Digital freeze out

Telluride Daily Planet, Friday, August 1, 2025

“We live in a digital world, but we’re fairly analog creatures.” –Omar Ahmad

On a morning walk recently, and tuning into a health podcast I found at the last minute, what often happens with information happened again: The subject I’m interested in finds me, all algorithms aside. Though I often admire the flow state of the athlete or musician — information flow also seems to have its own groove, and it feels good. (Wait, are algorithms actually aside?)

My info flow had converged on the increasingly digital world we live in — its associated tired eyes and downward facing head. I had just been checking out an app that would presumably help hold me accountable to not be on my phone so much. Seems silly. Silly that someone who learned to write with purple ink and a dip pen is now looking for digital ways to become more analog again.

But then this world often moves so fast it makes us dizzy. My daughter, 32, is already nostalgic for a youth she lived outside, her earliest phone a flip phone we shared. She feels anxious about AI as she peers ahead into strange job markets, homogenization, surveillance, misinformation, too-rapid change, ethical and existential quandaries, and all the rest that we are tensing about. Because, really, who’s in charge here? That’s what I’d been pondering. (And again, maybe there’s no such thing as information flow. Maybe I’m being covertly fed, honestly, I don’t know.)

Anyway, the podcast was new to me, even though its host, Mel Robbins, has some 35 million online followers. Her topic? The three top things you can do for your health, based on a poll of fifty prior episodes with renowned experts. I scrolled through all the possibilities in my mind, as she started enumerating. Number one was no surprise: exercise. Of course.

I would have gotten number three on my own, as well: relational living — connection and support, but number two caught me off guard. The second most important thing you can do for your health is to put your phone down. I mean, we all know the reasons why: It’s a time suck, disconnects us from what is real, is bad for our bodies and our brains, and marks us as a zombie in a world of zombies. It’s obvious why it’s number two — and how connected it is to numbers one and three.

After listening, I started fiddling in earnest with that app, the one for limiting screen time. Though skeptical, I wanted to see if it would work. A couple of days in, with a simple reminder set for x number of social media or other app opens, I felt something good. It was easy to be reminded and not that hard to obey. We can get out of a lazy rut, we can change, and it’s not that painful — for some of us, at least.

For others, however, it can be excruciating, according to an article in Wired (which mysteriously surfaced) about kids getting sent to digital detox camps — specifically gamers (mostly boys) or would be social media influencers (mostly girls). The socially stunted teenagers were bonding in silent rage over their lifelines that had been taken away, some having packed secondary phones to avoid an utter freeze out.

At a camp they didn’t voluntarily choose (unlike most adult digital detox camps), they were counseled, put on rigid schedules to get them out of their rooms and eating and sleeping correctly, given activities and educated on the financial realities of the mostly dead-end “skills” they were developing. They were desperate, miserable and recalcitrant.

I had a glimpse into this trajectory a dozen years ago when a friend in the PR business told me he would never dream of sending his assistants, who were great online, into real world meetings because they didn’t know how to look someone in the eye, read a room, or even get a vibe. A screen can certainly disconnect humans from their five senses — probably even the auxiliary ones that help us read a room.

Anyway, the whole time I was reading about kids in detox camp, I was dreaming about this simple idea that you could live in a cabin, paddle a canoe or walk in the forest, then read an actual book by flipping the actual pages. Even the idea of these things, and then letting my mind wander there, is remarkably calming for me. In much the same way you can affect a muscle by imagining its use (scientifically verified), it feels as though we can similarly use the idea of our analog pleasures to bring our brains closer to contentment.

Bottom line for me? Whatever it takes, disconnect from our phones and reconnect to the five-plus senses more — whatever it takes. It’s good for your lifespan, healthspan and joyspan!