Dispatch #45: Disappearing Act

On logging off

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On February 1st, the day before my birthday, I changed the passwords of my Instagram and Facebook accounts to some gibberish I’d never remember and then logged out. I was turning 44 the next day and wanted to spend the entire year without the time and soul suck of social media.

Back in January, I wrote about about my plan:

I have hope that ducking out of the internet for an extended period of time will help me listen to my own voice, my own style, my own desires. What do I care about? What books will I reach for when I don’t know which ones everyone is talking about? What stories will I want to tell?

I need to find the music I haven’t been making.

Of course, there’s a fine line between being original and being irrelevant. That’s the fear, isn’t it? That no one will read what I bring, squinting, out of the cave. That, if I go offline, I will have, essentially, disappeared.

I’m here to tell you how’s it going thus far, and what other choices it’s led to.

*

As always, the first few days without social media are peculiar. The poison is leaving the system and it feels uncomfortable. I would go to check my accounts, only to realize I couldn’t. I thought in Instagram captions. I wondered what to do with random pockets of time. I felt cut-off: from the noise, yes, but also from friends (and “friends”), from news and outrage and dance videos and fashion inspiration and—

Thankfully it didn’t take long to detox. Within days, I was free.

What does that mean? For me, it’s a freedom to daydream and to focus, to move through my days without continually reaching for my smartphone and its hits of dopamine (and despair and anxiety). Freedom to sit somewhere without interruption or distraction. Freedom to be wholly inside a conversation, a moment. To attend to those in front of me, or to make a concerted effort to connect with someone who’s far away. To be bored. To follow my own feelings. To live my life in private.

For the most part, I’m no longer beholden to what writer Craig Mod calls Attention Monsters. He explains:

“That is, any app / service / publication whose business is predicated on keeping a consumer engaged and re-engaged for the benefit of the organization (often to the detriment of the mental and physical health of the user), dozens if not hundreds or thousands of times a day.”

I’m writing this on Substack, so clearly I haven’t totally divested. That said, I refuse to download the Substack app. (The only app I need or want is the kind I can order at a restaurant! I’ll have the hamachi crudo, please.)

On my laptop, I’ll scroll Substack’s feed but not for long—it’s too treacly for my taste. I prefer a distraction with an end in sight, like the Crossword or the Spelling Bee.

I also don’t read the news on my phone, and I stopped news alerts years ago. Instead, I check the news on my laptop—and not obsessively—and listen to NPR. I subscribe to a couple of newsletters that cover issues I care about, like abortion rights, and I also try to seek out in-depth reporting on topics I want to know more about.

It hasn’t been very long since I went off social media, and yet I already feel altered. My rejection of the Attention Monsters feels like a lifestyle shift that will last.

*

For the optimizers in the audience, here are some of my productivity stats. Since going off of social media, I have written 27,000 words (or 97 pages) of a new novel that I’m excited about. I published seventeen weekly newsletters as well as two longer Substack essays in addition to this one. I have read 27 books. I taught one fiction writing class at Caltech, led three sections of an accountability group, and completed a two-month research fellowship at the Huntington Library, where I read books and archival material about Los Angeles in the second-half of the nineteenth century for a future fiction project.

Oh and I have three kids whom I pick up from school at 3:45 pm every weekday except Tuesday, when I retrieve them at 2:30 pm.

If the above two paragraphs annoy you, I understand. They annoy me too! What a bragging goody-goody! And, anyway, I read and wrote even when I was online a lot, so I’m not convinced my logging off has been that much of an influence on my productivity. In fact, I thought I would have read more by now—I mean, what am I doing with all my newfound time?!

Then again, I didn’t quit social media in order to be productive, or that wasn’t the main reason.

I quit to live my life more intentionally, to be more present with myself and the people I love. I quit to get my brain back; I was certain this retreat from technology would feed my creative work, and while my creative work is my job, it’s also more important to me than that: writing is my way of processing experiences and understanding the world. My creative work exists before and beyond any monetary value.

Logging off has helped me enjoy my work, and it’s certainly made it easier for me to lock in: I can focus for longer stretches of time and get into a flow state with less effort. Anyone trying to create anything knows how valuable that is.

Crucially, though, logging off has helped me be idle. Nowadays, I spend a lot more time sitting around and looking at stuff around me. I’m thinking, sometimes about my work or my life, sometimes about nothing very important. My mind roams.

It feels like being a kid again. I’m happier this way.

*

The thing about logging off is that most other people are logged on: almost everyone scrolls as they wait in line at the coffee bar; an infant thumbs their mom’s phone as they ride in a grocery cart; a kid, no older than seven, walks across a parking lot with headphones and a video game. People watch TikTok as they eat lunch alone, often without earbuds; the phone’s tinny audio is noise pollution for everyone else to endure.

Don’t get me wrong: I like seeing someone laughing at their phone, and then maybe showing the screen to a friend or family member, who laughs too. And when a thousand emotions play across someone’s face as they text, I know they’re having an interesting conversation. I also recognize that a lot of political action—not the reposting of political memes, but sharing information about assembling, boycotts, etc.—happens on social media. It’s not all terrible. In fact, it can be useful. It can be fun. Sometimes it’s beautiful.

Most of the time, though, it’s none of that. Most of the time, it’s endless hamster wheel scrolling, a way to disassociate from the present moment. Not that I can blame anyone for this—it’s dire out there! As Jia Tolentino writes in “My Brain Finally Broke”: “It’s easier to retreat from the concept of reality than to acknowledge that the things in the news are real.”

