It’s the shame that keeps me going.
Seven months ago, I publicized my commitment to what my friend Ruth Gaskovski calls my WWW policy: Weekends Without Wi-fi. Two months later, I wrote about the unexpected and excellent fruits of the practice of shutting off my devices entirely every weekend.
Then time went on. I got embroiled in a local controversy that sapped all my emotional energy, and we got the flu (and then got the flu again, and again…), and the whole time my kids still wanted meals and clean laundry every day, and my editors wanted those drafts to show up in their inboxes, too. And so I started to slip.
On sick weekends, I threw in the towel entirely. All bets were off. I am not good at resting, and so the only way to get me to sit still for more than a few minutes at a time is to plop a laptop on top of me. So that’s how I got through the sicknesses, even on Saturdays and Sundays.
Then I started realizing that I really did need to pop on once a weekend on Sunday evenings, or I would have trouble sleeping thinking about the inbox, messages, documents, restacks on substack, and all the rest that might await me on Monday morning. So I adapted my WWW policy to allow a check-in on Sunday afternoon or evening to do a little tidying up of the inbox and make a to-do list for Monday. That way I would know what was coming.
Then along came the Twelve Days of Christmas, and shouldn’t I feast on the internet instead of just in other parts of my life? All bets were off again for a few days.
And then I took a rather sudden trip across the country, and I just needed the WWW – the World Wide Web one, not Weekends Without Wifi – to distract and entertain me for the travel and the exhaustion.
And then I found myself lurking all over the internet on a Saturday here or there just because regular life was getting a bit hard and I didn’t want to put in the work to find healthy ways to deal with it. The computer felt better.
Then the shame kicked in (thank goodness). I started having compunctions. I wasn’t sending e-mails or messages or responding to anything on weekends because I didn’t want the people to know that I was breaking my policy. All the zillions (read: none) of people on the internet who actually cared what I did on weekends. And that did not feel honest. It felt an awful lot like willful deceit for the sake of appearances.
Probably because it was.
The reality is that because I have written so much about how important this is to me, the sense of shame I have at falling short and wanting to hide it is doing something good for me: it is making me reassess. And it is also actually helping me to not go overboard with tech even on the weekends when I’m not living out my policy to the letter. It’s good for me to have some public accountability. Even if nobody online sees me lurking, my children and husband know I do it. And I want to do better for them, and knowing that I’m not failing only privately is a good motivator.
So recently, I’ve been thinking all of this through. I still manage to make it through about every other weekend without significant use of devices, sticking well to my WWW approach. I do think the Sunday check-in and the sick day exemptions are good adjustments to my policy, and I think it’s good to adjust. But clearly, I’m spending more time on the internet than I originally intended to. What to do?
After thinking about it at some length, at seven months in I have come to the conclusion that, in fact, my WWW have been a success. Ideals like the WWW these are aspirational, and I can see that even when I fall short, I still am doing much better at resisting the siren song of tech on the weekends than I ever have before. And that, friends, is a win.
The other factor at play is that my personality is one that highly values self-control. I value self-control too much and trust in God and my friends and family too little. I write about not overdoing Lent because I tend toward scrupulosity; about going with the flow in homeschooling because I fear that doing so is too lax; about meeting needs instead of just removing temptations because I am all too likely to push through on willpower alone and then suffer the consequences. Much of my writing is in correction of my nature.
In light of this, it is good for me to have some accountability – hence the public character of my commitment – but it is also not good for me to seek perfection. Better to not care about making exceptions, to just chill out a little bit, than to obsess over being a primly perfect tech resistor.
I want my resistance to the negative power of digital technology to be humane, not punishing. And I want it to encourage others, not make them feel inadequate.
So here I am, seven months in, to tell you that my Weekends Without Wi-fi are still working. They are working imperfectly, which is exactly how they should be. My next step in all of this is to stop lurking on the weekends and instead free myself to make exceptions without apology, while still honoring that voice that says, “You need to stick to your policy as best you can, because you created it for a reason.” I want others to know that tech resistance and unplugging isn’t about superhumans doing perfectly that at which ordinary people fail; it’s about ordinary people dusting themselves off repeatedly and trying again, because the goal of a more humane life is one worth pursuing, even in our failure.
How is it going for you?
Dixie Dillon Lane is an American historian, teacher, and essayist who writes frequently for Current and Front Porch Republic as well as other publications, including her website, TheHollow.Substack.com. She is an Associate Editor at Hearth & Field and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame.