look like, again? How many references to robots are there in Alan Turing’s scientific papers? It feels insane to not be allowed to know. I have to let questions constantly slide away, unanswered.

  Hello, 1987.

  August 2

  I thought I’d feel comfortable asking strangers for the time but, instead, have been forced to constantly buy things in order to check time on receipts. Then Kenny gave me a watch today. Very funny contraption. I feel like a man with a pipe.

  August 3

  Impulse to check e-mail continues unabated. Definite sense that I’m maiming my own career and have grown certain that several lucrative book/movie deals are expiring in my in-box.

  The phone is, meanwhile, surprisingly easy to leave at home. I keep picking it up, though, on my return, expecting dozens of messages. In fact, only person to contact me in past 48 hours was a volunteer from a charity service called Big Brothers. (A sign?)

  Went for leisurely cocktail at West with K. and Vince this eve, then home alone for viewing of Pride & Prejudice while they went out for Pride weekend beer-up. I was in bed by ten; have arrived at “recluse” stage faster than expected.

  August 6

  The instinct to check e-mail comes naturally each morning, insistent as the urge to shower, to put on the kettle. I feel unawake without messages, as though am wrapped in some cotton batting. Simultaneously: feel like a child who ran away from home and then was crushed to discover nobody noticed his disappearance.

  August 8

  I dream of e-mail. All night I crafted perfect missives to Barack Obama and Kirsten Dunst. Alas.

  August 11

  Stood in Chapters for half an hour rea
ding a cover story in Fast Company by a man called Baratunde Thurston who disconnected from Internet for 25 days. Felt very smug reading it as Thurston was still texting and using Google Calendar; he even had a personal assistant log in every few days to make sure he didn’t “miss anything urgent.” Thurston writes that he experienced “an expansion of sensations and ideas” (vague) during his quasi sabbatical, which leaves me very excited about my true sabbatical as my more extreme disconnection will surely lead to a proper epiphany that surpasses his meager revelations.

  August 14

  No epiphany quite yet.

  It is still hard. (Though not physically sick-making, anymore.)

  Benjamin Franklin is helpful—he had this notion of “philosophical self-denial,” which William Powers writes about:

  You have to see that there is more to be gained by resisting the impulse than giving in. Once you truly believe this, it’s all downhill. What previously seemed a dreary, priggish way to live—denying oneself pleasure—suddenly becomes positive and even hedonistic.

  Meanwhile, I spent two hours today looking up things in books I could have sourced online in thirty seconds. Perhaps the hedonism comes later.

  August 15

  Each morning I kiss K. good-bye and he goes off to work at his new studio gig; I remain at home with the breakfast dishes and try not to give in. I imagine K. interacting all day with other clever artists—he’s storyboarding the new Seth Rogen flick and so, no doubt, lunches in chic Gastown rooms with the beautiful tribe, decked in Frank & Oak shirts and toting Hirschel bags.

  Through his phone, K.’s in touch with a few people before breakfast, in fact. I hardly cared before, but now our early-morning, toothbrush-in-mouth conversations seem nastily pruned by the endless ping-ping-ping. It often happens that, even before K. has left the apartment, he’s touched more lives than I will all day. I pad about the rooms with a book and pen, looking forward, pathetically, to the thrill of my Starbucks trip.

  Working from home was far more bearable when e-mail and texts provided a soft, ambient sense of connection to the outside world. Technologies, I guess, support an attitude in which feelings only count when they are expressed; and this leaves me unwilling to believe my days really matter when I can’t share them. It’s no good to think of our experience as reducible to tweets and instant messages, but it’s equally pointless to live an unshared life.

  Dilemma.

  August 19

  Did a Where’s Waldo at the café. Shocking bad sign.

  August 21

  On the unexpected pleasures of pamphlets, I could now write a treatise. Each day I await the mail carrier with a mortifying degree of suspense. Usually he arrives between 11 a.m. and 11:15, but today he did not arrive until half past noon. (The awareness of this transgression places me in the company of an over-starched Barbara Pym heroine.) Naturally, all news, all content, is now a precious alert from the wider world. I read “exciting offers” from credit card companies and think, “Yes, that is exciting”; I read newsletters from local politicians with unprecedented interest and today spent twenty minutes poring over a Pottery Barn catalog. Soon I’ll be one of those people who stop to chat with petitioners at Broadway and Granville.

  P.S. I now read newspapers.

  August 22

  We just can’t handle solitude without a rich interior life. At first there was this bewildering, wind-swept void where my online world had been. Now, haltingly, I place other things in that void. A book. A walk through Shaughnessy to monitor the construction of various McMansions I have my eye on. But, of course, nothing—nothing—is as enthralling as the lovely, comforting, absence-destroying Internet. You can’t really revert to a prior state of mind because (as Nicholas Carr points out) our brains may be changeable and plastic, but they aren’t necessarily elastic. My online mind waits angrily for its food.

  August 23

  My tolerance toward interruption has plummeted. (Good sign? Bad sign?) During a chat at the pub, or on the seawall, my interlocutor will raise a finger (pressing an invisible hold button in the air between us) and answer an incoming text message with a sort of blithe assumption that my own attention will immediately flit somewhere else in the meantime. But, without my phone on hand, I simply stare into this white noise and wait.

