Unfriending My Ex: And Other Things I'll Never Do (7 page)

My father is a retired Wall Street sales trader with a serious competitive streak. He and my mother are happily married and live in Bridgehampton. They have the kind of connected relationship and home life I aspire to emulate. Nonetheless, thanks to Foursquare, he became wildly obsessed
with becoming mayor of as many places in the Hamptons as possible. Most days he would wake up around six
A.M
. to play a round of golf, then drive through town, checking into Bobby Van’s, Candy Kitchen, Starbucks, Hampton Coffee Company (yes, that’s
two
coffee places), Pierre’s, and the bank, in addition to any other place he actually needed to be. He even became mayor of long-term parking at JFK International Airport for two months. He felt particularly proud of this mayorship. I think my favorite aspect of my father’s Foursquare addiction, however, was immediately after he realized that one of the perks of being the mayor of certain locations, like Starbucks, was that you got special deals. At Bridgehampton Starbucks, my dad learned, his mayorship granted him one free coffee per day. He would strut into Starbucks, order coffee at the counter, and when the cashier asked him to pay, he would whip out his phone, say something weird like “not so fast,” and flash his Foursquare deal for them, winning his free coffee. It was out of a
Seinfeld
or
Curb Your Enthusiasm
episode. He had gamed the system. He had won.

My mom and I weren’t concerned about this new obsession; we were more amused—this was so in line with my dad’s personality and we enjoyed teasing him about it. When I visited my parents shortly after introducing my father to the game, he took over our dinner conversation, venting his frustration that someone named “Ian Z.” was still mayor of Bobby Van’s. My dad just couldn’t seem to steal the mayoral title, even though he checked in at least
three
times a day. The day he finally became mayor was
great: We had steak to celebrate, and Ian Z. sent my dad a friend request on Foursquare—maybe out of respect or maybe out of pure curiosity. Ian Z. must have felt the same way that Andre Agassi felt when Pete Sampras beat him: completely floored and humble and exhilarated. I thought that with this victory, my father’s tenth virtual mayoral title, his obsession would die down. I was wrong.

The next week, my father went to work out at the gym, where he was the mayor and was always greeted with open arms by its staff, who couldn’t seem to understand why a man who went to the gym only four times a week was mayor while they, who went every day, were not. Clearly they had no idea about his late-night and early-morning drive-bys. In any case, thirty minutes into the session, my dad’s trainer said, “Ray, I gotta ask you a question.”

My father, unsuspecting, said, “What’s up?”

“Well, the other day, I was heading into Citarella in Bridgehampton and I saw you drive into the parking lot, stop for about forty-five seconds, then pull out again and drive away. You weren’t checking in on Foursquare, were you? Because you know that’s cheating.”

My dad swore to quit Foursquare on the spot—well, as soon as he had stolen the last mayoral title (for Bridgehampton Cemetery—who wants to be mayor of dead people?) from his archnemesis, Ian Z. On, November 2, 2010, my father became the mayor of the cemetery, and he quit Foursquare the next day. Even though I was happy he had the strength to quit, I was also helplessly and absurdly proud that my own dad had become the virtual mayor of
all the restaurants and most of the bars I went to in the Hamptons.

Foursquare and its virtual victory quest took over many of my loved ones’ lives for a period, not just my dad’s. A few of my friends would go out at night even when they didn’t want to, just so they could check into places and reinstate their mayorships, or would travel miles out of the way just to get new Foursquare “badges.” If we were a few visits away from becoming mayor, we would aim to go to a specific part of town just to check into whatever bar, hotel, or restaurant we wanted to be mayor of. Sometimes it was for bragging rights; other times there were incentives, like prizes that were blatant marketing ploys. We were addicted to the faux connection, to the distraction.

Just like Friendster and Myspace before it, many think Foursquare is quickly becoming irrelevant. Now that people can link their Instagram and Foursquare accounts and tag locations on their photographs, there is little reason to sign directly into the Foursquare application. Like many of its predecessors and many that will follow, Foursquare was meaningless, pointless, and completely addictive while it lasted. But like many of its peers, it has died down and may become obsolete, paving the way for the newer, shinier social media like Instagram, Tinder, and Snapchat. One day, those will be rendered obsolete as well when we find something else we love more tomorrow, chasing it down onto the subway tracks.

A
s I was reading
Walden
and reacquainting myself with Henry David Thoreau’s thoughts on the joys of solitude, I tried to remember the last time I’d spent any time by myself—truly by myself, with only my thoughts to occupy my mind, no iPhone or iPad or computer to distract me.

I thought about the time right after Samantha, my long-term girlfriend, broke up with me, and how I had done
everything
possible to avoid confronting my feelings. The healthy reaction would have been to sit by myself and reflect, as I had in high school or the beginning of college when going through other difficult times. But instead of dealing with how I felt, I self-medicated by staying constantly connected: over the course of ten days I e-mailed all of my friends, signed on to Gchat, texted, tweeted, FaceTimed, and checked Facebook hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.

What had seemed like a blessing of distraction was a curse in disguise. I realized that I had not experienced anything like Thoreau’s idea of solitude in six years—since I first got a smartphone.

Alone time is a chance to contemplate what’s going on in my life or where I am mentally or emotionally. It’s a time to figure things out, when no third parties are interrupting or hijacking my thoughts. I think I used to be more secure when there was more bandwidth for alone time. Spending time with just me made me
like
me more. I got to know myself better, and so I would know how best to handle challenges, disagreements, and times of strife. The more time I spent anxiously typing away on my smartphone and being my virtual self on social media, the less close I felt to my core, the part of me that made the best decisions, the part of me that was truly the best I could be. I always loved Thoreau’s words “I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning when nobody calls.” Thoreau was not a hermit, he just understood the importance of a divide between oneself and the world at large. “Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries,” he wrote. He complained once about a friendship, saying, “We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.” Sounds familiar. Everyone we’ve ever met in our lives is just a click away, and if we don’t want to think about something difficult, we can text; write an e-mail; check Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram; scour YouTube; play a video game; make plans—we
don’t have to be alone if we don’t want to be. True solitude has become uncomfortable for us.

