Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (2 page)

My anxiety astounded me. I even got the shakes a few times. My friend Dr. Amy Wicker (a real person, not a
90210
character), who happens to be a clinical psychologist in New York City, explained to me that
withdrawal is defined as a “syndrome of painful, physical and psychological symptoms that follow the discontinuance of an addicting
substance,” and although I didn’t feel
pain
per se, I definitely suffered both physical and psychological symptoms. Dr. Wicker added that while a smartphone is not considered an “addictive substance,” it is possible that one could experience significant emotional distress associated with an unfulfilled compulsion to check one’s phone, most notably a sharp rise in anxiety levels. Even though the psychological community does not yet officially recognize my addiction, I
felt
otherwise.

Fortunately, as the week progressed, the frequency of these mini panic attacks lessened from every few minutes to about every thirty minutes, then every few hours, and eventually not at all. Watching TV helped quell the panic. But then my missing DVR sent me onto a whole other slide of anxiety. I was watching some good old-fashioned, real-time television, and I would press the “fast forward” button incessantly, not able to fully compute why the commercial played at normal speed. You’ve probably gleaned by now that I like instant gratification; I like to see results and I absolutely hate waiting. I am completely incapable of watching television shows in real time. When I have guests over to my house and we decide to watch a show and the commercial comes on, I watch in awe as these people lower the volume and talk among themselves as if this is a completely acceptable thing to do. It’s not okay for me. I don’t even care about what happens next in the show (especially because I’ll miss half of it due to incoming texts and intervals of Instagram scrolling); I care about not waiting for it.

Reverting to watching TV in real time was torture. Experiencing
commercials is boring; it is also expensive. Do you know how hard it is to not buy what is being sold to you when you have nothing else to do but watch it? I bought two stand-alone elliptical machines that had no railings, just the little foot pedals. I bought them because they wouldn’t take up much space and the commercial told me I would get in shape. I bought a second one because I thought I would be lonely doing it by myself. When they came in the mail, I set them up and got on. I fell off and twisted my ankle. No railings! Three hundred forty-nine dollars later, they still collect dust in my closet.

Now that I was watching commercials, I noticed how many of them were devoted to telecommunication companies and the products and services they sell. It was like having to watch someone I had just broken up with star in five two-minute shows each hour. I missed my iPhone so much. Television is boring when you can’t IMDb that random actor you loved from
Twin Peaks
but whose name you can’t remember (Leland!) and text friends about how strange
American Idol
has become or what Walter White is going to do next.

Suddenly I had time on my hands. So what did I do? I decided to try to read a book. I know . . . revolutionary. I set my sights on Henry David Thoreau’s
Walden
. I may have been a bit optimistic about getting through a tome that dense in a week, but I had loved it in high school and I wanted to see if it still seemed as relevant and thrilling as an adult. Plus, I felt like I would relate to it; Thoreau spent two years in a cabin and I was spending a week without
social media. I was getting as pathetically close to a Walden Pond–type experience as you really can in this day and age.

If you aren’t familiar with it,
Walden
is part social experiment, part voyage of spiritual discovery. Thoreau chronicles two years he spent in a cabin he built in the woods. Basically, by removing himself from his social context, he was able to achieve a deeper understanding of himself, the world around him, and on and on. He set out to Walden to live “deliberately,” to “simplify, simplify” and thus enrich his life. I was basically Henry David Thoreau living in the twenty-first century. (Mrs. Smith, my dear tenth-grade English teacher, if you are reading this, please forgive me for comparing myself to Thoreau. I know I have no right.)

Confession (sorry again, Mrs. Smith): I hadn’t read a full book in a really long time—not including
Twilight
, which I had to read when I covered the
Twilight
trilogy at MTV. Even when I was reading that lighter fare, I was
still
easily distracted by whatever was around me. In fact, one of the most tangible changes in my life due to my addiction and increasingly distracted nature is that my attention span is shot. I am basically incapable of reading a single article in the newspaper or a chapter of a book in a single sitting.

One of my favorite weekend activities used to be lounging around and reading the
New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
front to back. My dad and I used to sit in the living room, read a paper each, then switch and read the other. Now, we sit down with our reading (usually via the app on our iPads) and within twenty minutes we’re playing online Hearts via Bluetooth. These days, when I try to read, I generally
get through the first line of each paragraph before my eyes start to skim and my fingers reflexively turn the page. I interrupt my “reading” every few minutes to check my iPhone. I usually make it through one or two articles but give up because I realize I’m not retaining anything. Sometimes I’ll manage to get through an entire article but realize I absorbed absolutely nothing because I spent the entire time thinking about the person who wasn’t texting me back . . . or how to respond to the person who was. If you’re anything like me, your eyes probably glazed over midway through this last paragraph. In fact, you’re probably texting right now, aren’t you? That’s okay. I totally get it.

Needless to say, at first it was difficult for me to focus on
Walden
. I had to read paragraphs over and over, because my mind was stuck in this rut:
I have to check my phone
. But after, once the phantom iPhone limb started to haunt me less frequently, I adjusted, and slowly but surely my attention span and focus came back. Suddenly, I was absorbing everything. And what’s more, I was enjoying it. Thoreau’s transcendentalist journey brought him self-reliance and self-sufficiency. He did not have to see company or hear a phone beep to feel confident or secure. He wrote:

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Those lines played over in my mind, even though the phrase “cut a broad swath” has always inexplicably made me cringe. On one level, I’d embarked on the experiment as a way to show my friends and family that I could do without my obsessive connection. But on a deeper level, I wanted to understand life on my terms again, to feel my feelings, whether positive or excruciatingly negative, and I wanted my time back, all the hours that I spent texting or Facebooking or tweeting. I wanted to get this experiment right so that afterward, in the coming weeks, months, and years, for the rest of my life, I would be able to see life in its raw form and so learn to live my life with less interruption and more deliberateness. But once I got into the thick of the experiment and I felt so alone and panicky, I started to get pretty bearish on the whole thing. Thoreau seemed to be better at this than me.

