Screened In

The Art of Living Free in the Digital Age

Anthony Silard

• Publisher: Inner Leadership Press
• Year: 2020
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780981785332
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Psychology

PART ONE

DISCONNECTED

1

A History of Praising and Criticizing a New Technology

One night about four years ago, I stood next to the crib of my son, who was about fourteen months old at the time, and watched him sleep. His arms were splayed out, palms toward the sky, in a position of complete innocence and vulnerability. Becoming a father changed me in many unexpected ways: the love a parent has for her or his child stands alone; it's unlike any other feeling I had ever experienced. My love for him transformed at times into feelings of protectiveness and fear. I felt so strongly, in the depths of my soul as I watched him that night, how much I longed for him to live a long, healthy life.

That was when it hit me: if he makes it to the ripe old age of eighty-one, he will live until 2094. My thoughts of the future suddenly became more salient than ever before. My mind began to race; I soon realized that when he is my age (I was forty-seven at the time), it will be 2060. I couldn't believe it: this human being sleeping innocently in front of me will live ten years past 2050 if he makes it to my age. I realized in that moment that I was writing this book for him, and for many others like him who will hopefully occupy our new world long after my departure.

The importance of plunging my heart, mind, and soul into writing this book multiplied exponentially in my thoughts as I realized that the concepts I was writing about—from the effects of the Internet on how we communicate, work, and keep ourselves safe to our need to find balance in and actually enjoy our time on this earth—would affect how he experienced his life. I felt a deep yearning for him to have the privileges I've had—to truly live, to connect with others, to feel relatively safe, and to thrive in this wondrous physical world surrounded by its spectacular, awe-inspiring nature and relatively healthy human beings to interact with and draw meaning from.

That night watching my son asleep in his crib, thinking about the promise and beauty of a new life, was the second critical moment in my life that inspired me to write Screened In. The first occurred five years earlier when I watched a man die.

Tragedy in Yosemite

I was driving with a few friends to Yosemite National Park in Northern California. We were in search of a hike, and I proposed that we take what we later discovered was a wrong turn, which propelled us onto a long, winding road headed into the middle of nowhere. After numerous twists and turns, we encountered three cars stopped in the road, one after the other. In front of the first car was the scene of an accident. Bodies and motorcycles were strewn on the tarmac. I stepped out of the car and walked past the cars.

There were two people lying silently on the pavement about seven feet apart. A third, along with his bike, had ended up on the dirt embankment about five feet above the road. The two people on the road, a couple who had been riding on the same bike, were covered with blood. I approached the woman and asked her how she was doing.

“I'm all right,” she replied. “How is my husband?”

“He also looks okay,” I told her. “Help is on the way.”

I slowly poured water into her lips and then her husband's. The third person, lying in the dirt on the embankment, had been riding on his own while listening to music on his headphones and had lost control of his motorcycle and rammed into the couple. He was unable to speak.

A park ranger finally arrived and put an oxygen mask on the man on the embankment. I listened to his breathing; it had an uneven, staccato sound I had never heard before that sent a chill through my body. It sounded as if he had broken a windpipe, lung, or jaw. The paramedics arrived about five minutes later. As I left, he was being rushed into an ambulance. A helicopter flew overhead, trying to locate a place to land and medevac him to the nearest hospital.

A few days later, I was having dinner with friends and told them what had happened. “For some reason, I don't think that man made it,” I said, remembering the disconcerting sound of his uneven breathing. “I just had the feeling as soon as I heard him breathe that he was too internally damaged to survive.”

“Why don't you Google the accident to find out what happened?” one of my friends asked.

I hadn't thought of that. I went online, and within a few minutes discovered he had not even made it alive into the ambulance. He died within minutes of when I stood up from kneeling next to him to make way for the paramedics.

Cleaning House

The next morning, I decided to clean up my email account, as my old emails were taking up too much space. I deleted about five thousand emails. I had a sinking feeling I was unable to shake, that worsened by the minute, as I went through thousands of emails I had sent or received: they had amounted to absolutely nothing. I felt like most of my long, laborious hours spent dutifully typing away at my desktop had done nothing but raise clouds of dust.

