I've Been Offline for Four Days and I'm Making Analog Memes

VICE's most online writer is currently disconnected from the internet in a small town outside of New York City. She will be logged off for five days, during which time she will chronicle her adventures in nature through daily dispatches. Her fourth correspondence is below, and you can read more about the project here.

Am I deranged for feeling sad about all the news I’m missing out on? Yesterday, through conversations with my boyfriend, desperately texting friends in media “I need someone to tell me what’s happening… PLEASE,” and then watching CNN, I learned that Hope Hicks resigned, Jared Kushner lost top secret security clearance, and Donald Trump suggested the government take people’s guns without due process—I think? The FOMO, a word I despise but is nonetheless useful, began to kick in.

This week, I’ve been allowing myself to consume news in all the non-internet ways possible, in an effort to assuage said FOMO (holy shit can we please call this something else?). Cable news has been kinda dull in that I don’t care what a former George W. Bush spox has to say about Trump behaving erratically—but gave me the gist of what was happening, which is what I was looking for. The local nightly news is also fun; leafing through the local paper at breakfast each morning is relaxing. I love bingeing on tabloids, and I’ve been cutting out the absurd quotes and factoids and pasting them in my journal, drawing around them, making analog memes. Suddenly, I like the news—yes, I know it’s also very bad please don’t yell at me. But it’s fun because it’s not screaming in my face. Because I’m consuming it entirely on my own terms. Because without the internet, keeping up with the news is a choice, not a deranged compulsion that’s tangled up with the insanity of social media.

But as my editor scolded me for consuming the news—“I thought we said no cable news?”—I felt a pang of guilt—This is the one week I literally don’t have to look at the news? Shouldn’t I be so zenned out by nature that like a celestial angel, I rise above the petty squabbles of man?

I did get out in nature today, in another effort to distract myself from everything I was missing, and went on a very nice hike on Bear Mountain with my mom.

As we made our way up the trail, my mom stopped in the middle of the path to text her boyfriend back—interrupting a conversation to text the BF is kinda my thing—and I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m addicted to this thing!” she complained.

“Trust me, I get it,” I said.

We made our way up the mountain and sat on a rock, talking about the last time we were at Bear Mountain together, on a school trip when I was a wee little girl and smartphones didn’t exist and George W. Bush was president. We talked about the anguish of childhood and adolescence, how I never slept back then and how I sleep too much now, our family, and of course, the news and Donald Trump. Even without the internet, conversations always manage to go back to that guy, which honestly sucks.

My mom told me about when the first Polaroid camera came out, how excited she and her art school friends were to finally have technology that instantly printed out a picture. Even though she’s lived more of her life without internet than with it, her pre-internet days are hazy. She’s grown accustomed to smartphone life, the luxuries of Google Maps and Uber, even though she does use the wrong fingers to text.

Technology has a weird way of making you forget what life was like before you had it. Humans adapt quickly, and it’s strange that trying to go back to a time before the internet is so much harder than acclimating to our increasingly digitized world. When a task is made more convenient, reverting back to how things used to be, how much work it was, is a specific type of excruciating. Why go out to buy a paper, or watch people you don’t trust talking about politics on cable news, when you could get the specific news you want, instantly, for free? And also see what everyone is saying about it if you want? That’s just a more convenient way of being—it’s so easy to adjust to convenience.

“The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot… They are cooked, of course á la mode,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. “Many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind.”

To put it in Thoreau’s terms, when it comes to indulging on the fruits of the web and other conveniences, I’m unnaturally hot; we all are.

This week is about cooling down. The colder I get, the duller my impulse to share every inanity and profundity that crosses my mind becomes. But I guess I can only get so cold? I’m pretty warm when it comes my desire for infinite breaking information, but the need to broadcast my thoughts to an audience all the time? The colder I get, the less I want to share every passing insight (or lack thereof) with a broader audience. I can’t decide whether this is a good or bad thing—but as of 7:12, Thursday, March 1, I’m gonna go with good.

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