The Less Online I Am, the Happier I Feel

Are we in a simulation?

Welcome to Firelight! In case you’re new here, I write about my unconventional life with my husband and two sons, the older of whom has non-speaking autism. In this edition, I write about my sundry attempts to manage my online life thoughtfully.

There were things I thought I’d lost forever: handwritten letters in place of text messages, weekly trips to the library in place of Audible and Netflix, and—most importantly—enough margin in my brain to keep my marigolds watered. Occasionally, I wonder if I actually remember certain things, like VHS tapes, or if it was all just some Mandela-effect conspiracy, a game for the likes of Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Were there actually times I stared at a wall, seething with boredom, comparing myself to Edmond Dantès, imprisoned at the Château d’If, in The Count of Monte Cristo? What if I’d never been bored? Would I’ve dared to write?

Me, age fourteen

Things are different now. We are screen-addicted and perpetually online. God help us. From here, the conversation could go in a lot of different directions: Are we in a simulation? (Thanks for that intrusive thought, Elon.) Does it matter? (Of course it does. What is real and what is true will always matter to those who care about the world and the people in it.) Maybe I’m regretting all the hours I wasted as a kid, watching Boy Meets World marathons, when I could’ve, well, not done that. Even so, I was somewhat productive. After all, I wrote a novel about a boy with non-speaking autism in middle school. Maybe the Château d’If was fertile ground.

How do I raise children in an environment so different from the one in which I was raised? I had a plan and none of it involved devices—until a clinician at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital placed an iPad in my non-speaking autistic preschooler’s hands and told me this was the best shot I had at communicating with my own son. Then, I had to explain to my other child why his brother was allowed to carry around an iPad 24/7 but he wasn’t. No therapists or doctors had answers. My brain was on fire: Does any of it matter? Maybe we should all just surrender to the metaverse and be done with it.

We tried that for a while, actually. My sanctimonious talk about moderation with screens comes from having lived the alternative. I watched hobbies dry up, one by one. Every crayon drawing on the dining table disappeared. The floors were clean and uncluttered—not a single toy to be seen—and no amount of begging and cajoling on my part could change that reality. I grieved what I thought was lost forever.

I don’t have a three-step plan to share and I’m not going to lie to you. None of it is easy. I can’t ask my kids to be mindful of their technology use when I, as the adult, am not mindful of my own technology use. I must join them, rather than preach at them. And I don’t know what the final outcome will be. My hope is that, someday, my kids will thank me for being a grown-up and setting boundaries. For fighting for our family when, at times, I thought it would kill me.

This year, a Swedish composer named Ludwig Göransson won the Oscar for Best Original Score. Toward the end of his acceptance speech, he looked upward. His message was for a specific couple in the balcony. “To my parents up there,” Göransson smiled, “thank you for giving me guitars and drum machines instead of video games.”

This letter isn’t about video games, iPads, phones, or any device in particular. Only you know the technologies that are helpful in your home and those that foster anxiety or addiction. Currently, my younger son has access to a drawing tablet and a Kindle. My older son has access to an iPad for communication. They are permitted these devices because they know how to put them down. For me, that is the litmus test: Can they put it down? Also: What is the purpose of this device? Finally: What kind of behavior does this device or app produce? I ask this question for the devices and apps I use, too.

I was losing myself online, but I kept logging on. Frustrated? Tap, tap. Sad? Tap, tap. Bored? Tap, tap. There was a lot of bargaining: I’ll lose this or that if I deactivate. The cost was always too high until, one day, it just wasn’t. I took inventory of my pounding heart and my uneven breathing. I was like an addict, finally collapsing in the street. I began the hard work of disentangling my beliefs from memes, trending hashtags, and influencers who told me what to eat, purchase, and think. I began to imagine what it would look like to separate myself from all of that input. Would I buy the same clothes? Would I fall for the same schemes and scams targeting parents of children with autism? Who would I be, if no one was watching?

Turns out, I’m someone who listens to Joni Mitchell. Turns out, I prefer burnt church coffee, served alongside stale donuts in a church vestibule, to four-dollar cold brew consumed alone in a car. Turns out, I sob uncontrollably at The Hunchback of Notre Dame (okay, that has been a constant for nearly three decades).

“Who is the monster and who is the man?”

Turns out, I love writing by hand. I credit a handful of new pen-pals for helping me to discover this. I wrote to a friend the other day: There is something grounding about writing a letter by hand. As I transferred the day’s events from my jumbled-up brain to a piece of paper, I felt my shoulders drop. I stopped holding my breath (which I seem to do all the time). I sat there, grateful for the task at hand—nothing on my agenda for the next few minutes but writing a single letter for a single person. I wasn’t worried about choosing precisely the right words. This was a gift (as yet another friend put it) and, like anything made by hand, it was imperfect. I’d like to think its imperfections, however, were a kind of gift as well: a silent reminder to a friend that her blemishes are safe with me—because I have them, too.

Turns out, our habits make us who we are. If I want my kids to do this thing more or that thing less, I need to do it first. After all, I’m the adult. My children are new to the world, turning ideas over like gems. My children are building a worldview regardless of whether or not I’m teaching one. As such, I’ll take them to the library to gather books and films for the week ahead. Yes, we could sign up for Netflix. That would be easier. The same goes for church. We could stream a church service. That would also be easier. Instead, we’ll reach for the hard-but-beautiful and teach the tiring-but-true: that the world is worth seeing, people are worth meeting, and life is worth living.

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