Turn off, tune in, drop out: on taking a digital detox

In which I discover there’s more to life than Facebook – as long as you post about it afterwards

I switched off my phone at Nice Airport and I breathed a deep sigh of relief. No calls. No messages. No updates. No tweets.

Tom made dad jokes about cold turkey which had nothing to do with leftovers. I had become an addict, plain and simple. Whatever I was looking for on my phone, I’d finally realised I likely never would find.

I was becoming twitchy whenever I put it down. I might miss an urgent communication from a stranger, or fail to make a pithy comment on a news story that would be stone cold by morning. Russell Brand could lead the charge into voter apathy and I might fail to be rallied in my inertia. My WordPress stats might surge without my knowledge and what validation could I seek from my labours if I didn’t have the numbers to prove I wasn’t howling into the wind?

As Christmas passed over into New Year, I felt a resolution forming in my mind which had nothing to do with the amount of chocolate coins I had consumed. It became clear to me that my whole family communicated, when we communicated at all, except for key moments scripted by traditions diktats, with eyes averted over screens. It seemed a sad state of affairs, if entirely normal in this day and age. And we were all as bad as each other. The kids with Minecraft on the iPad, or failing that, lulled into inactive fractiousness by the dulcet tones of Stampy Longnose on YouTube, which had begun to accompany our every waking moment. Tom quietly developed a much derided addiction to Candy Crush, and me to Twitter, and in falling down the conspiracy rabbit hole, whose depths I plumbed with as much fervour as the most committed teenage porn user.

As the holidays progressed, Johnny-the-pug kept bringing me a tied up pair of socks in the vain hope I might play a half-arsed game of tug of war. I barely looked up into his pleading puggy eyes. It really was a new low.

My screen addiction reached a peak (or should that be trough?) on New Years’ Day, which I spent mildly hungover, face glued to my new iPhone 6, having rowed with a friend the day before about my off-piste thoughts about the New Year’s Honours list, which I’d spent most of a party tweeting about, and about which I promptly wrote a slightly pissed, probably libellous blog, upsetting my mother in the process, while elsewhere fireworks were going off and people were kissing and linking arms in celebration of the New Year.

When, next day, the breaking news of the Duke of York’s historic shenanigans confirmed my worst suspicions about the 1 per cent, about whose privileged otherness I had been cultivating a proper dislike of, as well as improbable theories online, I became euphoric with told you so-ness on Facebook, following several drunken rants on the subject over the Christmas period.

My obsession with uncovering the truth, whatever that might be was becoming wilfully self-destructive, and making me look insane into the bargain. In short, I needed to get back to the real world. And as a family it was high time we re-learned to use our much underused yuletide muscles and sweat off a bit of Christmas excess.

We were lucky to have post-Christmas holiday booked, normally the remit of the maligned privileged few – a three day ski trip to Valberg in the South of France.  But without the freedom of languid private school holidays, we took keen advantage of an extra long double state school inset day and the fact that I don’t start a new job until mid January to grab a break that didn’t come under next year’s holiday allowance.

For the tech detox alone, It was well worth the peak airfares to get away from it all after a stultifying period of enforced jollity . There was no wifi in the mountains, and even if we did switch our phones on, it was so crippling expensive to view pictures of everyone else’s carefully edited festive highlights, it begged the question, what was the point of it all, anyway?

To my surprise, I didn’t miss it – the constant checking back for something I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know in the first place. Tom posted one last status: Are you really having fun skiing if there are no pictures on Facebook to prove it? He made a good point. What are we all trying to prove anyway, in constantly making our presence felt online? That we even exist at all?

I found a deep peace on the slopes, as my overwrought brain concentrated on the basic task of remaining upright. There is a solace in silence, where the only sound is the high pitch whirr of background radiation; in eating molten cheese and bread that will be burned off at 40 miles per hour without worrying about the state of my digestive tract; in taking pride in my children become better than me at something I only learned to do properly as an adult; in azure skies reflected off snow-cannoned peaks and a guiltless cold beer, with nothing to talk about but whether our next slope would be a green or a blue. It should come as no surprise that I slept like a baby for the first time in weeks.

It was edifying to stop feeling guilty about these hard-earned pleasures, and I felt cleansed in the mountain air and sunshine from all the muck raking I’d found myself doing online in spite of my better judgement, out of lazy boredom and grubby curiosity. Let others worry about inequality, power, corruption, global warming, purient news stories that tell only tantalising snippets of the horrors to be found down the back of the internet. It’s none of my business and I can’t do anything about any of it anyway, so why bother finding out, I mused to myself as I skidded along at ear chilling speed.

Better to lead by example in the small way I can, while still having the energy and small enough children to impress, to take my nose away from my navel and the screen that lies thereon, and to carve out a future that began in the short term with learning to do kick turns and ended by considering where we all might be in a week, a month and a year’s time if only we stopped wasting so much time on our respective screens.

At the top of a mountain, anything seems possible when you can really exercise your long distance vision. Where it takes only a slight lapse in judgement to land properly on your face, but where in a relatively short time, you can fly with new found confidence against a backdrop whose natural beauty – for all it might be unseasonably warm and the snow might admittedly be fake – amid all the cynicism and bad news and fear mongering and humble bragging and bearing witness to other peoples’ fun, you had forgotten truly existed.

Perhaps, then, I won’t be posting proud yet annoying videos of my offspring gliding like mini-pros down glinting mountains this year – but I might just post that one snap of me holding a beer in the sun for the benefit of those who are already back to work. After all, like most resolutions, this one is likely to have fallen off a cliff by mid January. And isn’t making other people jealous – or at least yourself feel better – what a holiday, even a tech holiday, is all about?