48 Hours News Blackout: An Experiment on Introspection.

What would my life be like if I received no news for a period of time? That question had been popping up in my head for a while, but I always dismissed it. I thought that avoiding the media and its bombardment of news was such an easy task that it deserved not a second thought.
The more I thought about it, though, the more apparent it became that it was not only not going to be easy, but it was going to take the help of my family, my friends, and the people I work with to help me through 48 hours of news-isolation.

I decided that I was not going to isolate myself completely from my family and friends; I would check my email, skipping emails suspected of bringing any kind of news. I'd watch Netflix, but not cable. I'd try to skip newspaper stands, libraries, bookstores, and the magazines at the impulse section of the supermarket register. I'd tell people I meet about my experiment as soon as after "hello" and ask them to collaborate by not mentioning any news.

I made up my mind and chose to run my little experiment on a weekend I knew I would be by myself. I woke up Saturday morning, turned my phone off, and got started.

Not long after I started the 48-hour news blackout experiment, I realized that it was going to take more than just shutting off my social media networks to avoid receiving news. The news was everywhere. As expected, there was news in my Facebook timeline, on my Twitter feed, and on Instagram. There was news coming mixed up in emails, and in unexpected channels: I couldn't check any of the administration tools of my client's websites, as they included news related to their activities. I restricted the use of the smartphone to the minimum, just to make and receive phone calls, like in the 80s, avoided the computer and the TV altogether, and limited my exposure to the world outside my home to avoid, or minimize, involuntary exposure to news.

A short period of time followed, in which I couldn't shake off the feeling of anxiety about all that I was going to miss out on. Irrational, I realized, as hardly anything big enough to change the course of history was going to happen. Most likely, in two days, I was going to have to catch up on small stuff, some of it of relative importance, but not life-changing.
Some time ago, I read the article "The End of Solitude" by William Deresiewicz, in which a phrase caught my attention from the very beginning. It says that boredom is not the consequence of not having anything to do, but only the negative experience of idleness. This implies a choice, maybe not a conscious choice, but a choice at last. An impossible choice if we haven't been taught what to do when we have nothing to do. The only thing we can do when we have nothing to do is to direct our thoughts in one of two directions: inward, and face ourselves, or outward, and become an uninvolved observer of the world. Uninvolved because the moment we get involved and start judging we abandon idleness.

Looking inwards, into our soul, could be scary; there we find the imperfections we would like to change but ignore daily, the secrets we keep from the world, and our fears. More importantly, we find that there is nobody else but ourselves to make sense of all of it.
If, in turn, we observe what's going on around us, like a play on a stage, we realize that we are alone, part of the whole, but separate.

As with boredom and its relationship with idleness, loneliness is not the necessary consequence of being in solitude, but the way we perceive being alone.

In an era pervaded by screens and social networks, solitude is a scarce commodity, and if it was an acquired taste in times past, it is more so now. Educated to avoid solitude, we seek company at any price, through a video conference on a computer screen or through text messages in the minuscule screen of a smartwatch. We escape idleness and throw ourselves into the arms of technologies designed to entertain us, to feed us, the passive recipients, with their content.

The presence of news is pervasive, but its absence forces us to look inward and face ourselves. The absence of news and the limitation of media in our daily life set us front and center in an unexplored landscape in which our only interlocutor is ourselves, inescapable and unforgiving. We are made to face our reality.

The absence of news for 48 hours forced me to realize that we are hyperconnected, hyperdependent on the new media, a media that is completely pervasive, seeping into every corner of our lives, and that has convinced us of the imperative necessity of its presence in our daily lives.
News, but only because I decided to make them the central focus of my experiment, has become a symptom of a much larger problem: We are immersed in a new reality in which we can't choose what information we absorb.
Our boundaries have been blurred, if not erased, by the constant invasion of news and media that makes me an individual who is part of an incredibly vast collective, with the tools to look at the world in an instant, but that lacks the capacity for introspection and reflection. We are becoming isolated castaways on a gigantic island that is connected to everything but doesn't let us see ourselves.