Has Tech Come Between You & Your Job?
It's time to let the world come flowing back in to your vocation
Yesterday, I had midday jitters and screen fatigue. So I gave up, changed into shorts, and went for a run through a nearby woods. It was a day a little too cold for shorts. But the leaves and sky were brilliant, and my lungs burned in a way I needed.
No phone. No earbuds. No podcast breaking down another unreliable poll.
I didn’t feel any less overwhelmed but what was overwhelming me was the world itself—not tech pretending to be the world. Not tech promising to make me something other than the sprainable, gasping, dying human that I am.
Isn’t it good how the world comes rushing in, enfolding, suspending, propelling, drawing? Which is why, in a newsletter about work culture, all I want to do is talk about cottonwoods and maples. But that’s not what I came to my laptop to do this morning.
What’re you doing? Why are you here, looking, skimming? Don’t you got fifty emails to reply to?
But, okay, as long as you’re here, we might as well do this. Let’s chat about a workplace trend, a study, a tale, and a switch. Let’s try to convert some stress into a posture that’s sustainable and shareable with your team.
A Trend
You’ve heard of BYOC, right? Bring Your Own Cloud. Use your Google Drive for work. And while you’re at it, BYOD: Bring Your Own Device. Use your smartphone to get your work done in your cubicle.
Now, there’s BYOAI: Bring Your Own AI. It’s a trend that adopts Perplexity or ChatGPT or Bard—or wait, no, the folks at Google call it Gemini now.
In six months, the number of workers using AI at work has just about doubled. According to a Trend Index about work trends—sponsored by LinkedIn & Microsoft and vibing like an ad for CoPilot—three out of four people use AI at work.
(Ask your doctor if CoPilot might be right for you!)
I mention this trend to point out, not the very real privacy and security risks, but rather the fact that increasingly our digital tools feel like a full-body suit we can never quite take off.
A Study
On the other hand, taking the digital body suit off might not be good for your health. See the 2022 journal article, "Digital Detox: An Effective Solution in the Smartphone Era? A Systematic Literature Review," where Radtke, Apel, Schenkel, Keller, and Scholz survey studies of 3,625 participants to determine whether digital abstinence improves wellbeing.
Here’s what they found: Not Really.
Yeah, this is the sort of article that begins with the arresting line, “Nowadays, smartphones are ubiquitous.” (Social scientists are people on whom nothing is lost.)
The study notes that definitions of “digital detox” are vague, with the result that people sometimes detox from devices but not from platforms.
No wonder your workplace feels like deep mediatization. Even if you don’t sleep with your smartphone, you can flirt with your Kindle’s news app.
A Tale
I’ve just started reading Jason Pargin's novel, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom on the recommendation of a Mode/Switcher. (Thank you, M!) The novel does a road trip with a ride-share driver who picks up a young woman with a huge black road case in LA. She offers him $200k to drive her to D.C.—but the driver’s not allowed to look in the box, ask about the box, or tell anyone about the trip.
Right before he leaves, he posts about the trip on his Twitch stream. The game’s afoot.
The book, so far, has some very funny, very smart things to say about late-modern life. I went to bed reading it last night and woke up to read it this morning.
Here’s a line near the start of their road trip when the driver wants to play some music. His passenger replies, “What’s wrong with silence? Think of all the thinking you’ll get done. This is why good ideas occur to people in the shower and why you can’t sleep because you’re too busy replaying some argument or rehearsing some hypothetical arguments you might have. Your brain needs quiet to process all the stuff that happened, and these days, you never give it a chance. Unless we’re bathing or sleeping, it’s a nonstop stream of new input with no time to process the old. But right now? It’s just us and the hum of the road.”
Maybe your manager should let you stare out the window more often. Or go for midday jogs in your New Balances. (Do you have to pluralize shoe brands? I dunno. BYOAI.)
A Switch
Here’s a question my brain spat out during yesterday’s run: what is the opposite of digital overwhelm? At the time, huffing and panting, I could think of two alternatives: digital minimalism and digital evasiveness.
Digital minimalism abstains from tech as much as possible. Authors like Cal Newport recommend this for doing “deep work.” Authors like Cal Newport rarely discuss the privilege that authors like Cal Newport enjoy while making the rest of us wish we were as deeply productive as authors like Cal Newport.
Digital evasiveness aligns roughly with the “playing dumb at work” trend discussed last week. Feeling digitally overwhelmed? No problem: avoid your tech-floodedness by gaslighting everybody into thinking you can’t find your password.
What I’d like to recommend instead is digital symbiosis. Stop thinking of technology as a losing battle and starting thinking of it as an attempt at harmonious co-existence. Ethan Mollick calls this “being the human in the loop.”
Okay, maybe nobody’s going to buy my proposed book Digital Symbiosis: How to Meditate While Doom-Scrolling. But I don’t know: can we find something besides an unrealistic abstinence and a dodgy avoidance?
Sounds like a question I should ask Perplexity.
LWYW
Just so we’re clear, The Mode/Switch is complicit in the problem of digital overwhelm. Like, I’m helping you overcome email by—creating more email. You good with that?
Hair of the Dog, amirite? You’re buzzed, so have another drink—that’ll help.
But Hannah’s here to lighten the whelm with Listen While You Work:
Digital Regrets
I just asked Perplexity how much of our lives we spend in our inboxes. Turns out, it’s about two and a half years out of our probable forty years of working.
A NYT columnist, Cornelia Channing, said she read somewhere that high schoolers today are likely to spend about seventeen years of their lives online. Ann Patchett recently wrote a piece called “I Signed Up for Email in 1995. I Still Regret It.”
My new book won’t rescue you from digital regrets. But it may slow your attention and lure you into deep reading. Plus I have ideas for what to do about your inbox.
Here’s a link to the book.
