It seems inescapable. What’s the alternative? You could try to turn Luddite. Give it all up. But that’s probably not such a good idea. Have you ever tried to give up all the trash you eat—potato chips, fast food, frozen stuff—at once? It never works, and you always come back to it with a vengeance. Same thing with New Years resolutions. It has to do with your pleasure and reward centers and dopamine. What’s more effective is instead you can whittle away at all the bad food habits, one at a time. You stop consuming soft drinks. When that’s achieved, maybe you cut out sugar altogether. Replace the bad stuff with good. Give up the junk with the added sugar and eat lots and lots of fruit instead, for instance.
We can do the same thing with our digital lives. Chip away at the harmful shit and start replacing the bad habits with good ones. I’ll leave it to you to work out the details. At this point I’m working out the details of what to quit when and what to replace it with for myself and no one else. And I don’t believe in on-size-fits-all solutions. A program of changing habits needs to be individualized to be effective, in my opinion.
Now humor me for a minute as I’m going to skip ahead in the process a bit and I’m not going to talk about those above-mentioned details concerning my own habits. That’s not even interesting to me so I know it aint interesting to you. Instead I’d like to talk a little about the philosophical underpinnings of the whole enterprise.
What I’m advocating for here is an “analog life,” as opposed to a digital one. What does that even mean? Maybe we should start by defining the terms “analog” and “digital,” just so we’re clear about what we mean. Everybody’s familiar with these terms, but let’s slow down a minute and consider them a little more.
an·a·log
adjective
relating to or using signals or information represented by a continuously variable physical quantity such as spatial position, voltage, etc.
dig·i·tal
adjective
(of signals or data) expressed as series of the digits 0 and 1, typically represented by values of a physical quantity such as voltage or magnetic polarization.
For the purpose of this argument, let’s just use “digital” to mean anything we do on a laptop or a smartphone or whatever and “analog” to represent the rest of life, e.g. going out for a walk, having an in-person conversation, eating a meal that we don’t post. Literally everything else we do. The phrases emphasized in the definitions indicate this difference between things in the real world and things done on a computer.
Let’s make one differentiation. What I’m advocating for is “analog life,” not “an analog life.” The difference is that if one attempts to live “an analog life,” they’re trying to accomplish the herculean task of complete renunciation of all digital living, so no internet, no streaming TV or music, no texting or posting, no nothing. A pre-computer way of life. Not that that’s a bad thing. I imagine that would be great, much better in fact.
But what I’m talking about is a philosophy or approach to living that I call “analog life,” without the indefinite article. It could be an approach to living where a normal person such as you or I try to get more analog or real-world experiences into our daily lives.
Here’s a personal example. I eat lunch at my desk most days, and when I do, I stream a video while I eat. It’s a digital/analog hybrid experience. As an all-analog alternative, why not pop open a book instead of looking at the computer screen for an extra half hour or hour? Or better yet, take my lunch outside. Read or don’t read—we can look at mindfulness sometime maybe but it gets no more than a mention here—but either way it’s an all analog experience. It’s that simple. We just look for little ways every day to live offscreen.
Los Angeles
April 27, 2023