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| UK version of The Big Bang |
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A shortened version of this article appeared in New York Magazine Renounce Your Blackberry The resolution makers have got it all wrong: January 1st is the worst possible time to give up anything you're attached to: You're hungover, there might be a near stranger in your bed, you may have just drunk-dialed your therapist or made out with your co-worker—only a masochist would eschew their security blanket on a morning like this. But February, on the other hand, is made for psychic renewal via self-denial. What else are you going to do after a social season that runs from September through the new year? "No cash left, no great parties to go to, and you're sick of getting dressed up, slapping on the make up, and drinking and socializing anyway—everyone is spent," says our friend Brenda, who has given up booze every February for the past decade. "It's a good time to clear your head and regain focus." Oh yeah, and it's the shortest month, too. But if you can't imagine drinking Fresca at your Superbowl party (talk about the cruelest month), you could always try a little high-tech abstinence this February instead: giving up as much emailing, surfing, cellphoning, and Blackberrying as your job will allow. When you're constantly plugged in, "your creativity, spontaneity, and joie de vivre diminish," says Jeff Davidson, author of Breathing Space: Living & Working at a Comfortable Pace in a Sped-Up Society. "When your neurons are always firing, when you find yourself in a continual mode of reacting and responding, instead of steering and directing, do you have any chance of thinking new thoughts or are you simply generating permeations of all your previous thoughts?" An incessant cellphone user, he says, is like the man with a hammer who sees only nails—or, in this case, urgent calls to be made. This is what lead Moby to announce to his friends in a group email last September that, effective immediately, he would be going offline and answering only snail mail and his landline (no answering machine) until the end of the year. He promised to sit on his stoop for an hour a day and answer the door whenever he was home. "I was getting 400 emails a day and spending hours and hours just giving perfunctory responses," he says. His hope was that the public announcement—the email appeared on Gawker within hours—would force him to stay the course, "kind of like making public vows of marriage or celibacy." Turns out, not so much: The sum total of his fast? "Four days. I wish I'd had the fortitude to make it last." But it was a nice four days, he says. "Disconcerting at first, but then really good. Ideally we'd all learn that life is okay without being so busy, personally and professionally." Though he won't be going cold turkey again, not even in February ("400 emails a day isn't seasonal"), he's thinking of a modified diet for 2007. Perhaps moderation will prove to be the key to abstention as well as to consumption. Brenda's annual experiment in temperance would seem to suggest so. "One year I tried to give up caffeine and sugar as well—until my boss told me to cut it out as I was a dreary, sad, unenergetic hag," she says. "He handed me a coffee and said drink." A shortened version of this article appeared in New York Magazine |
©2007 Emma Taylor & Lorelei Sharkey