It feels like being in Oaxaca Mexico this week is forcing me to live my day to day closer to my senses, a bit more present in the physical world and less plugged in to my phone. I am realizing that travel is the perfect teacher for the ideas about embodiment and being more present that I have been circling lately. I say circling because I am a mere mortal, I still check my phone, email, apps etc. plenty. On a typical day I get sucked into the daily outrage that is being an American with a conscience and a consciousness, and that gets exhausting. So, I have been running an experiment for a couple of weeks while on vacation—no news. I’m a week into having no idea what’s going on in the world at large.
What does it feel like? It feels like when you live in a loud city, and then you get out into nature and you remember what quiet feels like, and you realize you hadn’t noticed how the constant noise of the city was affecting you, because you senses have become numbed. It feels pretty good.
For awhile I have been moving towards has been towards embodiment and being less plugged in. Embodiment is a funny term because it is something humans used to be able to take for granted until recently. But it is quite simple —being in your body, being connected with it and the actual world not the screenworld. Less doom scroll and more actual life has been a reaction to every escalating and exhausting news cycle. Now, at my core I am a total news junky. An addict to things like deep dives on internet rabbit holes and Twitter and so forth. I feel like I could stand up in front of a circle of fellow doom-scrollers anonymous and talk about how I hit “rock bottom” and “there I was scrolling multiple news cycles on two devices at once, deep dives on following the collapse of democracy, investigating conspiracy theories about weird UPA” while my fellow addicts nodded their heads in recognition.
But now I am a doomscroller “in recovery”. Mostly just someone who has managed to set up boundaries and rules (like the digital Feirabend) that help me not get too out of control with the screen time.
Oaxaca feels like a deeper reset. This place is a feast for the senses! You feel like they have somehow stepped into a magical scene written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Every street corner is a riot of violet bougainvillea blossom and trees blooming yellow and lily white, crumbling stucco walls are slathered in murals depicting Aztec warriors and Mayan gods so it feels as though you are walking through a gigantic labyrinth of a comic book.
In the zocalo people wear a bewildering palette of styles from ancient Zapotec influenced indigenous patterns dating back centuries to modern. And the plants! Cacti, vines, flowers, trees the size of Texas singing with strange birds. Every corner you turn there is another park where people of all ages and nations pass their time just hanging out, laughing, talking, flirting, teasing, hanging out, singing, playing music, dancing, eating ice cream, tacos, smoothies, elotes, sipping mezcal. This is a place that makes it very easy to get off your phone.
With the welter of mesmerizing beauty and sensory stimulation, the distraction of a phone feels unnecessary. I suppose you could argue — it is always less necessary than we have allowed ourselves to be programed into thinking it is. But—that is the nice thing about going somewhere different, you step out of the ruts and routines to realize how much of what maybe feels necessary to your identity is actually only just a habit you picked up.
With this in mind I am making an effort to accept the dance that Mexico is offering me. I am not quite ready to ditch the phone all together—it’s just too damn useful for navigation (like finding out where the best tacos are.)
But, I am making a real effort to take a big long break from reading any and all news this week. I am also largely avoiding or cutting back on social media of all stripes. This is an open experiment. I am not sure what I will find. Mainly I am just testing what happens if I tune out the national news for ana few weeks. Will I have “missed out” on not keeping up with every latest outrage and insult of the United States government upon the collectible nervous system of the world? It’s important to recognize that the news is engineered to make you feel freaked out, fear and anxiety hook your attention, and the provocations of the current White House take full advantage of this—by design.
What will it feel like to step away from the 24/7 engineered crises?
It’s been so long I am genuinely curious to find out!
And in its place . . .. sketching in a notebook despite the fact that I can’t really draw, talking to locals despite the fact that my Spanish is muy basico, trying new every new taco I see, walking aimlessly, listening to live music in the park— and largely the plan is to have less of a plan. (Maybe a good thing to try more often in general!)
Of course, you don’t need to fly thousands of miles to take a vacation from the news. And maybe a frequent taking a week, or two off “news vacation” . . . is always an option. The problems of the world will be there waiting when you come back. And just like a vacation, it’s not that the point is to step away from “real life” completely and forever, it’s that taking a set-amount, a week or two break is simply good for you and your nervous system It recalibrates you. It resets you. being somewhere different makes it easy to change your habits, but they have always been changeable.
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