At the same time, it seems obvious that we’re a very sick society. If the phones aren’t the reason why we’re sick—(but aren’t they?!)— they’re certainly not helping us feel better.

Now that I’m logged off, the language around phone usage strikes me as deranged; it’s as if nearly everyone around me has dejectedly surrendered to something icky. On a podcast someone will talk about being chained to their phone. Someone I know will refer to the images or ads that are “served” to them, but then they’ll rail about some unreal image shoved in their face. “I hate my phone!” people say, and then they go back to their little glowing boxes.

To their oppression, they offer a shrugging emoji.

Tolentino’s essay deftly captures the experience of wading through AI slop, and it gets at how that same dangerous unreality is creeping into the rest of our lives, from government data to job listings. However, I no longer relate to her daily experience of being perpetually online. She’s correct: It isn’t easy to accept our current reality. But we must if we are to make meaningful change.

We don’t have to live this way, guys.

*

People tell me that they wish they could get off social media, but they can’t because of work. That’s true for some, but definitely not for most of us.

“You can go dark because you don’t have a novel to promote,” a friend, a fellow writer, tells me on our way to a party.

“I doubt I’ve sold very many books from my Instagram posts,” I say.

“Okay, sure,” she replies, “but you have to give the impression that you are, that it’s going well.”

Do I, though?

I guess I’m over giving impressions.

A woman at the party tells us about her conversations with ChatGBT. Because I don’t want to be a scold, I don’t mention the environmental degradation of these chats.

She tells us she’s getting a beautiful box to put her phone in, to get away from checking it.

“My daughter’s so young….” she says. She doesn’t finish her sentence.

“Can you lock the box?” my friend asks.

“No,” the woman says. “But it’s beautiful.”

“Well that won’t work if you can open the box,” my friend says.

I agree. The phone itself has to be less appealing.

*

That’s what I’m working on now: Operation Unappealing

Last month, I took email off my phone. I did it because I was checking it all the time. I might as well have had Instagram with that level of screen-attachment!

People are always talking about how many emails they get. They must be important and fancy because no one emails me except politicians running for senate in states I’ve never been to, or clothing companies I haven’t gotten around to unsubscribing from.

And yet, that didn’t stop me from checking gmail!

I don’t have my teaching email accounts on my phone and that’s never been a problem. It’s not like I’m traveling and have no other access to my email. It’s still there, on my laptop. In fact, it’s more satisfying to wait and check it there less obsessively. That way, I can sit and devote time and attention to the task at hand. Or, more realistically: I can select all and delete.

(And, look, I can print out a UPS return code. I am fine seeming like an old lady. Old ladies are the most free.)

Without my email, I truly, finally, detached from my phone. I honestly forget about it sometimes.

*

Operation Unappealing continues.

A couple of weeks after getting rid of my email app, I ended a 523 day streak on Duolingo by removing it from my phone and unsubscribing from all email reminders. I was beginning to dislike Duolingo’s gamification of language learning, and I hated the fake pressure: What the hell is the Opal League, anyway, and why do I need to stay in it?

Buona Sera, Duolingo.

Now I have no reason to look at my phone unless someone texts me, and half the time, those are from bots or political donation requests.

When a friend and I text, I’m happy to be together on the screen. It’s real connection. It’s delightful.

That’s all I want from my phone: If it isn’t a tool (a map, a camera), it must be a delight. Otherwise, it can go dark in my purse as I gaze at a hummingbird.

*

You know what else I’m gazing at?

My kids.

The number one aspect of my life that’s improved since breaking up with my phone is my relationship to parenting.

I keep having this thought: What if phone addiction is why most parents are struggling?

I don’t totally believe that: parenting is challenging, with or without a smartphone, and there definitely isn’t enough structural support for parents in the US.

And yet—

I’ve found that without the siren song of my phone, I’m less irritable, more interested in the here-and-now. For me, the here-and-now usually means writing or parenting.

AI-slop may be invading many aspects of our lives, but it has yet to come between me and my kids. It feels really good to forget about my phone as we eat dinner together, as we read together, as we talk and argue.

Before I quit social media, my children’s lives were going by, and I was on my phone. They were watching me be on my phone.

When that woman at the party said, “My daughter’s so young,” I’m pretty sure this was what she was getting at.

I’m also not comparing my messy, chaotic life to unrealistic imagery of children and childrearing that I might see online. What a relief.

I was afraid that going offline would render me irrelevant, but it turns out, I remain relevant to those I care about, and to those who care about me. And I’m relevant to myself.

It’s my phone that matters less and less.

*

At my Huntington research fellowship, I spent time reading ranch diaries and looking at photographs of early LA. I read memoirs by early Angeleno magnates, and combed through the journals of a California booster. I’d never undertaken research before, and it required me to really slow down as I read, to parse handwriting, say, or to take notes.

It was a lesson in intention, care, and patience. Reading research material always took longer than I expected it to.

Every time I saw a scholar bent over an archive, be it a seventeenth century Book of Hours or a notebook belonging to Octavia Butler, I was reminded that this work isn’t quick, that facility with a subject takes time and attention. That’s exactly what makes it so fulfilling.

I told myself to simply be with the material that I’d asked the librarians to retrieve for me. To stop. To look closer. To read closely. I told myself I was there to discover.

Something old and thus delicate was before me. Something special, something made by a human being.

Be with it.

(A rare book is placed on a special pillow called a cradle.)

I wish for this kind of cultivated attention in all aspects of my life.

My attention is rich and deep. Only I can give it.

***

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**Post cover image is of the scrapbook of Charles V. Hall at the Huntington Library.**