  The real annoyance, though, is not with conversation pauses; it’s with the dullness of the conversations such fractures produce. A divided self is simply not a worthwhile thing to focus on.

  So then I disengage—I’ll start daydreaming or I’ll study a mosquito bite—and we end up with a case of Compound Distraction.

  August 24

  Was at first distraught to find that everyone I informed about Analog August wanted to know what my epiphany had been. Surely, if I was going to all this trouble, I must be experiencing an inner transformation. Or perhaps my interrogators felt the exercise was pointless but assumed I would claim such a transformation to save face.

  Have found myself a little desperate to make something up. The closest thing I can report, though, won’t sound dramatic enough. It’s just this: Behavior that seemed utterly normal on the 30th of July now looks compulsive and animalistic. Now when I see teenage girls burrowed into their phones on the sidewalk I think of monkeys picking lice out of each other’s hair.

  August 25

  In the 17th century, newspaper readers in coffeehouses were thought to be antisocial and indulging in a “sullen silence.” Today they’re a charming part of the mise-en-scène. Time settles everything. One day soon we’ll contentedly discuss dreams that appeared to us as bright blue bubbles of text.

  My day’s activities included: a visit to the bank to pay a bill; sending a printed chapter of my book to Matthew in Ottawa; Mailbox (11:45!); 40 minutes ogling Shaughnessy mansions; 30 minutes reading Coupland’s riff on McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message.

  But nothing feels productive (i.e., nothing makes me money).

  Increasingly disturbed by how hamstrung my work-life is without Internet. I can’t take on new projects, or even invoice for old ones. I sweep and tidy my desktop instead. My free time is capacious. Found myself disappointed when I checked my toenails and saw it wasn’t time to clip them yet.

  August 26

  Bertrand Russell says in Conquest of Happiness that the ability to fill leisure time intelligently is the last product of civilization. I guess I thought I’d start filling my own free hours more intelligently once I cut out the cat videos and Bret Easton Ellis tweets. But no.

  I appear to be as much of a moron offline as on. The real difference is that my unintelligent behavior is much more painfully obvious now. Which is something to hold on to, if not to cherish.

  August 27

  I wanted to remember the absences that online life had replaced with constant content, constant connection. I’ve remembered what it is to be free in the world, free from the obliterating demands of five hundred “contacts.” But, of all the absences I’ve remembered, there’s one that is the greatest, the most encompassing—that is solitude.

  And yet, of this absence, a little goes a long way. 1987, it turns out, makes for a crushingly lonely vacation. Still, if solitude feels painful it’s only because we don’t know how to be alone.

  August 28

  Friends who’ve done the West Coast Trail talk with glassy eyes about the White Spot burgers and 24-ounce Cokes that get downed on the ferry ride home. The religious consumption of that long-denied high-fructose injection. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to eat first—digitally speaking—when I go back online. E-mail, obviously. I fantasize with a starved man’s mind about sitting down at the laptop with notepad at the ready, a cup of piping coffee . . . how I’ll just let it run over me, a joyful sabotaging of the calm mediocrity I’ve been engineering this past month.

  August 29

  It is possible to abstain. To know full well the hefty glamour of the world’s shining face and then, for a time, step away.

  But exactly what part o
f me I’d be abstaining from wasn’t clear before I tried this. How large a portion of my life was enmeshed so thoroughly in online technologies that it could not be extricated. Social life stumbles forward at half-speed, perhaps. But work grinds to a halt. In the entire month, only one work-related phone-call. The rest of my peers and editors, on receiving my bounce-back alert stating that I’m not online, appear to have written me off for dead. How much money have I lost? And how many chances?

  September 1

  Game over. But we’re on an island. It’d be sacrilege to binge on e-mail here. Now that it’s come down to it, waiting a few more days doesn’t feel like anything at all.

  September 3

  Back home from the Gulf Islands. Last night K. and I fought.

  After dinner I glanced around like I was about to commit a crime and cracked my laptop, freed its wireless settings, dove into the 264 buzzing e-mails that were waiting for me, all aglow. This, naturally, meant ignoring K. for the course of the evening. He’d ask what I was looking at and I’d mutter one-word answers without looking away from the screen. His monk-like boyfriend—who tutted at the distractions of others—had blipped out of existence.

  And what a sweet ride, to slice through that stack of missives! Of the 264 messages, 100 were easily junked. A further hundred required only single-sentence replies, which I issued with a rat-tat-tat military efficiency. And such efficiency! Such quick arrows of accomplishment! Meanwhile, K. grew increasingly annoyed at my happy-robot distance. I left the in-box at 11 p.m., with about 60 thought-requiring messages left for me to tackle in the morning; sated, I trotted off to bed. It wasn’t until then, as I laid myself down to sleep, that I floated back to my surroundings and became aware of K.’s anger, aware that I’d utterly botched my first day back online.

  Coupland warned me not to expect an epiphany from all this. An epiphany? Maybe no. But it’s the break itself that’s the thing. It’s the break—that is, the questioning—that snaps us out of the spell, that can convince us it was a spell in the first place.