On Going Web-free at Home

Several posts ago, I mentioned that my wife and I were experimenting with another lifestyle-change; we wanted Sunnyside (at least for a time) to go web-free. It's been six weeks now since we got ourselves disconnected, and six weeks is long enough I figure, to give us a feeling for how it's going. To tally up the costs, whatever they might be. To sum up the rewards as well. Sunnyside isn't a doctrinaire place. Neither my wife nor I want to stick with a project that's obviously silly. Of course you have to be open. You have to try. You have to give your ideas a fair shake. But if, after you've made a change, you realize that change hasn't been worth it, why would you want to stick with it? Just for the sake of pride? Naw, let it go.

The big picture is this: we Sunnysiders like to think of home as a quiet space. A refuge. A sanctuary. A place in which the mind is free to focus. To read. To write. To meditate and pray. To rest if necessary. To turn inward and reflect. To commune with living things in the immediate vicinity--birds at the feeder, plants inside the home. And to converse with other human beings in a common physical space that is as free from distraction as possible. 

Now, how much of this describes the sort of the home the web can really help us to create? Not much, frankly. If anything, the web, with its infinite variety of distractions and opportunities to connect with others here there and everywhere at any minute of the day or night--if anything I'm saying the web gets in the way, impedes the project of creating that meditative, communal space that we're reaching toward as the Sunnyside ideal. It's not, of course that the web doesn't have it's uses. They're probably just more professional and communal than familial and domestic, at least by Sunnyside's definition of familial and domestic. 

But I want to stay away from couching any of this in moral pronouncements or abstract general arguments: i.e. the web is good or bad; or the web is a force for this or that; or the web does this or that for us; or doesn't do this or that for us. There is of course a place for that conversation, but it's a huge theme, and one beyond the scope of this blog. And in any case, I'm not an analyst. I'm not that kind of thinker. I'm more interested in argument from direct experience. And I suspect most of my readers are too.

I think it's really worthwhile to note that we often try much harder than we need to, to prove with words and abstract arguments that what we are doing with our lives makes sense. Life isn't really all that abstract. It's about emotion. It's about the breath and the beat of the heart. It's about relationships and feeding them. So why work so hard to justify our opinions with words and abstract arguments before we've even tried to embody them in active living? It's like trying to prove that French cuisine is wonderful and worth devoting your life to, without ever actually cooking it or tasting it. For heaven's sake why not just run the experiment and record the results? Why not taste the pastries and look inside yourself and ask, how do these make me feel? What can I feel my devotion to souffle's doing to me? And how does this fricassee make the world at large more like the world I want?

At the time Sunnyside went web-free, here were a few questions on my mind:

• If I want a more peaceful, more meditative life, then how does surfing the web for an hour or so every evening make me feel more peaceful and meditative?
• If I want a more articulate focused mind, how does continuous access to email, news, and video contribute to that goal?
• If face-to-face conversation is of great value to me--especially face-to-face conversation with my wife--how does the presence of a screen in two corners of our living space contribute to or detract from that sort of conversation?

Now, it seemed to me I could answer these questions best by means of a live experiment, namely an experiment in subtraction. Why not subtract the web from the home, or rather, subtract the home from the web, and find out what happened? 

And here's what happened, at least to me.

1. I did not die. 
2. I found that with some regularity I missed listening to music streamed over the web. 
3. On occasion too, I missed being able to look up this or that fact or statistic.
4. One evening I wanted to check on my bank balance, and had to wait until the very next day to do so!
5. On the positive side, I have (over the last few weeks) felt a good deal less mentally scattered and more devoted to the activities I care about. I have in particular been reading more. And I like that.
6. I have also found myself far more able to fall into trance and reverie. I like to daydream. It's important to my work.
7. Also on the positive side, I have simply not had to resist the temptation to seek out more-or-less mindless entertainment on the web. This is an advantage worth extolling. You see, to not have to struggle with impulse is often a very good thing. Our planet has limited supplies of energy. We human beings do too. Why spend so much energy resisting the impulse to do what we don't really want to do, when we might be using that same energy positively and actively doing something that we really do want to do? Simply remove the temptation. Sure the removal is radical. But, like marriage and monogamy, it has its genuine advantages.
8. The change has also encouraged me to walk more, especially to the library. Use of the computers there is free. As is the company of many of the good citizens of Valparaiso. And I enjoy walking. It's a time to think and a time to be outside.
9. Intriguingly, although the number of hours that I have spent listening to music has declined since Sunnyside went web-less, the quality of my listening time has gone up. I am actually sitting down at the library exclusively to stream music. Last Friday in fact I sat down at a carrel and listened to an entire Brahms Piano Quintet. Deeply. Drinkingly. That sort of thing never happened before, when music was available at home at any time. So again, the law seems to hold: less is often more than we think. 

I should emphasize that by no means have the lives of us Sunnysiders become wholly Internet-free. Neither my wife nor I would really want that. We both have many uses for the web. We've simply acted to keep the web and its place in our lives in perspective. We've drawn a clear border (at our front door) demarcating where the web may be a part of our immediate experience and where it may not; and in doing so, we've affirmed our own power to control the medium for our own human advantage and use. After all, the web is a human creation, and ought to serve human purposes!

HB

Until Saturday the 23rd!