Have you ever been truly alone?
A place where the sound of your blood rushing pulsates in your ears and echos against your pillow sounds like footsteps in the gravel outside your window. Where your cat jumps down off the couch and sounds like a mountain lion climbing on the roof. Where your breathing is deafening. Not a soul within screaming distance. Surrounded by darkness that you have never seen before. A darkness that my eyes couldn’t even adjust to.
What would you find out there in such isolation? Peace? Freedom? Fear?
For me, I found all three and more. Staying in locations where there is no cell reception, no electricity, and no people.
In December 2021 I decided to discontinue my cell phone service. The location where I resided was a complete dead zone and there was no sense in paying for something I could not use. Since then, I have solely relied on public wifi services.
In my recent excursion from Big Bend Texas to Eastern Oregon, I have driven and navigated with zero cell phone service. No GPS. No AAA call. No social media. No connection whatsoever. I would stop at public wifi locations and find my next spot and navigate that way. Piece by piece. Step by step.
This came before I head a podcast on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, guest speaker Johann Hari was talking about his new book Stolen Focus. He speaks about how we have been manipulated to continue to engage relentlessly with our cell phones and electronic devices.
Of course, as I sit in a Loves Truck Stop, on my laptop…typing this blog, I am just as guilty as anyone else.
But in his book, Johann states that: “I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley interviewing some of the leading dissidents there, people who designed key aspects of the world in which we now live. So you open Facebook or any of the mainstream social media apps and those companies begin to make money immediately in two ways. The first way is obvious. You see ads and they make money from the ads.
The second way is much more important. Everything you do on Facebook is scanned and sorted by Facebook to build a profile of you. So let’s say that you tell your mom you just bought some diapers. Facebook’s algorithms are scanning you. This is someone who is talking about diapers, they have a baby. They build up a profile of you to sell to advertisers. As people in Silicon Valley always say, you are not the customer of Facebook, you’re the product they sell to the advertisers.
The whole machinery, this whole business model has an effect: Every time you pick up Facebook, Instagram, Tick Tok, and Twitter and scroll, they make money. And every time you put it down, their revenue streams disappear. So all of their algorithmic power, all of their engineering genius, and some of the cleverest people in the world are dedicated to one goal: How do I get you to pick up your phone more often and scroll as long as you possibly can?”
The real question is, what kind of tech do we want and whose interests should it serve?
Johann Hari
With that disconnect in mind, I also decided to limit my electricity usage. Just out of curiosity. No humming of the generator or lights. Did you know that the lights above you hum? I didn’t until there was no hum. No refrigerator hum. No motors turning. Nothing. Absolute silence.
In this small step, which now seems huge, I found that I have a lot of fear. It showed me that I am highly reliant on a connection to people and for emergency usage. Even though I did learn that with no cell service 911 will still work.
Hell, I even learned how to read an actual paper map for the first time. Learned what direction I was going. Had to pay attention to the road sign for a change.
But the fear ebbs and flows. It changes. In a parking lot at night surrounded by cameras, lights that never shut off, truck engines that constantly run… I felt way more anxiety than I did surround by nature and the 100 mountain lions lurking in my mind.
To combat that fear in nature, I explored. Walked. Took pictures. My mind also imagined how my ancestors and pioneers lived and functioned. No cell phones. No electricity. No campers. Just what they made or found for usage. Listening for threats instead of relying on electronic alerts. It helped remind me of this by seeing remnants of each on my travels. Petroglyphs along cavern walls and tiny tiny rock houses speckled in the countryside. People were here before me. They did it scared too. But they did it.
I sat outside in the absolute dark and looked into the abyss. That’s where I found sanctuary inside myself. I was complete, content, whole. I was not afraid per say… I was just in unfamiliar territory. I have become so reliant on devices and machinery to get me by. In places and situations such as this… I have to rely on myself. And frankly, THAT is what scares the shit out of me.
