Today is day 16 without a cell phone or social media. It feels like forever. I am confident I will never go back to carrying a telephone, that part of the experiment has been easy, and it is safe to say, a resounding success. The facebook blackout has also been a success. My efficiency has skyrocketed, as well as my emotional maturity. I find it hard to believe that something so simple could make such a huge difference. The increase in productivity doesn't surprose me, that's a pretty simple cause and effect: remove distractions and you get more done. What I find surprising is the effect on my emotional well being.
     First, let me recap what I have done and update some of the interim changes. I intended to blog more  describing this experience but studying is the first priority and I've been in the zone. For the entirety of winter break I have been studying for my PhD physics qualifying exam. It is a mammoth undertaking. I have to essentially memorize 150 problems that take at least a page to solve. The Friday before Christmas I woke up late in the afternoon after having been up way too late and my first instinct was to get on facebook to update political arguments and then start texting. This was accompanied by a sense of doom, that my present path was going to lead to failure on several accounts. It probably wouldn't have, really, one of my greatest skills in life is holding things together under the most heinous of circumstances, but regardless, I don't want to have a survival existence. So what, I'm a physicist, that only impresses people for about 5 minutes. If that's my only accomplishment in life, I'm a failure. I'm looking for inner peace.
     So, in search of inner peace and a 60% on my qual exam (its so difficult that a 60 is passing), I gave up my cell phone and all social media. Incidentally, I think I've hit on a brilliant new dotcom venture: one that locks you out of your distracting social media and website acccounts for certain hours of the day. You give them your password and they change it from 9-5.
     I felt the difference immediately. By about day 4, I already knew I probably wasn't going back to having a cell phone. I am a bit ahead of the tech curve and I think I represent the next phase in communication. I think I'll call it "LCARS" (you get there first, you get to name it). For those of you who had a life while growing up, LCARS is the fictional shipboard operating system and interface on Star Trek TNG. TNG predates cell phone ubiquity, so that may have more to do with their suspicious absence of omnipresent communication devices than any technical prescience. However, their solution is, in my opinion, better than cell phone ubiquity. Active duty starfleet have a comm badge that activates for official ship communication, that is worn and not carried. It serves one purpose: to talk. Normal citizens carry nothing. Other than that, technological and communication needs are met through an intelligent speaking and touch interface that can serve (among many other things) as a telephone. My point is, I think that the end of the cell phone era will come, and people will no longer carry a device full time for communication. They won't have to because their TV will no longer be a tv, it will be a tv, computer, office, internet, and videophone. But I must be clear, I don't think this is a completely "natural" evolution. I think, if I'm correct, that it will be a conscious next step taken to restore balance to an overly tech-dependent lifestyle.
     For me, the peace comes from having time to think through my actions and feelings. I've got a lot of good qualities; I'm hard working, intelligent, sensitive, caring, funny, and a damn fine singer. I am not, however, patient. There are many sources of my impatience: my drive for success, need for order, insecurity, and I'm sure it links to how I was raised as well. The end result is, between my upbringing and the technology age, I've gotten used to immediate response to every impulse, and I forgot how to sit still. I've since become aware of my irrational emotional response to absence of immediate 'feedback' and my panic at the idea of a delay in gratification. To sum up, since I've given up the immediate payoff of tech, I have come to realize that not all thoughts are good and not all feelings represent reality. I'm sure that's a seemingly obvious realization to the reader, but in these times it is a realization easier discussed than accomplished.
    My increase in productivity was quite large, but still not as great as I hoped. For one thing I substituted Reddit for Facebook. On its own merits, reddit is far better than facebook, but for the purposes of this experiment, was just like giving up coke to take up crack. So yesterday I had the same friend lock me out of reddit. About a week ago I was pondering the days ahead, including what I would do after my exam. This experiment will not be complete if the first thing I do after it is over is run back to Facebook.