Christina: We all dream about it: a life free of scrolling, tweeting, liking, faving, streaming, replying, apologizing for not replying, and other assaults on our poor, saturated brains. But what would an analog world actually look like? Award-winning writer, Chris Colin, paints a picture in his bedtime fantasy book for adults titled OFF: The Day the Internet Died.

[00:00:00] Hi, Chris. 

Chris: Hi, 

Christina: How are you? 

Chris: I'm well, how are you? 

Christina: I'm just fine. Thank you. Okay. I have to tell you that the discovery of you and this particular book this year has been like one of the great [00:01:00] highlights of 2021. Honestly. 

Chris: Thank you. Hey, wait. That's not saying much, this is a pretty crappy year. 

Christina: It's been a pretty crappy year, but good things have happened.

I read this aloud to people all the time. Like earlier I was doing an interview and I was like, "Can I just tell you that I'm going to talk to this person later? And I'm just going to read out loud my favorite pages." Yeah, I'm really excited to have this conversation. 

Chris: Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

Christina: So I have kids coming home from school in about 45. There's a note on the door telling them to be quiet, but I know you have kids, so you can appreciate this. So if you're okay with it, I'm going to jump right in. 

Okay. Welcome Chris. 

Chris: Thanks for having me. 

Christina: My pleasure. Where am I speaking to you from? 

Chris: I am in San Francisco, cold foggy San Francisco.

Christina: It's cold and foggy? 

Chris: Yes. That's how we like it. Apparently 

Christina: I'm originally from Vancouver so I can relate. 

Chris: Okay, cool.

Christina: Yeah. So on a Saturday afternoon, where can we find?

Chris: On a Saturday afternoon, I'm either muttering about having to take my [00:02:00] kids to soccer games, or if I'm lucky, then there are no games and we're swimming in the Russian river, which is a very lovely warm river just north of San Francisco or the less sexy answers I'm, puttering around fixing things.

Or maybe I'm, I'm a writer, I'm a journalist, so I might be on deadline, finishing a story. 

Christina: All right. What gets you up on Monday? 

Chris: My children, dog, responsibility, anxiety, all of the above, a nice cocktail of all of the above. 

Christina: What's one thing people wouldn't know if they followed you online. 

Chris: Oh, interesting.

I curate the bejesus out of myself and my loved ones. Our, we probably have some less flattering angles about us to, to us, to our face. Then I would let on, no, I it's serious answer. I don't know. My, I have a public persona, because I'm a writer and that only shows one little teeny facet of life.

Obviously. 

Christina: Is there a hobby we might not know about? 

Chris: I am a musician. So yeah, so I actually go back to my earlier answer if it's Saturday and I have my druthers [00:03:00] then I'm playing music.

Mostly guitar. 

Christina: Yeah. Nice. Okay. Final question for this round. What brings you the most joy in life and how do you prioritize it? 

Chris: Oh, that's a really easy question, huh? I okay. This is going to be really boring, being with my loved ones, which nine times out of 10 is my kids and my wife, but also my friends.

I live in San Francisco, a lot of friends around here. Sorry that there's a police car going past. Yeah. Being with loved ones, joking around having fun, cooking dinner, the, all the normal stuff. I don't, my the exotic stuff is nice, but I like all the normal stuff. 

Christina: Great. So let's get right into it.

I want to start by addressing the elephant in the room, which is your defense of FOMO in an essay for Pacific Standard you wrote, where you argue that quote "fretting over your options is part of a life well lived." And I wanted you to explain. 

Chris: Oh boy that's a deep cut.

Yes. [00:04:00] I had this feeling like, yes, I'm an enemy of FOMO as much as the next person, but I also had this feeling like FOMO was getting a bad rap because w wielded correctly, it is an expression of a deep passionate love for our existence on the planet, which is this crazy miracle that happened to us, that we are on this rock and we're alive and we're walking around having fun.

And you get a very short time and then it's all over. And I think FOMO is not healthy, but I think FOMO is, it means that you're paying attention and you want to do all the damn things. And I feel like wanting to do all the damn things in life is appropriate. It's not realistic, but that ache is so human.

And I think it's okay to feel it. And then step two can be like figuring out how to manage it. And what's the best thing to do about it but feeling it, wanting to do every single thing where on this short time [00:05:00] we have here, I support that. 

Christina: You wrote, you described it as longing at one point in the article and you say "longing isn't just another inconvenience for today's eager solutionists to disrupt. It's a vital biological tool. To put this in PR and programmer speak: FOMO is a feature and not a bug." And like you just said, "life is a miracle. If we're not heartbroken over all we're not experiencing, I dare say we haven't gotten our arms around the situation" and I really did love the way that you Yeah, I really loved this piece.

And you wrote about actually your experience at camp grounded, which for those of you who are listening, who do not know what camp grounded is or was, it was an unplugged summer camp for adults. How was that experience? 

Chris: Yeah, that was really toward the beginning of this movement of, like starting to pay attention, like how much is the internet taking over our lives?

Are we losing our minds? And so they had this really interesting and pretty lovely gathering in the woods north of [00:06:00] San Francisco. And that's where I learned the term FOMO. I had never heard it. This was years ago, obviously. And that's when I came to see the connection between FOMO and the internet. They are made for each other. Each encourages the other.

And and they're just all they're intertwined in all these fascinating ways. And that was when I first started really thinking about the possibility that we need to disentangle those strands. 

Christina: So let's talk about your new book. Like I said, in our earlier preamble the best thing in my opinion, to come out of 20, 21. What sparked the writing of off the day, the internet died.

Chris: So off is if you're not looking at it right now, it's a picture book for grownups. It's a grownup book in kids' book, clothing and. It's a funny book it's written in like folk biblical speak. It's pretty absurd. It's not what you might call a serious book. And in the rest of my life, I was a serious person.

I am a serious person. I'm a journalist and I, say serious things for [00:07:00] a living. And I think I had just gotten tired of the seriousness I think that was part of it. I wanted to do something funny. The world felt like it could use a laugh at the moment. But I also thought, the conversation about our relationship to the internet, it gets a little scoldy. And I didn't want to be a scold. I did feel like we were in a crisis situation. We are in a crisis situation, our relationship with screens, but I didn't want to be another scold. Partly because that doesn't work. And partly because I don't really feel that way. I think that it, for most of us, if you're honest about how you feel about the internet yeah. You think it's bad for you and yeah. You wish you'd use it less. And then five minutes later you're like, wow, this is incredibly useful and amazing in certain ways.

So yeah I wanted a book that reflected that ambivalence and a book that was fun and funny to read that you could face. You're the nearest loved one who has a little bit of an internet issue [00:08:00] or yourself, who has an internet issue. 

Christina: Absolutely. There's a couple of things I want to pull out of what you just said.

I it's my first book, the joy of missing out. It was originally titled digital detox. Ironically, it had, the title had to be changed because camp grounded had trademarked digital detox and we were like gonna battle it out in court and it was like not even worth it. And so we changed the name. Yeah. And we changed the name to the joy of missing out.

And I am grateful for that choice every single day of my life, because it completely reframed the conversation around. What joys we can step into. Rather than withdrawal of something. It's what can we yeah. Move into? And yeah. I love that this book is an absolute joy to read.

Is it okay if we read a little bit? Is it okay? Do you have a favorite? Do you have a favorite page? 

Chris: No I don't. But I do want you to read in your most God-like voice 

Christina: I've been practicing. Okay. Maybe not that one. It was, I did one earlier. This. 

"On [00:09:00] the day the screens went dark, I cried to our children, let us bake a pie that we know, not which recipe is rated highest. We toiled and toiled than beheld. What we'd wrought, I would receive neither fave nor heart, nor aunt Kim supplemental conspiracy links, but we ate it, but we ate of it with vigor." Sorry, I'm fumbling on your beautiful words.

"On the day the screens went dark. I swiped neither left nor right upon the toilet nor angered any birds. In and out in three minutes." 

Tell me about your experience with, is it Renee? Is that how I say her name? The illustrator. Yeah. So how was that collaboration, was she there from the start? Was she a part of even developing some of the texts?

