2.5 Hrs Per Day, 12 Years: Let's Do the Math

Listen to presences inside poems,
Let them take you where they will.
— Rumi, Essential Rumi,
tr. Coleman Barks, p. 99





Still January 26, 2009

Here’s what Automated Weather Man from Gray, Maine, says tonight:
-12 to -5 tonight
Tues mostly sunny high about 20
Tues night mostly clear, becoming mostly cloudy around 10
Winter storm watch for Wednesday, moderate snow accumulation
Wed night low 10-15

Yay!! Warming up! Nice stuff falling out of sky!

But this is my weather life. What had taken up so much time in detail—and it’s not a bad way to spend time, tinkering with the weather, but still—this was 25 minutes of time a day, reading and re-reading the updated forecasts, looking at radar, reading watches and warnings and advisories. Getting hopes up, getting let down, or fulfilled sometimes. 25 minutes a day, now 5.

Oops, just went to the dashboard to use the calc, and there was the weather widget, showing the current temp at the airport (1 F) and the little snow icon for wed. OOPS! I confess. I was just on the internet for a moment.

OK, found sci calc. 25x365 is over 30 hours a year. More than an entire day and night. Just reading about the weather!

OK, if we’re going to go that far….let’s say I averaged 2.5 hours a day on the internet. This is: sitting down to check email, googling, researching, IMing, checking the weather.

That comes to….whoa. 38 days a year. Roughly 5.5 weeks a year, day and night.

This is a conservative estimate. It was probably more like 3 hours a day. There have been many nights when I could not sleep and I would be on the internet for 2-3 hours researching all kinds of topics in addition to time during the day. That’s 45 ½ days a year, or six-and-a-half weeks a year, day and night.

So, I’ve been on the internet quite a bit for the last 12 years. Just for the sake of estimates, let’s say I’ve been spending 6 solid weeks a year on the internet for 12 years. Are you ready?

72 weeks. 18 months. A year and a half of checking / writing email, researching, buying, reading web sites, googling, IMing, etc.

So in the last 12 years, only 10.5 of those years have been spent in some form of awareness of where I actually was sitting, living, sleeping. And this is only screen time. This doesn’t include the stolen moments anticipating and processing (“A&P”), which I think double or triple the time. Let’s be conservative and only double that time:
Screen time + A&P time:
12 weeks a year / 3 solid months, or 25% of my life
Total over the last 12 years: 3 years, or 25% of my life.

Now, that’s 25% of my LIFE, and it was spent during my waking hours only. Waking hours are 2/3 of my day on average, so what percentage of my WAKING LIFE have I spent on the internet in the last 12 years? I don’t know if I can do math that complicated anymore!
Let’s try.

37.5% of my waking time spent in screen time & A&P time. Over a third of my waking life consumed by the internet.

This is taking into account going to camp and being offline for a week at a time, as well as working as a web professional and working wired constantly for 8-10 hours at a time.

A&P time isn’t the same, but it does represent a significant departure from really being here and now.

So, now comes the big, “So what?” That is exactly what this book is about.

It's Still....Reallllly Cold Out

"Usually people are completely unaware of the roles they play. They are those roles."
— Eckhart Tolle

Still January 26, 2009

I’m getting incredibly blasé about the weather, which, considering how house-bound I’ve been feeling, is rather unbelievable.

Tonight Jeff told me over dinner that it’s supposed to be snowing Wednesday. “What? Really!?” I exclaimed. I pressed him for details but he was annoyingly vague. Still it occurred to me that I hadn’t called the weather forecast to find out when our prison sentence of excessively cold weather was coming to an end. Was I somehow enjoying the punishment too much?

I haven’t been mentioning this experiment to as many people the last week or two, but I should continue to mention it rather than not. People get inspired by it and also say some interesting things.

Inauguration Day, Part II

January 20, 2009
Inauguration Day, part II

After watching and celebrating at Brenda’s, we walked back home. Charlie stayed out for a bit with me, Baxter went in. I spent about 45 minutes scraping ice off the back porch. The deep untouched snow in the backyard etched in places where footprints had cut through to the back gate.

I kind of wished I had a radio to bring out to listen to NPR while scraping ice off the deck (the thick kind that forms under the icicles). But then I thought, that’s not possible. This is what’s happening right now: the white snow, the sunshine, the icicles dripping, the ice scraping off, sometimes in sheets, mostly in scraggly bits. The vivid blue sky. A beautiful inauguration day. Here in my adopted home state of Maine. Letting the mind digest the intensity of what we’d been listening to, watching. Not overloading. Not incessantly repeating. Not communicating with people I cannot see or hear using an electronic device.
*
Today would have been a good day for wikipedia. Yesterday too. I think about investing in a real encyclopedia set even though it would need to be updated in 5 minutes. Then I remember world book on the computer. Maybe this is in our future. But I still have missed spending days with the old encyclopedias. Remember the encyclopedia salesmen? Remember enjoying a good book?
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When the kids have questions we would have googled, I write them down to address later. There’s a mindfulness to that.
*
Today I phoned people when I thought of them instead of facebooking, texting, emailing. I called my cousin Sue when I thought how our grandmother Helena would have LOVED today, and also her mother Katherine. She was totally touched that I called. Later I realized it’s because people don’t do this so often. I phoned my aunt and uncle, and of course mrk in Seattle, who sounds like he might have a new girlfriend because he didn’t really have time to talk (!).
*
I seem to be recovering from my weather prediction addiction. Now I’m content with sun/no sun; general temperature range; precipitation or no; wind or no. I don’t need to obsessively call the weather line the way I would obsessively check the weather online.
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A possible name for what this journal is (even though it’s on the computer): Anablog. Or the Antiblog. As in, not a Blog.
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Walking to the Rosemont Market tonight between the piles of snow (there's so much now that it’s hard to find a place to put it). I’m becoming a more concentrated version of myself again. Walking along that evening road, amidst all that snow, not available to anyone by the digital networks except maybe Jeff.

That's-so-cool! syndrome

"In the long run, men only hit what they aim at." — Thoreau, Walden

Still January 6, 2009

The idea of leading one-month internet retreats—a weekly discussion and people would rely on each other, and check in once a week to see what they were learning, what it was like. Cool idea, don’t think I'd want to lead it. Too much else interesting to do.
*
That’s So Cool syndrome — lots of stuff on the internet is cool — but do I need it, really?

For example:
Snow coming tomorrow. Habitually I would spend 20 minutes on the internet and computer, reading and re-reading the winter weather advisory or storm watch / warning gleaning as much excitement out of those words as possible, look at the radar a few times, look at my dashboard to see the weather widget show the snowflakes coming down (well, tomorrow anyway) that I could see perfectly well from my window. “That’s so cool!” and it is.

But…Tonight: 3 minute forecast over the phone. I actually had to stand up to go and get the phone for that, until sitting here on my butt. And instead of scrutinizing all the available data, I take 3 minutes listening the forecast. Do I personally really need more? Why was I allowing it to take so much time?

Because it’s cool! Because I feel cool looking at radar and having some clue about how to interpret it. There’s nothing wrong with that — and Jeff and I have bonded some over this — but if my time is my life, is this really how I need to spend my life? Could I limit myself someday to 5 minutes a day of obtaining the weather forecast? Just curious.
*
Another victory of the experiment: today I learned to hand-card wool. There’s a lifetime of refinement but at least I can do it and it’s getting easier. It was the first time I’d done this since second grade — Charlie’s age. And I learned because I had the time.

This is the thing: so much time was spent on the internet doing absolutely nothing real. Research, yes; networking, yes; communication, yes; but most of the rest of it, unnecessary. Titillation is the word that comes to mind, and that’s probably the more socially acceptable word for it. There is in places like Facebook the absolutely convincing idea that I was doing something real…and yes, passing notes is real. Harnessing all that power to help elect our new president or raise money for the Nature Conservancy via ad exposure is real.

But…but….but…the here and now of it is breathtakingly simple: more time in front of a computer screen, pointing and clicking, lost inside it and the mind, consciousness of the here and now utterly lost in cyberspace. Or worse, half-lost then and before and after — the anticipation, the processing post-surfing, when my precious children might be asking questions, wanting my full attention but never quite getting it, or getting it rarely. I got pretty good at pretending to be fully present, or so it seemed.

OK, off to my very real bed which already has my very real sleeping husband in it.

If right now is my life,...

still Friday, January 2, 2009

"If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so-called 'responsibilities' accumulate to fill them up. One master compares them to 'housekeeping in a dream'. We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time." Sogyal Rinpoche



It is weird to notice the number of times per day the impulse to get online comes. It is dozens. Today the panic is less. Detox! The fear that I'm committing "connection suicide" is lessening, and it's only January 2nd.

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Today — the weather report — a paragraph at the top of the New England edition of the New York Times. Regional, not so specific. "It's winter!...blah blah blah." The phone — dialing up to the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine.

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Today — heading up the street to get some lunch. All the old brick buildings of the old port district and shops in their post-holiday sales. Then later, massage school work — studying polarity and sending out postcards or making phone calls to get some practice sessions rolling again.

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Being on the internet for me is, in part, an attempt to address the fear of "missing something" — an age-old human fear? — but hours a day were lost sometimes in cyberspace, and sometimes more because of being distracted thinking about what I'd read, with whom I'd chatted — and if right now is my life, how much did I miss in an attempt not to miss anything?