I couldn't shake the image in my mind of the man who died on the embankment. My memory of him was followed by the devastating feeling that so many of my limited breaths in this lifetime had been expelled from my still healthy lungs while I sat hunched over this machine, an exercise in futility at the most primal, deepest existential level. I deleted hundreds upon hundreds of emails I had systematically labeled for various categories of my life—acquaintances, conferences, book sales, foreign rights, dating—that had led to nothing meaningful whatsoever. Well, I thought to myself, for every five hundred or a thousand emails there was the spare message that had led to something positive, perhaps even something beautiful. Was it all worth it for that occasional email? I couldn't figure out the answer to that question; I still can't.

The mental picture of the man lying on the embankment persisted. It was the first time I had watched a man die right in front of me. I thought about the ways I try to make a difference in the world, to help others, to improve their lives in some way. I realized that each of us has one means of truly making the lives of others better, of discovering the form in which we are called upon to give to others.

For me, that form was to write—to pour the deepest essence of myself into the written word with the objective of making life easier, more understandable, more livable, and more appealing for my brothers and sisters with whom I share this planet.

Diffuse Energy

So much of my energy had been poured not into writing, but other ways to contribute, many of which were probably more manifestations of my insecurities about paying the bills than a genuine desire to help people—in other words, mostly futile emails attempting to drum up new contracts and business. I've never been a businessman; I'm a writer, I thought to myself.

I sat there checking “Delete” in the box next to message after message—each virtual missive spawned by my insecurities and fears of not being “good enough” as a writer, each drafted to attract new clients, each falling on deaf ears, or, more aptly, over-weary eyes trained on a screen for much too long.

I also had less altruistic thoughts: I was throwing my breaths away; working until seven every evening; returning home to my wife an unappealing vessel of stress and fatigue; a weary, humorless soul recovering from the day's digitally mediated ups and downs; a robotic automaton deficient in the vitality of life; a deflated, disappointing dinner date. For six years, I had set an alarm on my cell phone to ring at six in the evening to remind me to stop working—and then “snoozed” (ironically, in my case synonymous with “worked”) until around seven. I changed the alarm, for the first time ever, to go off at five, with the intention to stop working by half past.

Then I called my guitar teacher and set up my next two lessons. Playing guitar helped me feel something deep inside. It helped me bring my life into alignment, albeit temporarily, with the rhythm of an instrument that does not care about any of the glowing screens surrounding me. I would play it as it had been played for centuries (by novices like myself seeking rhythmic respite from the trivialities of life) because that is its purpose.

I decided to schedule my guitar lessons at six so I would have no other alternative but to stop working by then, like it or not. I would start doing yoga more. I checked the paper for upcoming concerts and discovered that Maná—both my wife's and my favorite rock band—was playing the following week; I bought tickets on craigslist and thought about how to surprise her.

The Need for Reconnection

Thinking back to the man on the embankment gasping his final breaths, I realized that our time on the only planet (that we know of) that supports organic life is so limited, and that our lives are so fragile. We have no idea whatsoever when it will be over, and it can end just like that, in a matter of seconds, as it did for him. We have to embrace each day, and do our best to truly live and experience life while we still have the opportunity.

We have a limited number of breaths to take. He lost this ability—to use his lungs to breathe in oxygen—and his life flickered out as precipitously as a candle under an open window. I realized that I am not afraid of dying. I imagine there will be some suffering, and then silence. I just want to make the most of the limited time I have left on this earth—to actually experience the life within each day that is there to embrace and enlarge or dismiss and miss—and also help others to live with more grace and happiness during the limited time they have left.

This motivation drives the pages that follow. This book is about how each of us can reclaim our essential freedom and humanness in the digital age. Why? Because, as numerous social psychological studies have found, the people you surround yourself with (possibly including you) are now most likely less empathetic, less comfortable with themselves, and more depressed and lonely than they were only a few decades ago. While some of these studies are correlational and note that screen time and these unhealthy variables are both rising (which could point to another variable other than screen time driving these variables upward), others suggest a stronger, predictive relationship. For example, one randomized controlled trial assigned otherwise similar individuals to either spend more or less time on their screens, while another simply monitored screen use over time in a random set of individuals. Both studies found that more screen time causes increased loneliness, depression, and anxiety, and less emotional connection with others.