Chris: And I'm sorry out there in podcast land, you can't be seeing the pictures cause she's a wonderful illustrator demented in my favorite kind of way. And she does these really lush, very funny droll illustrations. Yeah, I had never worked with an illustrator before that I can recall. [00:10:00] So I, I came up with a manuscript and then I wanted to find someone.

Who could make it, a gazillion times better. And that's what she did. So we would just bounce ideas around. She's like me, she's ambivalent about the internet. She, sees all the ways that it's destroying the fabric of our society and she's as addicted as I am. So it was nice that we were coming from the same place.

Christina: Yeah. Cell phones, email, obviously social media have deluged us with more information than ever. Tell us about your digital habits. How do you turn off? 

Chris: I think that one of the, one of the most insidious things about the internet for me has really surfaced in the last couple of years when I think I'm not speaking out of school.

When I say the world got insane. Or extra insane. And I think we all felt largely because of the pandemic, but also other current events and climate change catastrophes and all sorts of things. We all felt like we had to be like looking at our phones every four minutes to see what new ungodly thing had happened on our planet.

And I [00:11:00] think it became a habit or even more of a habit, certainly for me. And it pushed this idea at some unconscious part of my being that you just have to be paying attention all the time and you have to know what's happening in the world and that's wrapped up in the frantic pacing of the internet.

So I think that very much took over my life and I'm a journalist, so it's second nature to want to know what's going on and also. If you care about the world, of course you want to know what's going on. So it makes sense that you would think I need to read. I need to look at my phone constantly to see what's happening, but I think it's possible to be an engaged and active citizen on a different pace sometimes.

Yeah. And so that's what I been trying to do is yes. Obviously I want to know it, the latest thing happening in the white house or whatever local news and international news is as important to me as ever. And I want to have a little healthy distance from not just the, not the news itself, but from the pace of the news and [00:12:00] the sort of desperate speed with which every single thing has to come at us.

So that's my addiction and that's my attempt at breaking it. 

Christina: How have you slowed it? Do you have any subscriptions to physical newspapers? Do you have a set time that you check? 

Chris: I'll tell you I realized that and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this. I think that most advice you get about detoxing from the internet is basically like telling you to white knuckle it. Just sorta don't look at your phone so much, go take a walk without it. Don't look at your computer. And it's that's really hard. And I had this realization that, you probably had long before I did, but our relationships with the internet are a chemical exchange. And, we are getting those dopamine blasts every time we get a fave or a heart or a like, or an email. And if you want to have any shot at changing the, your relationship. If you want to flip the script in any way, you got to fight fire with fire, you gotta find [00:13:00] some a chemical reaction elsewhere that is equally pleasing to you. And 

Christina: I love this. I agree. 

Chris: So that's, easier said than done, but what I've tried to do is, identify the things that really spark, happiness and joy and excitement in me. And so I don't just have to do my homework and take my medicine and, leave the phone on my bedside table or whatever.

It's actually actively finding the things that light me up. So yeah, playing music certainly does that. Taking one of those big blocky things down from my shelf, I think they call them books. These are things that you have to sometimes nudge yourself to do, but once you're in them, you're like, oh yeah, there's this other ancient part of myself that's switching back on. 

Christina: Yeah. I love that you framed it in that way. People will, They're always asking me for tips, right? What are your top three strategies for digitally detoxing or whatever it is? I'm always so reluctant to share them for the exact reason that you pointed out. You ask people to take away their phone, for an hour, a half an hour, an afternoon, a day, tech Sabbath, [00:14:00] whatever, and people are like in cold sweats, right? Like they don't know what to do with themselves. So it's, for me, it's always been the conversation around what are you going to put in there instead? Like things you're anticipating things you're looking forward to doing, like going for brunch with your friends.

Go whatever, like whatever it is, you need to put something in that space. And you, I read a piece or an interview that you did about this book and you advocate for doing fun or beautiful, or you say unusual things offline, just because, and in one interview you said, quote, "to really experience the full, miraculous, awful, extreme, wonderful insanity of the universe I think you need one foot in the. And the real life world. It's both quieter and wilder there in ways that lend themselves to being alive." I just loved that quote. 

