Unplugged
I’m a creaky 58-years old. I remember when I was young, going to bed was just to sleep and wake up the next morning refreshed. Today, retreating to my bedroom for a night’s sleep is a special ritual designed to totally detach intellectually and emotionally from the world. When my bedroom door closes, the world and I become two for at least nine hours. Buh bye…
When I go on vacation or take a three-day weekend with my girlfriend, my cell phone buzzes, rings, dings, what-have-you endlessly demanding my attention. Cell phone calls, texts, Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and hundreds of emails scream for my attention, all destroying any face-to-face communication I may want or need. When I get back to the office, I am body-slammed with a work pile and launch myself into it without being able to interact with anyone. Body language? What’s that? I adjust my “out of the office” email notice and dozens of emails hit my mailbox like gunfire. After two or three days back, my email inbox looks like a crammed railroad station. But still, I have not looked anyone in the eye or spoken face-to-face with anyone.
My spam email box hold hundreds…possibly thousands of phony-baloney emails selling me this and that. My car’s warranty must be exceptionally important because I get sold on it three times a day. “Normal” and “regular” office hours consist of eight or nine unabated hours of pounding the keys of an unrelenting computer. Computers do not reduce my workload. In fact, computers increase my workload.
The internet…what an amazing invention at my beck and call to help me “interact” with friends, family, and business contacts. There exists a “new normal.” Part of the “new normal” is having a cell phone that’s ever ready to interrupt me during meetings, meals, conversations, gardening, you name it… it must and will have your attention. The “new normal” now includes “phubbing.” Phubbing is staring and/or playing with your cell phone rather than looking at the faces of the people standing in front of you and talking to you. Today there is education without campuses, banking without banks, meetings without travel…. faceless communication is scheming to remove a giant chunk out of what it means to be human.
Heck, when I was a kid there were no cell phones, no color TVs, no internet, no transistor radios, no CDs, no DVDs, no nothing. When our television broke, Dad and I fixed it ourselves by replacing the tubes inside we’d bought at the hardware store. Now, we go online and click three buttons to have a new widescreen shipped to us from an airline terminal-sized warehouse just off the interstate.
It reaches a point from time to time that I feel techno-exhausted. I have to stop, park my cell phone and laptop and go outside. When I do this, I recall that when I “unplug” I am creating time for friends and family and perhaps more importantly, time to interact with God. Jesus commonly “went off alone” to pray. For example, “After He had sent the crowds away, He went up on the mountain by Himself to pray; and when it was evening, He was there alone.” Matthew 14:23
That’s what I need to do, and with greater frequency. As humans, we need (and many of us crave) to be within each other’s physical presence. Endless digital connections and communications are not healthy. We don’t need a metaverse…. we already have a universe. We need touch. We need to see each other’s body language and how we use our eyes and voices to express ourselves. Love isn’t an emoji.
We need to unplug. We need inviolable and uninterrupted time with our families and God. Technology burdens us with the task of juggling multiple lives and worlds. But it comes at a cost. I call it techno-exhaustion. When new technology comes out, I’m not excited. I don’t care how much it’ll “help me” or “make my life easier.” I don’t want to learn how yet another device works. I’m willing to plumb the depths of old technology for a while. I remember telephones that hung on the kitchen wall. I liked them.
The average person uses the internet 30-hours a week and the television nearly eight hours each day. As a culture and as a people, we desperately need to “unplug” from virtual reality and enjoy some actual reality. Instead of “capturing a memory” with our $600.00 cell phone, why not simply have one…watch it unfold before our eyes instead of our lenses?
Please, from time to time promise to “unplug” with me, look into the eyes of other people, and see that we are special creations of a living and loving God…and not a data point on a laptop.
“Be still, and know that I am God!” Psalm 46:10a
JG