Fear washed over . “I’ve climbed all the way to the top, through that crazy snowstorm… I can’t give up now, “ you mutter to yourself.
Your hands, sweaty, caked in old and new injuries-some scabbed over, and some fresh from jagged rock edges piercing your once-soft-skin-you fling your right arm over the ledge with every last ounce of strength left in you.
“Almost there…almost there….” you yell to yourself to give you that last motivational nudge to reach the peak of the mountain where there lay the barren pine shed. Your bag slips off your shoulder. In an instant, it’s gone, falling into the clouds that shroud the ground from view. After several minutes, you hear the loud crack of your bag and all its items hitting the Earth that lies thousands of feet below you - 29,031.7 feet to be exact.
“Thank God, my phone was in my pocket,” you mutter. “After all, that’s all that matters.”
You finally climb over the edge and stumble and clamor your way to the pine shed, wind gusting and the snow whiplashing you in the face. You push and shove against the shed’s snow-burrowed door. The door finally gives way, nearly tumbling you inside.
It’s eerily dark. There'‘s only one candle and a cot in the corner of the shed. And the smell of damp mold and aged pine hits your nose. You take a seat on the rickety cot, releasing a heavy cloud of dust and lint into the air. You immediately sneeze.
“Finally, I made it.” You take some deep, wheezy breaths, trying to calm your racing heart. You slowly feel your mind and body settle after your week-long, harrowing trip to reach this exact destination: the pine shed.
After a long pause, you frantically feel for your phone and hold it up above your head as if you’re Gollum, holding the precious Ring. “My precious”... you gurgle.
“Oh my god, there’s no internet!” “Wait!” you command yourself. You stammer onto the cot, praying it doesn’t give out under your weight, and hold the phone up as high as you can. “Please, Big Tech overlords, reach thy phone and give me thy internet!” you beg.
Ding… ding** ding* come in the notifications. “Yes!! “Yes! you scream to yourself. “It’s on" I did it!! I did it!!”
Less than 50 people have climbed all 14 of the tallest mountains in the world. And here you are in all your glory, in all your perseverance, having climbed one of the tallest mountains, reaching an astounding 33,500 feet. And once conquered, your sole intent and goal was to sit in that pine shed on the ledge of the mountain to rip yourself from the real, physical world so you could glare into your phone without anything or anyone taking your attention away from it.
So there you sat alone in a moldy pine shed at the tippy top of a mountain, ensnared by your phone.
The distractions are mounting - in the phone and in the world
In another life, I always wanted to be a fiction writer. So, of course, any chance I can start an article with fiction prose, I’m going to do that. I also didn’t want to bore you with an immediate factual analysis about a writer in a shed who is distracted from her writing.
But I couldn’t help but see stark similarities to our world today, just in different fonts.
In her book, The Writing Life, Annie Dillard documents the tedious work, the ins-and-outs, of the life of a writer:
“Appealing workplaces are to be avoided. One wants a room with no view, so imagination can meet memory in the dark. When I furnished this study seven years ago, I pushed the long desk against a blank wall, so I could not see from either window. Once, fifteen years ago, I wrote in a cinder-block cell over a parking lot. It overlooked a tar-and-gravel roof. This pine shed under trees is not quite so good as the cinder-block study was, but it will do.”
She describes the pine shed on Cape Cod, isolated in nature, that she filled with basic tools so she wouldn’t constantly tempt herself to take her attention away from her desk and her writing.
Focus was her objective. She wanted to get her book done, was determined to do so, yet the world around her was way too distracting.
Little did she know, a time would come—our time currently—where the world was inundated with distractions on top of distractions. And to pull yourself away from the distractions of the digital world, you almost need to distract yourself with the real world.
Basically, the distractions she was trying to get away from are what we all need.
We need to touch grass. We need to feel the weight of paper in our hands, smell books, hear the patter of rain on the window, watch long grass sway in the wind, and stare at it long enough to calm our minds and bring ourselves back down to earth.
How can people be future writers & readers if they are not only combating the distractions of the real world but also this fake digital world we hold in our hands?
Step out of the digital pine shed
Annie had a discipline of facing blank walls to try and shut out the outside world. Yeah, it’s a pretty extreme method, but if it worked for her, kudos.
For all of us, I think our method should be to seek out Annie’s distractions and heal in them. Because the real world is healing. It’s not perfect, yes. But it does far less damage than the digital distractions.
Damages like—and I think we’ll keep hearing this sentiment more and more as the years go by—we have entered a post-literate society. And the new class divide will be those that can read and stay focused and those who cannot.
The phone has essentially become the mechanism of that divide.
Reading how Annie disciplined herself enough to self-isolate and fixate on writing shows me we can do this again—cut ourselves from digital distractions, build healthy habits around reading and writing, and cure our high-intake dopamine problem.
I will end by saying this: we collectively make a society, and society’s social contracts slowly unravel the more illiterate society becomes.
How so?
The social contract that society is built on relies on words, literature, text.
With an illiterate society, disinformation spreads, which causes a rise in panic and hostility, crime, loss of economic growth & expansion, and feudalism due to a breakdown of equal law—i.e., those who are in power will start to abuse their power once those at the bottom of the totem pole are left ignorant, illiterate, and without critical thinking skills—which we’re all seeing the inclings of now.
I’m not trying to be dramatic when I say this, but we all need to take a page out of Annie Dillard’s playbook and focus again. Focus on building stronger minds through reading and writing.
And if that means having to climb up a mountain that is 33,500 feet in the air, trekking through snow and blazing wind, and crawling into a shed just to get away from the distractions of our phones, then we might just need to do that.
Push To Read Book Club
I’m running a low-pressure reading space for all of my subscribers. Here are the conditions:
Read whatever you want.
Every Friday, you drop the page number that you’ve read up to. You can also share a favorite quote or snippet from the book you’re currently reading.
There’s zero pressure. You can read 3 or even 50 pages. Whatever works for you.
The point is to keep us all motivated and consistently reading:
