David Michael Miller
At the end of July I started an experiment. I stopped posting or even looking at my Facebook and Twitter accounts, and I took a hiatus from the Citizen Dave blog at Isthmus. Basically, I checked out of modern life. I was still present in three dimensions but I didn’t live in the digital one, and so, for all intents and purposes, I did not exist.
It seemed to me that we live in a world of way too much information. Everybody seems to over-communicate. There is a gushing river of trivia, gossip, malicious misinformation and, sure, some useful ideas and insights, all mixed together and rushing past us at breakneck speed.
But just as you find the trout in the quiet pools out of the main stream, I thought maybe I’d be well served by getting out of the flow for a bit.
And how did it go? Fine. Actually, more than fine. I’m so happy to be gone from social media that I have no plans to return any time soon. If you live and die by Facebook, well, I guess I am dead to you.
But before you condemn me for just not getting it, the point shouldn’t be lost on us that Donald Trump is as close as he is to being president largely because of the power of social media. His inane tweets have gotten him hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of free attention. If that doesn’t make you question the value of these platforms I don’t know what might. Anybody who can express his views in 140 characters probably doesn’t have views worth expressing. But here we are.
I can’t think of a better example of the ridiculous belief that we have the right to know absolutely everything about a person in “real time” (for the love of God, can we please stop using the phrase “real time”?) than the flap over Hillary Clinton’s pneumonia. The woman’s been working endless hours under incredible stress, probably getting short night sleeps with an uneven diet and sporadic exercise for more than a year while shaking hands with thousands of people carrying billions of germs, and so she caught a bad cold. But, hey, we should have known about it on Friday instead of Sunday.
Full disclosure: I got a respiratory illness not unlike pneumonia (and actually, a lot worse) each of the three times I ran for mayor. It’s horrible for the candidate and of no interest or concern whatever to anybody else. But in the modern world of must-know-everything-now, this is what passes for a scandal. Insert deep sigh here.
But while I’m happily refraining from social media, I am returning to the blog. What can I say? I have no real defense for myself. I just enjoy the act of writing, and having some kind of voice (no matter how faint) in this community means something to me.
But it’s going to be different. I used to try to post two or three times a week, but now I’ll limit myself to just about one. My goal is be less reactive and more thoughtful.
I also used to be occasionally sharp and snarky in tone because that was the style of the blogosphere and, to be honest, because it’s just a hell of a lot of fun to write that way. But I often regretted the impact that my fun might have had on real people, even the dreaded Gov. Scott Walker. (I joke with Isthmus editors that I could write “Scott Walker is a bad man” a thousand times in one post and stay at the top of the most-read list for a week.) I can’t promise that from here on out I’ll be a saint, but I do plan to blunt the barbs and try to see things from the other side or, as is usually the case, from the many other sides.
When I was in high school I used to start every summer by reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. (Yeah, I know. I didn’t get a lot of dates.) I learned that there’s something good about checking out for a while, slowing down and trying to appreciate the here and now. In short, there’s a lot to be said for simplifying your life and just concentrating on whatever happens to be in front of you at the moment.
In fact, studies have demonstrated that multitasking isn’t really possible. The human brain can only do one thing at a time. When we think we’re doing more than one task we’re really just taxing our brain as it flips quickly from concentrating on one job to the other and back again. This doesn’t work all that well. According to an article on the Talentsmart website, Stanford researchers have found that “people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.”
And other studies suggest that multitasking can actually reduce a person’s IQ and make them less empathetic. Think about the guy in your staff meetings who is always looking down at his phone. What’s he like? Can I rest my case now?
It’s quaint to think that Thoreau believed that his 1840s America was moving much too fast. But it’s all relative, I suppose. Fast-moving trains and the telegraph might have freaked out Thoreau, while today everybody can literally speak to the world in an instant. Regardless of the technology, the principle of the problem is the same: The speed of communication is overwhelming the human ability to process information.
It seems to me that we’d be better off cultivating habits of reticence. I’m looking for a big comeback by stoic philosophers. Zeno forever! Say less. Do more. Maybe people will discover the joy and inner satisfaction of just shutting the heck up once in a while.
Not likely. We live in a world run by extroverts, and in that world America is the capital of the outgoing and the hyper-expressive. We are Oprah Nation.
Still, I am free to have my own, quiet personal revolution. And I fervently believe that there’s a lot to be said for saying a lot less. So, you’ll still hear from me in these parts, just less often. But, I hope, what you might read will be stronger, more useful insights.
When I was in my late teens — I don’t know, 16, 17, 18, something like that — my sister Janice, who must have known that I was reading Thoreau and not getting dates, gave me a birthday card with this Thoreau quote:
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
God knows, at the time I was not keeping pace with my companions. But I’ve come to this point in life where I have gained the freedom to step to the music I hear. It beats more slowly. See you next week.