It’s been said that Thoreau was the most content man alive because he had found the balance and stability in total solitude. The ultimate transcendentalist—he believed in the goodness of man and nature—Thoreau lived a life without distraction (granted, this was 1845, long before the phonograph or the telephone) in natural surroundings next to Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Before Thoreau, many famous theorists and great religious figures sat in seclusion in order to connect with and speak to their spirit guides; the prophets, sadhus, and yogis conducted their visionary experiences and trances in the desert, a cave, or some other place that allowed for absolute solitude.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, another transcendentalist, described how being alone could bring you a deeper appreciation of friends and society: “The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.” Emerson believed in friendship, but he also valued solitude. We need our alone time in order to be functional and emotionally aware in our relationships, at work, and in friendships; that is how we can become better people and be introspective, self-analytical, and reflective—all those things that make us
human
.

An emerging body of research in the field of clinical psychology suggests that we should be spending more quality time alone.
In an article titled “The Power of Lonely: What
We Do Better Without Other People Around,” Leon Neyfakh states that “spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us—that certain tasks and thought processes that are best carried out without anyone else around, and even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities and be capable of focus and creative thinking.” Proponents of solitude claim that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with other people, we need to spend certain time
away
from them too. The ol’ saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is more deeply true than any of us completely understood.

Still, many of us go to great extremes to ensure that we will not be alone with our thoughts. I remember when I was in high school, taking breaks from homework or walking to school and noticing the world around me. I went to Brearley, widely considered one of the top high schools in the nation, and while I credit my teachers, curriculum, and peers with the fantastic education I received, I think the time I spent alone in high school helped too. I had time to reflect and to absorb the information of the day. By the time college started, I was immersed in my phone and soon would be immersed in Friendster (RIP), Myspace, and Facebook. I don’t think I truly needed study breaks in college, as I only studied for five or six minutes at a time between checking my phone or Facebook. In high school, I remember sitting at my desk for six or seven hours, sometimes, without a single distraction. Today, I’ve barely opened my eyes and I’m on my phone; my iPhone reigns.

There are now over 1.15 billion active Facebook users. The latest numbers on Twitter indicate that it has over 240 million monthly active users.
Nielsen found that between 2003 and 2009, the total time spent on social networking sites went up
883 percent
among all ages, with teens between thirteen and seventeen years old increasing their usage 256 percent in one year,
“growing at a rate faster than any other age group.”
They also found that the average teenager sends and receives more than seven text messages for
every hour
they are awake. Teenage girls send and receive about four thousand texts a month.

If we assume it takes thirty seconds to read a text message, think of a response, and type a reply, then we can deduce that based on the numbers of texts they send, the average teenager or twentysomething spends roughly an hour to an hour and ten minutes of their waking hours each day texting. If we add to that (at least) three or four hours of time on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and similar member-community sites—Common Sense Media found that
25 percent of teens log on to their favorite social networking site more than ten times a day—we arrive at an average of
at least
four to five hours of electronic and social media communication per day. Combined with school, after-school jobs, socializing with friends, and hopefully a tech-free dinner once in a while, this number leaves the average young person with virtually no time to be alone with their thoughts.

But it’s not just connection-crazed teens who are affected. All of us are spending more and more time in the digital
world. Fifty percent of those I spoke with said they spend more than three hours on Facebook or Instagram per day, one out of ten said that they check Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter more than
thirty
times a day, and 61 percent confessed to checking these sites more than five times a day. According to Nielsen’s
State of the Media
report,
Americans in general spent a total of 53.5
billion
minutes on Facebook over the course of 2011. It doesn’t take a social scientist to deduce that these studies dramatically underestimate the frequency with which we are on social media and our smartphones. Just look around. I’m looking around right now. It’s gorgeous outside but my parents’ living room could easily be mistaken for an Apple Store. My father sits with his iPhone resting on his leg while he plays Hearts online on his iPad. My wife is to the right, scrolling through Instagram for what I’m counting as the sixth time today. My mom, sitting to my left, is checking Facebook on her iPad while playing Words with Friends on her iPhone. And I’m on my MacBook Air writing about technology and social media changing our lives. I’ve left my iPhone in the other room but have just discovered that I can text from my iMessage app on my computer, so behind this MS Word window is iMessage, where I have texted nine friends in the last ten minutes. Oh dear. For me and everyone I know, the frequency increases every single day; if we’re working, the Facebook window is always open alongside our e-mail. We’re constantly refreshing the Instagram feed on our phones. These studies and polls are always one step behind.

I wonder if staying constantly connected—by way of
our screens—still means we are connecting on a
human
level. By eating up our time, communication devices and social media hinder us from being social on a person-to-person, face-to-face basis. And not only that, they may make us want to interact with people
less
.

A June 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that 13 percent of us are occupied with our phones to “prevent unwanted personal interactions.” When we can just click a button to express our thoughts and read those of others, suddenly in-person interfacing seems a lot more annoying. Why spend twenty minutes talking on the phone, tying up your device so you can’t also be texting and checking e-mail, when a five-word text or 140-character tweet would suffice? I freely admit to doing things like letting the phone ring to “miss” a call, then waiting to respond with a follow-up text—even if I like the person who is calling! Texting is just so much . . . easier.