Always On to Always Off in 5 Steps
I’m still toying with the idea that when the end of the year comes I might turn my life from always on and available to always off and unavailable – the 70′s and 80′s, so to speak. I don’t think its necessary to be a total isolationist, but I’m interested to see how it works in the real world – will I shrink and die a horrible lonely ignored death?
So how do you turn yourself off in 5 easy steps? Here’s the obvious answer, but one we’ll ignore until it hits us directly in the chops…
Step One. Disengage yourself from your mobile telephone. Its a sham. Why are you paying a fifty or a hundred Australian dollars per month for that piece of rubbish. Is text worth it? That’s a lot of cash you’re forking over. And when someone phones you at 3am they’re pissed off that you’re pissed off – right… ditch the phone. If you have a pager – yep, into the rubbish.
Step Two. Disengage from email, instant messenger, Facebook and any other social networking or online communication tool as much as possible. One work email for necessity and one non-work email (for example, its a requirement of the university course) if you have no option, but only check the private email once per day at most. The business email is used from 8.30am to 4.30pm on weekdays.
Step Three. Explicitly write on your business card that you are only available between 8.30am and 4.30pm from Monday to Friday. If they want to shoot the breeze someone can call you on the landline like a human being at a reasonable hour, they can drop by and have a few beers. They cannot bother you at 9pm on family video night with a request for changes to an insignificant button on a minor page on their website.
Step Four. Start paying your bills in cold hard cash. Walk right into the bank and withdraw money from a human being. Smile. Humans should be talking to humans, not texting them. Incite your family to enjoy a real life, too. A comptuer friend is not a real friend… a computer friend is not a real friend. Healthy children are important so let them play outside with real toys.
Step Five. Invite your friends over, take your family out, drink beer and ignore the masses. There’s an increasingly loud background noise to living in the computer age which gets impossible to tune out. Let your child / teenager have their mobile telephone but only when they are out of the house for the day. No texting other teenagers while the family watches television – the same for Facebooking. Yes there will be tears, but that’s real life. Making choices should be cooler than having bling.
I know a lot of people would reel against this regime saying they won’t get work, they’ll suffer socially or the real world will collapse. Others might call me a bomberless unabomber. My guess is what threatens you is an addiction to the constant stress of an always on society.
Try to think of other ways you can disengage from the external noise… what works for you? The always on bullshit is only working because we’re all buying into it – so stop complaining. Stop expecting others to buy into it, too.
