Ch. 4 // Digital Detox
📚 The Practice of Attention Book Club 📚
Hi, friends! Welcome to Be Where You Are. We’re rolling along with our low-key book club to read Cody Cook-Parrott’s new book, The Practice of Attention. Here’s last week’s post on Ch. 3, “Digital Space,” and here’s the post with the framework for how we’ll do this. If you’re a paid subscriber and you’d still like to join us for the accountability threads & meet-ups, just send me an email and I’ll get you on the list! 💥
As I read the Digital Detox chapter, I kept thinking about these lines from Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing:
“A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.”
I jotted this quote down in 2020 when I did my first digital detox (which I wrote about here for Romper). It still helps me to remember what I’m really doing when I dive into my apps or my laptop. I’m chasing something other than what’s in front of me. Sometimes, that thing is actually good for me! Most of the time, it’s not.
About once or twice a year since then, I’ve done an impromptu detox motivated by disgust with my digital habits. With this detox, I wanted to be ambitious, even though Cody cautions against making one’s expectations too high and thus unsustainable. I started with a list of eleven things (🫠) then I realized I had to prioritize and condense. I chose one or two to focus on, then swung back and ended up with nine (ha).