And then something changed . . .

It happened around day four. Suddenly, I found myself a little bit closer to Thoreau. I was walking more slowly everywhere I went. The words
leisurely pace
occurred to me. Things were starting to actually occur to me! I was looking around, noticing people, their faces, emotions, appearances, and style. I felt as if I hadn’t been down my own street for years. It reminded me of when I got my first pair of glasses in sixth grade—I walked outside and
looked at a big tree and
really
saw the tree. All the details that I had been missing amazed me. I hadn’t realized that I couldn’t see. Other things started coming into focus too. I was listening in meetings, engaging my friends in genuine conversations that lasted more than thirty seconds, and reading magazines and newspapers, which for the last two years I had complained I didn’t have time to read but had actually stopped reading because I could not concentrate on them. In fact, I always had the time but had wasted an estimated
four and a half hours per day
on my phone! Four and a half hours—time I could have spent reading several chapters of a novel, writing a blog, doing work, calling my grandparents, having a much-needed conversation with a friend or significant other, or even going to the gym (okay, probably not the gym). I did the math, and it was even more alarming: At that point, I had owned a smartphone for more than six years, and my addiction to it cost me roughly 9,855 hours. That’s
411 days
. Well over a
year
! And it had left me with a less-than-satisfactory ability to read, an obnoxiously low attention span for my friends and family, and an almost complete unawareness and disavowal of the world around me.

I recalled how one night, I was eating dinner with a friend who had recently broken up with the boyfriend she had been with since college. He had cheated on her after years of dating, so her tears were in no short supply. In the middle of analyzing the post-breakup texts the ex had sent to her, I picked up my glass of sauvignon blanc, and, behind it, a pop-up message on my iPhone caught my eye.
Thus began the familiar itch—including the twitching minor anxiety that I was missing something good. I began imagining all of the exciting things that the pop-up message could portend, and before I could snap back to the conversation, my urge to check turned into a complete loss of attention. For a moment I even forgot that I was, in fact, at dinner, listening to a friend in the middle of a crisis. I took a deep breath and reflected on the situation. It was eight
P.M
. on a Sunday night, so the likelihood that the message was signaling an important work e-mail or anything at all that would demand an immediate response was minuscule. Still, I was fighting a powerful urge to check and felt a cold sweat building up on the back of my neck.

A good friend would have ignored her phone. Make that: a good friend would
not
have had her phone on the table. I had always prided myself on being caring and attentive, but over the previous few years I had received countless complaints from friends and family about the fact that I
never
put my phone down during meals or face-to-face conversations (I can see my friends reading this and nodding their heads in affirmation right now). Knowing full well that I would be reprimanded but still too engrossed to come up with a better excuse, I used the same line I had a thousand times before:

“Ugh I’m sorry, this is probably work. I just have to check to make sure it isn’t my boss . . . Just one sec—”

This was the seventh dinner in three weeks during which I had recognized that my catching a glimpse of the light on my phone was quickly followed by the compulsion
to check. Of course, when I gave in to the itch I found junk e-mails: Wasabi Lobby’s sushi specials, Pottery Barn’s seasonal sale, a pop-up notification about the score of a sporting event that I didn’t even know was happening, or the five-times-per-day AccuWeather alert, warning me about a coastal flooding watch (is there always a coastal flooding watch? So confused about this) in my area.

It had happened a million times before, but it didn’t matter. The off chance that the message could be exciting, dramatic, tragic, or life-changing (or from an ex!) was just too tempting and caused an almost-thirty-times-hourly “need” to check my phone. And so I welcomed my one-week switch from a smartphone to a landline. It was going to make me a better person, I was sure of it.

Having a landline during my experiment didn’t only help with my ability to be present at dinners and meetings. I also found that there is a stark difference ihn talking on a landline compared to talking on a smartphone—that is, if one even talks on a smartphone at all and doesn’t just text. I found that the landline encouraged longer conversations. It also felt like a novelty, so in a way these conversations seemed more special. I was brought back to the days when I would lie on my bed and talk to my friends for hours on the phone. (Remember in the opening credits of
Beverly Hills, 90210
when Kelly is lying and rolling on the bed on her landline?! Just like that! Except for the rolling part because no one does that! But you get what I’m saying.) Most importantly, I was less distracted because I didn’t have a multitude of messages coming and going across the screen
while I tried to concentrate on what the person on the other end was saying. I forgot how exciting and lovely it could be when the phone would ring and it was a
surprise
to find out who was on the other end, how nice it was to hear my phone ring without getting a text beforehand that said
Can I call you?
(Is there a more ridiculous waste of time than that text? Isn’t the ring the universal symbol of
Can I call you?
) I had to actually talk to people when they called, and I rediscovered how wonderful this kind of interaction could be. It was great to
hear
people’s reactions, rather than just read the
haha
or
lol
or
imagine?!
or
omg what?!
It was as if I had forgotten there was a living, breathing, feeling person behind those digital letters and emoticons. In only one week, these conversations strengthened my friendships with people with whom I usually communicated through text or social media.