So you shared some of the personal things that you do. What are some things that you do with other people? What are some of your favorite, fun, beautiful, or unusual things to do offline besides music?

Chris: I just did it for the first time in a pandemic. I went to the local art museum. I hadn't done that in ages and [00:15:00] museums I don't know, they exist in another time and place in my mind at least. You're just, it's a different it's just a different vibe in there.

And you're you overwhelm. I think what it is that you, your senses are overwhelmed and saturated much like they are with a really fun internet session. You get lots of fun info and we are hungry for that, especially if we have been nurturing this addiction all these years it's just a different kind, a different flavor of information you're saturated with.

My wife and I ditched the kids for an hour, we went to SF MOMA. And God, it really felt like there were parts of me that had been hibernating and they were suddenly woken. And I just looking at art, I'm not a, art historian or anything. I don't, I'm just a regular civilian in the context of art, but it was beautiful and I just loved it.

And the museum was closing soon and we're running from room to room. It was so awesome. And we left feeling good in a way that you don't after an hour of internetting.[00:16:00] 

Christina: I love it. I had a very similar experience right before the pandemic started, where, my office was right across the street from the museum of contemporary art here in Toronto.

And I hadn't been, and I was just on a whim one afternoon, went to see Douglas Copeland's show the age of you, which was closing in a couple of weeks. And I have been thankful every day since then. And I actually ended up writing about it in my most recent book, because yeah, it was such an immersive experience.

It just took me out of my regular thought patterns. And it just took me out of myself in a way that I hadn't experienced in a really long time. Cause it was also an embodied experience. I was walking around, I was hearing the sounds. I was sitting to watch a film and trying to make sense of it all.

It demanded much more of me than my typical ways of consuming. 

Chris: Oh yeah. I feel like I owe you a more robust answer. Cause I, I do think like going [00:17:00] to an art museum is wonderful, of course, but I said, part of what I believe in is doing weird stuff. And one of my critiques of the internet is that it's of course it's wonderfully diverse and you can have all kinds of strange, surprising things on it.

But sometimes I do feel like there's a sameness or a same-ifying force on the internet. That's shoved us into familiar ways of interacting or familiar ways of consuming things. And if you can break out of that and do something truly strange, that's when you're engaging the weirdness of the world in a way that, that wakes you up.

So I don't know what that is. Go jump in a river with your shoes on or go stare at an aunt up close. I don't know, do some do something that you just don't do very often. And I don't know. I think that's a way of waking part of yourself up too. 

Christina: Same-ifying. I'm going to have to hold on to that one.

One of my goals for the season of the podcast. I just wrote down three words. I wrote down weirder, wilder, [00:18:00] and wonder, and that I wanted to get closer to the real experience of being alive in this season. Because I ended up last season really interviewing a lot of like tech founders and I loved it, but it was like a lot of the same story over and over again, there was that same sameness happening, even in the conversations.

And I think. I really love that challenge to do things yeah. To do weirder things, to follow impulses, healthy impulses, to do things out of out of the ordinary. And I think you can do that online, but there's still. Like you were saying earlier about the filter, right? The curating of putting yourself online, even with your family or your public persona as a journalist.

Even if you're doing weird things online, you're still making a choice to write, to put your, share that online. And so there's something about doing it in the real world that is just for yourself for your own a couple of people. And it's. It's a different experience. You're [00:19:00] a member of the well.com.

Can we talk a little bit about this? 

Chris: We can talk about it, but you're going to be disappointed with how little I have to say. 

Christina: Okay. Yeah. Then we don't need to talk about it. I just, I was it's not a community I was actually aware of which I'm actually embarrassed by. And I was really curious about your experience there, but you don't have much experience there?

Chris: My experience there is that I got a free internet address from them back in 1999 or something. And because I worked for a magazine called salon, which owned the well, and I got this groovy internet address and I'm sorry, email address. I've been clinging to, for dear life ever since. So that's my experience of the well.

