Mostly unplugged

The Quite Interesting 7 (see last week’s column) continue their peregrinations around Baltistan, and are currently and very comfortably perched in Khaplu. The hotel we are gracing with our custom was a ruin 10 years ago, and has been transformed into a state of the art branch of the hospitality sector. An essential part of any package these days is an internet connection, wi-fi in the room and uninterrupted service to all manner of smart devices. And even here, at the furthest reaches of connectivity, my fellow travellers are busy paying attention to the demanding babies that sit in the palms of their hands. But not me.

Having resisted the march towards smartness, my phone ownership had remained determinedly dumb until last Christmas when the Missus decided that it was time for me to get dragged into the 21st century. She gifted me a smartphone. In a matter of days it drove me nuts. By the second week of smartness I had disabled every function that had any reliance on the internet and had rendered my very smart phone as dumb as the one it was supposed to replace. Then it got stolen.

Shock-horror! But all was not lost because there at the bottom of a draw, chuckling quietly to itself, was my dear old Dumbster and guess what — all my numbers were saved to its hard drive. A quick switch of the SIM card and I was in telephonic business.

Back to Khaplu, where puzzlement has been expressed as to why a hack journo such as myself should choose to not be connected to the world via every possible means. There is further narrowing of the eyes at my decision not to answer any emails and — further shock-horror — had my phone turned off for all but an hour a day for SMS comms with the family. I was, in common parlance — unplugged. Mostly.

After a week with part of my life support systems turned off I can report that it is a remarkably liberating experience. The sky has not fallen. No horses of the Apocalypse have come over the horizon and I am free of the beeping trilling tyranny of a gizmo that in my opinion has become too powerful by half. It seems what has become one of life’s essentials may be not so essential after all — or at least not so invasively ubiquitous.

One of our numbers has realised that. He does not have a mobile phone and relies on a landline for contact with the outside world and he seems none the worse for this markedly deviant piece of behaviour.

Also of note are elevated levels of anxiety if for any reason there is a break in connectivity, be it phone or tablet or lappie (mine has developed a glitch and this piece will be fired down the wire on the lappie of our ever-helpful guide) — which I am increasingly sure is unjustified.

Do we really need to be connected 24/7 and sharing whatever we had for breakfast/lunch/dinner and pictures of kittens and fluffy bunnies with cuteness overload? No we do not and we managed to live satisfactory lives before the internet, for all its good and ill, was invented.

For me the net has become something of a mixed blessing, and I am managing my online time much more closely in the last four months. My working day has a different ‘shape’ to it in that it has a definite beginning and an equally definite end. There is a physical gap between where I work and where I live the rest of my life. My PC gets shut down at 4.30 and I leave the office, close the door and leave the phone inside — turned off. It may stay that way until I reboot sometime after 10pm to talk to friends in different time zones and catch up with the world at large.

Unplugging was not easy to start with. That subliminal fear that I might be missing something was ever present — but there were no disasters. Being mostly unplugged for the best part of a fortnight has thus far been distinctly therapeutic, and I warmly commend it to you as well, Dear Reader.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 17^th,  2015.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.