Less screen, more page

NOSE REMAINS ON FACE

Digital detox. It's one of those fashionable terms, and concepts, that have been cropping up a lot recently. Spending too much of your life on social media? Then go cold turkey, remove the app, banish the icon, close down your account. Hey presto, instant improvement. Maybe.

But, as is often the problem with radical solutions, throwing away all the bad that a thing does involves losing all the good too. Babies and bathwater time.

For others the more sensible approach is culling - reducing the number of friends on Facebook, stop following so many on Twitter, and so on and so on. But that doesn't always lead to a reduction in the time spent looking at a screen. It may just mean you end up missing fewer posts, but spend as much time as before interacting with a smaller group.

I wanted to reduce my time staring at a small screen. For a specific reason. One of the (pre-planned) joys of retirement is finally having the time to read, and reread, all those books I've bought over the decades. Shelves full of volumes as yet unperused. In my first full post-work year I got through about sixty. In subsequent years the total has been somewhere in the mid forties. Until last year, which saw a miserable thirty one pass before my eyes. It's not even as if there were any mammoth tomes in that list either. I simply wasn't giving enough of my life to the printed (or e-ink) page. That's the change I was aiming for.

Just because you don't like your nose there isn't a good reason to remove it in the hope it'll improve your face (some might disagree in my case....). So the detox scenario was never an option. Twitter connects me with one world, Facebook with another, and Instagram is a creative outlet of sorts. But cutting back is easy enough.

So there are days when the tablet is never turned on. The phone is around, but kept in pocket unless needed. Don't respond to every email instantly, ignore the buzzes and chimes and vibrations unless expecting something important. I can catch up with much of what I need to when I sit down at my desk to go through my daily writing activities (less strain on these old eyes too!). And use the time gained to pick up whatever I'm reading at the moment.

It's working, so far. The end of January is still some way off and I'm about to polish off my sixth novel. I've been in seventies London, Highgate Cemetery, nineties Cairo, medieval Scotland and France, modern Japan and am just about to go to war with Saddam Hussein. My brain is far more active, my imagination widened, my empathy engaged.

An introvert's solution to the digital domination.