I've spent the past ten years researching and teaching people about how to manage complex emotions such as loneliness and trauma. After interviewing hundreds of people from all walks of life and listening to their stories about what has precipitated the loneliest moments of their lives, I'm convinced that the recent increases in screen time and loneliness are inextricably linked.

No Two Places at Once

As we will see below, this link is not far-fetched due to a “displacement effect” (think: the water displaced when you drop a bowling ball in a bathtub, which I'm sure you do often) in which more time online equates to less time face-to-face with family and friends. This effect was first observed by social psychologist Robert Kraut and his research team at Carnegie Mellon University in the late ’90s when they provided free computers, Internet access, and a phone line to ninety-three families in Pittsburgh. They subsequently tracked the activities and emotional states of every family member over ten years old who was interested in joining the study (169 people in total) for two years.

The researchers found that the more time these individuals spent online, the less time they spent in person with family members and friends—and the lonelier and more depressed they became. Because Kraut and his colleagues surveyed these family members before they received daily access to a computer and the Internet, the research team was able to identify electronic communication as a cause of social isolation, depression, and loneliness.

A decade and a half later, nothing has changed. Consider the experience of Hannah, the vice president of a technology company in San Francisco I interviewed last year who recounts how loneliness and time on her digital devices impacted her life after a recent breakup:

After a six-year relationship ended in 2016, I jumped into another relationship in 2017. Following the most recent breakup, I realized how much I have relied on others to feel happy. I have spent the last eight years of my life relying on someone else for fulfillment. Throughout these experiences, I made it a priority to display my relationships and outings online for others to see. I wanted others to see how happy I was. Scrolling through my Instagram feed has become a bad habit and quite unhealthy because I have the tendency to compare my life with the lives of others. People have never witnessed any authenticity or my true emotion of loneliness because I choose not to upload that part of my life. I choose not to upload when I am struggling emotionally, socially, or financially. This habit has only reinforced the fact that I utilize social media as a drug to temporarily cure my social isolation.

These interviews have convinced me that the reason we're unable to cope with the dysfunctional nature of our lives is that the new technology-induced social norms we unwittingly conform to are dysfunctional. Our smartphone and screen use have propelled us down an unfulfilling path. We have been promised connection. Instead, we have ended up with loneliness and misery.

A grim picture? Yes, when you consider that loneliness is more detrimental to our health than smoking and, in older people, twice as likely as obesity to precipitate death. Yet as you will read in the coming pages, such a scenario is an unfortunately accurate portrait of what our lives have become.

The Internet in Historical Perspective

In order to understand how we've become so hooked by the Internet, let's first put it in historical perspective. After all, it's not the first time that a new technology has come along and upended many previous customs and shaken up our society.

Throughout our collective history, people have either enthusiastically embraced or warily distrusted new technologies. As with any medium that changes the status quo, technology has always attracted flocks of both enthusiasts and detractors. The invention of the typewriter in the 1870s, for instance, quickly divided the public. Newspaper and magazine editorials and articles proliferated, taking sides on whether or not it was polite to use a typewriter.

Many considered the typewriter discourteous and an insinuation that the receiver could not read script. Others disparaged the invention as harmful to eyesight, and cited statistics that more people than ever wore eyeglasses. Still others deemed the typewriter inconsiderate of privacy—sound familiar?—as clerks had presumably read the typed page in addition to the writer. Capturing the ambivalence surrounding the typewriter, the State Department called it a “necessary evil.”

The inventions kept coming: the next half-century would revolutionize how people went about their lives. A decade after the invention of the typewriter, the telegraph—from the Greek for “to write from a distance”—was heralded by Scientific American in 1881 as having ushered in “a kinship of humanity.” Again, sound familiar? The Victorians were not so sanguine, and lamented that the telegraph meant that “the businessman of the present day must be continually on the jump.”

Turn It Up

A decade later, the Italian inventor Guglie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Part One: Disconnected
• Part Two: The New World Order
• Part Three: Reconnected
• Commencement
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Back Cover