Taking a technology vacation

Here’s an interesting account of someone trying to step back from being online, in touch, and on call 27/7.

There are interesting lessons here for many people, including some meditators. It’s increasingly common these days for people to take laptops and cell phones on retreats. When I was a lad (even just ten years ago) it just wasn’t acceptable (not seen as necessary) for people to make phone calls when on retreat. Phones were definitely for emergencies. But now you get people disappearing “behind the bikeshed” in order to have chats or even to do work.

And as for laptops, although I’ve never taken one on a retreat I’ve been on as a retreatant, I have taken one when I’ve been teaching. In fact that seems to be pretty much standard these days — so many of our notes are in electronic form — but I think that more retreatants are taking their notebooks with them, which is a huge shame. Sometimes people are even checking email!

Making phone calls and being online on a retreat are just totally the opposite of what’s meant to be going on, which is an abandonment of the normal “opiates” of busyness and discursiveness that we use to keep from experiencing ourselves more deeply. But it’s getting harder and harder to convince people that it’s even possible to disconnect for a week or weekend. The same unacknowledged and untreated anxiety that drives them to be in touch 24/7 makes them think that something bad — something really, really bad — is going to happen if they’re out of contact.

There’s a level of magical thinking in there, of course, which takes the form of thinking that being in touch continually through electronic devices is going to keep everything all right. It’s certainly nothing quite as rational as “if my mother falls and breaks her hip I can drop everything and go to help her” because that could be achieved just as easily by giving the phone number of the retreat center as an emergency contact. The thinking seems to be more an unconscious assumption that the world will somehow run more smoothly if we’re in contact with it. In other words it’s egotism — the sense that we are so important to the running of the world that it can’t get by without us. It’s that egotism that gets fed by taking cellphones and laptops on retreat, and that’s why we need to unplug once in a while and just experience ourselves.

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