digital detox

Last weekend, after a period of plenty of stimulation and travel but not nearly enough sleep or stillness, I decided to embark on a self-imposed 48-hour digital detox. I sat down and listened to records the whole way through; I spent time with loved ones without feeling the compulsion to take a photograph every five minutes; I had a nap for the first time in years. And, after some quite bothersome withdrawal symptoms on the first day, by Sunday evening, I had got quite into the whole thing and felt a certain degree of dread about turning my phone back on.

It wasn’t very original of me, sadly. A discernible trend towards de-technologising our lives is afoot. Digital detoxes and silent retreats are all the rage, with Conde Nast Traveller recently declaring “silent travel” to be “the wellness trend we’re obsessing over this year”.

When I told a friend about my screen-free weekend (some might call it showing off), she was unimpressed. “Well, my friend switches his SIM card into a ‘brick phone’ every single weekend,” she told me.

Indeed, these “brick phones” – also known as “dumb phones”, to contrast with smartphones – have been rising rapidly in popularity, allowing users to make phone calls and send text messages (and sometimes even to get directions and play music), but not to spend hours scrolling depressedly yet compulsively through social media. So en vogue are these devices, in fact, that Human Mobile Devices, the company that makes Nokia phones, is partnering with Mattel to release a Barbie-themed flip phone in 2024, encouraging buyers to “swap reel life for real life and take a breather from all the interruptions of notifications”.

But the desire to pare back our digital lives and to return to simpler, more manageable times extends far beyond mere smartphone fatigue. We live in an era in which not just every human being, but pretty much every work of film, music, television, art, and literature is available to us, instantly, at the click of a trackpad. And while this is no doubt an incredible feat of human ingenuity, it is also utterly overwhelming.

It can be oddly limiting, too. As a teenager, if I wanted to listen to some music, I would browse the 100-odd albums I had in my CD collection and work out which I was in the mood for. These days, I pay £10.99 (S$18.70) a month to have access to more than 100 million songs on Spotify, yet usually listen to the same four or five playlists. Listening to albums is going out of style: A 2020 survey by streaming platform Deezer found that only 36 per cent of people still listen to albums in the original sequencing, while 15 per cent of under-25s had never listened to a full album.

The problem with these streaming services is that the unlimited amount of choice is paralysing. How are we supposed to work out what to listen to? Yes, you can “save” an album to your “library”, but the fact you haven’t spent any money on it makes this “library” feel impersonal and superficial, while the fact there is no album sleeve to peruse or acknowledgments to read lessens the sense of connection with the music and the artist.

Likewise, opening a PDF version of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics carries none of the excitement of finding it after a long search in a dusty library. The lack of any friction in these processes is deeply unsatisfying, while the over-availability of everything, as any dating expert will confirm, lessens our desire for it.

Witness, then, the revival of all sorts of old-school formats that allow us to regain the sense that we can tangibly “own” things, and that give us a rare opportunity to limit our horizons.

Fairly well known by now is the resurgence of vinyl: British sales rose for the 16th consecutive year in 2023 to 5.9 million records, the highest level since 1990. Less well documented is the cassette-tape comeback: British sales reached a 20-year-high in 2022, after a 50-fold increase over the previous decade. And despite e-books’ portability and convenience, almost four printed books were sold in Britain for every e-book in 2022, according to Nielsen.

One might imagine that this is all being driven by old fogeys missing the Good Old Days, but the opposite is true. In a Harris Poll in 2023, a staggering 77 per cent of Americans aged 35 to 54, and 63 per cent of those aged 18 to 34, said they would like to return to a time when humanity was “unplugged” (only 60 per cent of the over-55s agreed). Younger buyers are also leading the resurgence in vinyl and cassette tapes, having missed them the first time round.

We were not designed to have the output of all of human history at our fingertips, nor to be contactable at all times – but that is the situation we now find ourselves in, and it is both a great privilege and a curse. FINANCIAL TIMES

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