The benefit of disconnecting

The acceleration of technology has put an endless river of information at our fingertips. Is this an unalloyed blessing? Is more information always better—or is there a point where it tips over into too much?

The digital spiderweb

It used to take an active effort to connect to the internet. Most houses used to have one clunky desktop computer, hidden in the basement or in the corner of a cluttered office. Those of us who grew up in the 1990s remember the shrill screech of the dial-up modem, the family complaints when using the internet tied up the only phone line.

Those days are long gone. Now it takes an active effort to disconnect.

Nowadays, most of us carry always-on, always-connected smartphones. They bombard us with alerts and pop-ups; they fight for our attention; they sing a siren song of temptation when we should be doing more important things. Wherever we go, we're enmeshed in a spiderweb of invisible digital threads. Not just our desktops and laptops, but many household appliances now have wireless connectivity, from cameras to thermostats to refrigerators. Even our cars are more like rolling computers.

To be sure, ubiquitous connectivity has its benefits. Anywhere you go, you can stay in touch with loved ones, get real-time directions, translate a language you don't speak, get weather forecasts and important alerts. No one ever has to be lost or stranded again.

Also, for the first time, millions of people can do their jobs from home. This is a revolutionary shift that's changing work for the better.

Working from home lifts the burden of commuting, releasing people from the time-consuming, stress-inducing daily drive. It makes work practical for disabled people, parents of young children, and everyone who benefits from a flexible schedule. It frees people to live anywhere, ending the need for everyone to cram into the same few expensive cities. During the COVID pandemic, it was a (literal) lifesaver.

On the other hand, it means millions of us can never truly disconnect. That cloud of work anxiety hangs overhead at the dinner table, in bed at night, on vacation. There's a constant temptation to be available to answer e-mails or attend meetings. It reinforces the worst bosses' expectation that employees should be on call around the clock.

If it bleeds, it leads

Then there's the media.

Conventional media feeds us a steady stream of negative news—crime, disaster and tragedy—because that's what grabs people's attention. Calm, deliberative, factual reporting is seen as boring, while tabloid stories that provoke anger or fear reliably drive viewership.

The problem is that, of all this negative news, only a tiny fraction is important or actionable to the average viewer. The vast majority is irrelevant to us. It agitates our emotions, but that's all; there's nothing we can do about it.

This is bad enough, but social media is far worse.

Social media radicalizes people. It makes bullying, threats and harassment easier than ever. It's a vector for inflammatory lies, conspiracy theories, paid propaganda, and other viral misinformation. Worse yet, its relentless algorithms ensure that we're exposed to as much of this toxic content as possible. The future may be as shocked by our casual consumption of social media as we're shocked by the past's casual acceptance of cigarette smoking in hospitals, restaurants and airplanes.

Again, when you had to choose to turn on the TV or the radio, this was arguably less of a concern. Now, thanks to internet-enabled devices everywhere, we're bathing in this outflow of mental sewage all the time. Instead of making an effort to seek it out, you have to make an effort not to see it.

The 'naïve view of information'

This is more stimulation than our brains evolved to cope with.

For most of our species' history, communities were small and local, and life moved at the slower pace of nature. Now news is deluging us faster than ever, as if everyone needed to know everything happening all over the world in real time. It's no wonder so many of us feel stressed and overwhelmed. We don't have the bandwidth!

There is a persistent misconception that more information naturally and automatically leads to truth and progress. Ignorance results from not enough information, goes the thinking. Increase the information and you increase understanding of the truth. This misconception is most prevalent among those with advanced education — those whose exposure to more information led (in their view) to more truth.

But this assumption of the automatic benefit of more information is demonstrably false. In his recent book Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari calls it the "naïve view of information." We are currently inundated with information, arguably too much. While information is essential for cooperation among large human groups, it just as often disseminates fictions and fantasies, misinformation and disinformation, as objective truth. And because much of the fiction is attuned to our preferences rather than to the truth, greater inundation does not reliably lead to that truth.

What is needed is not more information, but a greater incentive to discern the truth and ability to do so.

Again, more connectivity isn't inherently a bad thing. But the internet should serve our interests, rather than the profit motive. At its best, it should keep us in touch with friends and family; bring us useful news and stories that inspire empathy; and give us the information we want when we want it.

The dark side of connectivity is its power to keep us perpetually distracted, anxious and upset. It's all too easy to get addicted to the little jolts of dopamine that each notification provides. Companies know this, and they know that if they can keep us at a steady simmer of anger and fear, our critical thinking skills will be decreased and we'll buy more stuff.

You can think of it the same way as artificial light. Artificial light is unquestionably a boon for humanity: we can find our way in the dark, we can stay up after sunset. On the other hand, living in perpetually lit environments is terrible for our brains. We need darkness, to sync with our circadian rhythms so we can get restful sleep.

Just the same way, an endless flow of stimulation is disruptive to our well-being. We need mental quiet time to relax, recharge and restore our equilibrium.

As more people come to recognize this, the future may choose to be less connected, rather than more.

We may see people choosing to go on an internet fast, like a secular Lent or Ramadan for the information age. Or we may see devices that come with a built-in time limit on daily usage, to discourage mindless scrolling. Or we might see "technology free" zones where data coverage is intentionally limited. However people choose to achieve it, a less connected future could also bring more peace and tranquility, without losing the benefits of access to knowledge.