But I do know that people love them and it's a really neat old-school place that that has always has interesting things going on. 

Christina: I'm excited to explore further, but we won't include this in the entry. What was your hope with publishing off? 

Chris: That's a good question. I do think just doing, making funny art is a virtuous thing and some tiny [00:20:00] microscopic way.

If anyone laughed and that was a good thing, that was a hope. But yeah, I think my more substantive hope was if this could somehow in a tiny way, contribute to a conversation that's not happening enough where it's only happening in a narrow band. A conversation about our relationship to the internet.

Then it would be a worthwhile thing because I feel like, yes, we all grumble about our relationship to our devices, of course, but I don't think the culture is doing anything seriously about it, except, in fits and starts and with small pockets And I feel like we're, it felt urgent to me, it felt if we don't do anything soon, this will just become even more permanent and unquestioned.

And we still have a little window where we can say, wait a second; life, doesn't have to be like this. And it's not just how often we look at our phones and we're talking to our friends at dinner. I keep saying this, but it's the pace.[00:21:00] It's sped everything up and it's, it has sliced out our opportunities for reflection and slowness and because our relationship with the internet is so unconscious, you just lose time. You think you're going to Google something and then you look up. Or you don't even realize that you reached for your phone to check something, it's so we're so unaware of it, so often that that we don't see what we're missing. And myself very much included.

This was a book I wrote for myself. But yeah, I just, I felt like we had a very, a narrowing window to really stop and say, wait, look where we're heading. It's coarsening the way we interact with each other online. It's messing with our politics. It's messing with our sleep. It's messing with what we just, how we see the world.

It's it's facilitating all kinds of crummy things in the sort of political space. And it was, it's like one of those things that's so obvious, no one really, or a lot of people don't talk about. So I felt like this was my one little shot at changing the conversation. I'm not totally aware of any [00:22:00] situations, huge cultural shifts that began with a a picture book, but you never know what this might be the first one. 

Christina: I love Dave Eggars' glowing review of the book where he says "for humanity to stay sane, this must be read like the Bible." And I was reflecting that in the digital age, there is no holier act than turning off. But I do feel like you have succeeded in sparking a conversation.

I think you catch, the idea that you catch more bees with honey. But this is a gorgeous, conversational piece to get us hungering again, to come back to that longing conversation, longing again for what it would be like. I found, I find myself every time I read it having those feelings of a longing, a desire which helps me disconnect much more easily than some arbitrary rule about when or when I should not be online.

Chris: Yeah. Thank you. I'm really glad to hear that. I will say that the most encouraging thing that's [00:23:00] come out of, this is just hearing people say, and I hear this so often God, I forgot about X or Y or Z. Someone said to me the other day, I forgot what it was like, before it was so easy to listen, to go find a new song on the internet, skip around on the internet for another song to listen to when you had to listen to a bad song so much that you actually started to grudgingly like it.

Someone else told me, they, they were remembering what it was like to go to a restaurant without knowing in advance, if it was gonna be good or not, because I wasn't ready to review. Getting lost in a new city without having a map in your hands that an easy map in your hands just hearing people like, remember these joys that they had.

And sometimes they're strange joys, but that's been really heartening to just know that you can, with a little picture book, remind people of a whole other sort of ghost self of their’s that they've lost.

Christina: That's awesome. 

This is the JOMOcast, and I want to end [00:24:00] on hearing from you how you would define JOMO or what does JOMO mean to you?

Chris: I think JOMO to me is is realizing that you have, it's that joy of looking at what's right in front of you. Right there at the kitchen table or wherever you are, and realizing that the present moment is, can be so rich and textured and fulfilling and odd and beautiful that you don't need to go like casting about looking for some other thing to stimulate you.

You just need to, adjust your knobs, tweak, tweak your levels, such that you can tune into the present moment. And get a kick out of it. Like it's that joy and tuning out the rest and being happy with that. 

Christina: Thanks so much for being with me, 

Chris: Chris, thank you so much for having me.

I love talking about this, talking with you about this. 

Christina: Me too.