As I write these words, I have a deep-seated desire to minimize the Microsoft Word document that they reside in, open up Chrome and explore the wide world of the Internet. I view the web as a giddy child in a candy store—a passive consumer that finds all sorts of fascinating and bizarre products there. I doubt I’m addicted—but isn’t this what every addict says?
This passion (read: borderline addiction) has hurt my ability lately to focus deeply on a task/issue/idea at hand—arguably one of the most important touchstones of a thriving intellectual life. The ubiquity of an Internet connection allows me to look for the shiny and new before the important. Experiences I once derived meaning from now are distracted by what may lie in the virtual world. Perhaps the most vicious personal consequence of the Web is its ability to suck the boredom or the pressure from a moment in time and deny me the simple and scary pleasure of just being with my living, breathing self.
Due to these concerns, I tried an experiment for a short portion of this summer: I didn’t allow myself access to any electronic communication for 23 hours of the day, every day, for 2 weeks. At a time in the summer when I wasn’t surrounded by friends, parties and academic events—or bombarded by texts and e-mails about them—I found this a reasonable goal. I left my laptop and iPhone with a trusted friend in Mirrielees and biked back from Crothers to check on it only after about 11 p.m. every night. In this last hour of the day, I checked my e-mail/Facebook/Twitter, returned missed calls and did the interrupting, usually insignificant work of digital communication that ripped apart my attention span throughout the day.
By the end of the first day at this enterprise, I remember feeling vague symptoms of withdrawal. I remember reaching for my backpack to pull my laptop out in my dorm room and finding nothing. I would halfway reach into my pocket for my iPhone, and my hand would grasp for open space. Suddenly, the distance between me and other people mattered, and there existed a concrete barrier to communicating with them. I found myself having to plan my phone calls and e-mails ahead of time.
Yet there was something deeply liberating about being with a book or a person or an idea and knowing with definite certainty that nothing in the world would bother this interaction. My days became simpler, filled with reading, writing, running and working. For the first time in perhaps a decade, I wrote out things with my hand. Not just sentences, but whole pages of a story flew out of a lead pencil! My penmanship got better, and I could suddenly read my own handwriting with ease.
Those two weeks were some of the most serene of my adult life. In some ways, I returned to my life as a 10-year-old: a person that looked up at the night sky more often, whose world had shrunk to his immediate surroundings. I read more vivaciously and thought more intently. My head lost the ringing necessity to check what was new with the world.
Eventually, after I regained possession of my laptop, my old habits came flooding back. I now no longer wrote things by hand. I slowly have regained that ringing, somewhat superficial curiosity for world events—if not for the nobler goal of engagement, then at least for the pure adrenaline rush of learning of something new that happened in the world.
As we emphasize our outer lives and our community on this start of the academic calendar, we must not forget what makes the social life of community so worthwhile. The very reason we subscribe to societies all around campus is because individuals in them have developed a rich and fascinating inner life of integrity and passion. These kinds of leaders are rare, even at this university of universities.
I invite you to be one of these intellectual leaders. The next time you feel like burning a few hours with a YouTube session, write to your senator. Pick up Mein Kampf and start reading. Look in the library archives for Steinbeck’s letters home as a Stanford college student. This CS major invites you to try his experiment of limited electronic communication and write to him (no really—snail mail it!).
To find out Aaditya’s P.O. Box, send him your last e-mail at [email protected]. This way, he will know to check his P.O. Box.