Living Life in 3-D

The other day I came this close to giving up technology altogether…

There are two reasons I was about to call it quits:

The first is the addictive quality of being needed.  All.  The.  Time.  If I’m honest, I get a particular charge out of having my phone buzz constantly; I feel productive at work when the emails are coming in at a constant rate; I feel important when I’m juggling several activities at once, bouncing from one mental inbox to another.

I joke with my friends that “I am trending right now” as I get notification after notification from various social media platforms after I’ve posted something popular or clever.

Here’s the problem I’ve found with both.  When I’m feeling popular (whether personally or through my business) because of social media attention, I notice that I get tethered to my phone, needing to check it every few minutes to see what the latest activity is.  As a result, I completely lose sight of what’s tangible and immediately in front of me—often times it’s my family and my children that I’m ignoring in favor of digital popularity.

And yes, I feel important and productive when I’m at work and my phone and computer are blowing up, but I also find it utterly exhausting when the technological interruptions fail to ease up.  As a result I come home spent; all I want to do is plop on the couch and unwind in empty mental space.

Both “positive outcomes” end up leaving me completely disconnected from those around me.

And then there is the other extreme—when nothing is happening, and I’m not buried in busyness.  Because the busyness is addicting, I inadvertently search it out, catching up on the latest from Twitter, ESPN, Facebook, etc.

I get sucked in to what I call a 2-dimensional life.  Catching up on all the “latest”, at the expense of being present in the here and now.

In fact, I have become aware of a legitimate change in my mental state when I stay on technology too long.  I can feel my mind’s energy flattening out into that 2-dimensional state, where the 3-dimensional things of life suddenly become disruptive and threatening:

When I can’t lose myself in updates from all of my friends, and instead have to interact with other people, my first reaction is one of mild annoyance—like I would rather stay in my isolation than engage with others.

It’s the curse of modern society, if you ask me.

If you were to ask me to pick, I would so much rather opt for 3-D, but when push comes to shove, I get sucked into a 2-D existence, and once there, prefer to camp out in that spot for fear that moving back into 3-D would require too much from me.  Too much flexibility, too much self-sacrifice, too much reality…

I heard a study recently that stated that people who spent little to no time on Facebook were more likely to consider themselves happy and content.  Moreover, they were less likely to consider themselves lonely.

Think about that for a second.  Less likely to feel lonely when they weren’t spending so much time seeing what their friends were up to.

Interesting, isn’t it?

My family and I have a tradition of unplugging from technology for 24 hours each weekend.  I don’t have any photos to show from this weekend, because I had intentionally left my phone at home, and since it was off anyways, I had no motivation to keep it with me.

My family and I decided to head to the local soccer fields and kick the ball around a bit.  That quickly evolved into a “grown ups vs. kids” soccer game, where we ran around, laughed, fell, doubled over in exhaustion, and walked away physically tired but emotionally full.

And there was no one to “share” the moment with, because that moment was just for us, to be enjoyed by us in the moment, and not meant to be framed with a picture-perfect version of our family that we could boast about on Instagram or Facebook.

And the truth is, it would have made for an incredible photo, too.  There were sun rays poking through storm clouds, mountain vistas, and of course, our boys playing soccer.

But instead of finding the perfect angle for the perfect photo, we spent our time finding the perfect way to spend the moment together as a family.  (I’m aware that this flies in the face of modern society, where if you don’t have a picture of a cool experience, it didn’t happen.)

But you know what?  I didn’t miss technology at all in that moment.  Because that moment was a sacred experience of life in 3-D.  Life lived to its fullest.

And I’m convinced that had I chosen to share that moment with technology, it would have taken far more than its fair share of the attention that day.  And had I given it that attention, the experiences that I would have missed out on would have been gone forever…

And so I’m landing in a place where I notice that when I’m over-connected to technology I’m actually more disconnected from others, and so I I’ve decided to be intentional about taking a part of each and every day where I am disconnected and unplugged, so that I can re-enter experience and engage in the people around me.

Because I have decided that a life in 3-D is something I have to fight for, each and every day, for the very existence of my soul depends on it…