Get out of the house

How to escape digital carbon monoxide poisoning

Last week, I bummed myself out (and probably you, too) by drawing a metaphor between our culture saturated with digital distraction and a house with a carbon monoxide leak.

If you haven’t read it yet:

Don't fall asleep

At the end, I promised to write a follow up with some potential solutions. And then, dear friend, I nearly didn’t.

Can you guess why?

It has something to do with being in survival mode with a newborn, and therefore much more vulnerable to the siren song of the very toxins I decried.

It’s just so tired in here.

Thankfully, my sense of obligation compelled me to take a wild crack at it anyway, and get this thing out before the week ends. Because it’s nice when your word isn’t totally worthless.

---

Photo by Janis Wolf on Unsplash

Wake up and breathe

As any 30 or 40-year-old who has finally become disillusioned about the impassioned activism of his younger years knows, identifying a problem is a hell of a lot easier than deploying effective solutions.

So, last week, I pointed out that we all live in a big house filled with digital carbon monoxide, and that almost everyone is in terrible danger of an apathetic death by the toxic gases of distraction.

Alright, so now what?

Literally, right now, what do we do?

Right NOW.

Because if you’re reading this, you’ve got a screen in front of your face, and if you’ve got a screen in front of your face, you are almost certainly suffering from digital CO poisoning.

Here are some symptoms:

• You feel tired and distracted

• You can’t ever shake the dull sense that you should be doing something else

• The thought of doing pretty much anything else makes you tired

• As you read this list, your mind is sluggishly offering half-assed excuses for these symptoms

Can you hear that? It’s an alarm.

I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that what you need right now is the same thing someone suffering from CO poisoning needs.

Fresh air.

Literally, the exact same thing.

So go outside and take ten deep breaths of fresh air.

I’m serious. Right now, this very moment. Step away from your computer, or put down your phone or whatever, and get out under the sky.

Don’t read the next paragraph until you’ve had ten full breaths of fresh air.

…

It’s incredible how hard it is to do that, isn’t it? That’s the bad news. Your poisoned brain will come up with a dozen reasons a second not to detach your eyeballs from a screen and go fill your lungs outside.

But if you actually do this, if you actually drag yourself out to breathe the fresh air away from the digital carbon monoxide, do you notice what happens?

I’m going to give you one more chance to go actually do this if you cheated and kept on reading to this point.

…

What happened after ten big, screen-free breaths?

Feelings!

Relief, maybe. Joy? Possibly sadness, probably some fear. Anger, even. If your lucky, a little swell of gratitude.

Feelings are symptomatic of caring. They are what you get when the apathy abates.

What might be most surprising is that even the so-called good feelings (joy, peace, love, yada yada) are scary when you’re not used to them. When you’ve been sufficiently poisoned by the toxic gases pouring out of your screens, spiritual death feels like the status quo, and the status quo’s greatest advantage is that it is comfortable.

So don’t be surprised if, later today, or tomorrow, or next week, you find it’s just as hard or harder to get outside and away from screens for that fresh air. Fresh air upsets the status quo.

But you must do this. You must do it. Every time you feel your eyes grow heavy, every time your spirit sags with that familiar apathy, you must run outside and breathe and breathe.

Write it on post-its.

Put it in your calendar.

Set timers and reminders.

Tell your wife, tell your kids, tell your roommates, tell your mom and dad, tell everyone you know to ask you when’s the last time you tasted the sky with your lungs.

But that’s just the emergency stop gap. It’s good for anyone living in the CO poisoned house to periodically run outside, but if nothing else is done, they’ll still wind up dead.

So what else?

I hate to tell you this, but that depends on you. When you’re outside, breathing fresh air, you’ve got to start to try to figure out what it is that’s poisoning you. Because it’s not the screen itself — it’s what’s coming through.

Just like the house itself isn’t poisoning you, it’s what’s leaking in.

So ask yourself where the digital CO leaks are coming from in your own house. The news? “Social” media? Streamers? Your own email inbox? Probably some combination. Probably a dozen, a hundred other places.

Now the much harder question: What’ll it take to stop the leak?

And then, once you do stop the leak, don’t be surprised when the poison finds another way in. This will not be a war you can win with one battle.

But you can gain ground, you can wake up, and you can start to see others who need your help. Others who need to be dragged outside.

How to save your friends

It’s not hard to imagine throwing on a gas mask and rushing inside a home to save someone from carbon monoxide poisoning. Seems downright heroic, doesn’t it?

But what about the digital CO in the digital house? Are you willing to ask someone to put their phone away? Are you willing to suggest to someone you love, to their face, that they’ve got a screen problem?

Well, no one likes an intervention, so there’s that. And we already established that raising alarms doesn’t really work.

So we need to be more creative.

We could host a phone-free local hike. We could invite a couple of friends and cook dinner together, no screens allowed. You could have an intimate listening party, where you spin a record front to back without anyone talking (or checking notifications). You could ask an imperiled friend to teach you something they know, in person, with your full and undivided attention.

You could show people what full and undivided attention looks like.

This happens every day: your in the car with a friend, or at dinner, or just hanging out somewhere, talking about something, and your conversation is interrupted when one of you pulls out a phone for some reason (any reason). If the distraction lasts for more than a few seconds, what does the other person automatically do?

Imagine what would happen if, the next time a friend’s phone interrupts a conversation, you resist the trigger to pull yours out, too. Instead, you just keep watching them, waiting for them to return the attention you never withdrew.

Imagine the awkwardness of that move. Imagine the power.

This is you, your hand hooked under their heavy arm, pulling them toward the air outside.

---

OK, your turn.

What else can we do?