Actively Unplugging

            I am wearing a new watch with this amazing feature:  it tells time!  That’s it! 

            I do have an Apple watch, all plugged in and ready to go.  It’s perfectly fine, works great, tracks my every step, my calories, and my heart rate.  It can even do an EKG – and I’ve done numerous ones.  I’m in sinus rhythm!  Yay!

            The Apple watch is a marvel, but what it does basically boils down to two things: First, it keeps me distracted because it goes off constantly.  Every text message, email, Ring doorbell-activating package delivery.  It pulsates on my wrist when I am driving and using the map app, which is helpful and yet intrusive.  It tells me to get up if I’m in danger of not reaching my “stand goal.”  Disturbingly, I now get phantom vibrations on my wrist when I’m not wearing it – just like I get on the right side of my rear end, where my iPhone sits in the pocket of my jeans or shorts.  Those phantom twitches creep me out.  Also spooky:  sometimes when I’m wearing the Apple watch, it just lights up red underneath.  What does it want?  What is it doing to me?

And second, it fills my head with all sorts of data about … well, me.  My steps. My movement.  My standing up.  My screen time – guess what, it keeps going up!  To be fair, that is because my family and I play numerous New York Times games (Wordle, Connections, Strands, the Mini, Letter Boxed, plus I do Sudoku and Tiles) and share our scores – for which I have zero regrets.  My husband, Mark, and I also use the Bible app, which has our online daily reading plan.

But that’s on my iPhone.  Not my Apple watch or iPad, or my Mac.  Yes, I have four devices.  Mark has even more, because he has an extra iPhone for work, a work computer, a laptop, and his home computer, plus his iPad.  When we go on trips, he has multiple navigation systems going at once, because we like to take the back roads.  So there we are trying to take the roads less traveled, even as we use extra technology to do it.  It drives me crazy.

            I have an iPad, and I don’t use it.  Well, actually, I do use it, every night, because I play the White Noise app on it when I sleep.  “Ocean Waves Crashing” is very restful.  But I could give it up – because I also have White Noise app on my phone!  I could just use that!  Now you might say, and you would be right to point it out, that I could just turn on an old-school box fan for white noise.  Well, ha ha, joke’s on you – I have one of those, too!  I use it in addition to the White Noise, so every night we go to sleep with the fan and the ocean!  Country and Western!  It’s like a wind tunnel in the bedroom!  We also have three dogs in there, and two of them snore.  So, I could use the decibel checker on my Apple watch, but I don’t wear it at night.

            Actually, I haven’t worn it for the better part of a week, and I don’t miss it.  In fact, I feel more relaxed because it’s not going off all the time.  It owned me and I didn’t even realize it.  I’m not using the iPad, except as a noise machine, and I could get an actual noise machine.  They still make them.

            I don’t do much with social media anymore, either.  I got off Twitter because it was a time suck.  I kept going down rabbit holes.  I am susceptible to conspiracy theories!  I admit it!  So I cut the cord on that, just quit cold turkey, and got another piece of my life back.

            I don’t know how to use Instagram, except to see what other people post.  Sometimes it goes into “vanish mode,” and I panic.

            I have two websites for my writing:  this one and my men’s health website, vitaljake.com.  I could use social media more effectively – or actually, at all – and boost my posts, and get a lot more traffic, and maybe even monetize the sites (although for the men’s health one, I will never take ads from any health-related products because I don’t want to lose my credibility) – but nobody is breaking down my door with offers.

            I like Facebook, but I hardly ever go on there.  For the same reason: it’s a time suck.  All of a sudden, an hour has gone by, and I have nothing to show for it.  So I steer pretty clear of it.  I know that I miss out on a lot, but I figure if it’s really important, people will call, text, email, or even, crazy thought, send a letter by snail mail.

            I’m unplugging, and it feels great. 

            The world is so much bigger than our little tiny screens.  I have a friend who is a second-grade teacher, and she said that many of her students’ parents are self-involved, on their devices all the time, and they put their kids in front of screens to entertain them.  They don’t help them with their homework, don’t eat together, don’t spend much quality time just hanging out and talking.  These seven-year-old kids even watch screens in the car – either their video games, or cartoons on their phones, or on the DVD screens in front of them.

Everyone loses here.  The kids are missing out, and so are the parents.  I have seen a bunch of articles on the benefits of banning cell phones in the classroom.  Here’s one, but there are plenty if you want to read up on it.  It takes 20 minutes for a child’s brain to refocus after being on the cell phone.

            When my daughter and son-in-law lived in Wyoming, we used to go to Yellowstone a lot.  It’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.  The scenery is truly breathtaking, it’s pristine.  You can see moose, elk, grizzly bears, bison, eagles, wolves, coyotes, mountain lions, bobcats, owls – wild and often massive animals that just want to live their lives, and if you can respect that, you get the privilege of watching them.   Sadly, a lot of people don’t grasp this concept. That’s because either they have played so many video games that they think they’re in one, or they are just oblivious.  So yes, you can go to Yellowstone and see the Grand Tetons and stunning Alpine lakes and weird, multicolored sulphur pools and geysers, and rivers with trout that the bears are actively trying to catch and eat…

            Or you can watch it on your phone!  While you’re there!  I have walked around Yellowstone and stepped out of the way of oblivious people who aren’t looking at the scenery directly.  They’re looking at it on their screens as they take selfies.  They’re walking backward and holding up their selfie sticks, seeing wildflowers or mountains or giant bison as a backdrop, in their own rear-view mirrors.  They’re literally missing the forest for the trees – except the trees are just images on a screen!  They could be wallpaper on the phone, in the background just like my ocean sounds.  Fake images instead of fake noise. Or maybe you put a soundtrack to it for the next Instagram post.  Hello to all my fans and followers, I’m an influencer and I’m live-Tweeting at Old Faithful!

            I just cannot imagine that I will get to the end of my life and think, “Darn, I just wish I had spent more time on social media!”  Wish I had spent less time talking with the kids!  If I had just put in more screen time, maybe I could have made it past the easy level of Sudoku!  If only I had made more memes and reels!

©Janet Farrar Worthington