"Offline"
Deb Olin Unferth
The plan is to cut back in half-hour increments. Each week she would cut back her time by half an hour, until she is down to two hours per day. This way, she figures, she will grow slowly used to not being online and she will slowly fill her day with other things, though she isn’t sure what those things will be. She is old enough to have a memory of life offline, but it fades each year and it now seems far away and long ago, and she doesn’t recall what she did with that time and whether it was fulfilling.
The first week is so easy, she doesn’t even feel it. She can be online 23.5 hours a day! This is not so bad. She has to sleep some time, after all. Weeks go by, months, and she doesn’t even notice how severely she is restricting her use. Even when four months have passed—restriction of eight hours!—still she is fine as long as she doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and, in a fit of insomnia, “browse.” More weeks go by and still she is okay because one must sometimes look up from the screen, if only to pay for a soda, or go down the hall. But six months in, she hits the twelve-hour mark and that’s when the pain sets in. She abandons her walk-around online telephone, so she can’t walk on the street and check her mail. She goes to the movies but she can’t look at the screen while looking at the screen. Slowly more and more hours open up, more and more hours that must be filled with activities, and she can’t remember what there is to do in the world other than study screens of various sizes with various intentions. Now she uses each minute she has carefully, treasuring each moment online, and her time offline feels ghostly, like time spent waiting for her real time, her life time, her Internet time. What am I doing out here? she wonders. What is the point of this restriction if there is nothing out here to do? From sheer boredom she reads a magazine. She has trouble concentrating and at first can think of nothing but how bored she is, but then she smiles in a couple of places and learns one interesting fact (sea seals, like parrots, can mimic!) that she tells a friend over lunch, a friend she made plans with because she is so bored. Now she is down to six hours a day online and she really is at a loss. She tries to fill the hours. She exercises every day. She calls her family to chat. She does a little home improvement, and still the time lowers. Maybe she’ll do something else—help the world in some way, give? That’s a smug thought, but she thinks it anyway, since she has nothing else to do. The time lowers to three hours a day online, and she casts desperate looks at people on the streets and in stores, and she thinks, How do people fill their days? Are they unhappy, having to face their own brains so often and with such constancy? Is it worth it, she wonders, this dull life? She feels—as she switches off the light, going to sleep early since there is nothing else to do—that she can glimpse in the distance, a time when she might enjoy something for what it is, when she might read a book and want to read it, when she might take a walk and find it fun, when she might hear a joke and laugh without awareness of her loss. It is for that hope that she does this, for its possibility.
(This story originally appeared in the print edition of TIMBER Spring 2013)