Should I Turn Off the Internet? (Lessons From a Family That Did) | Monday Advice

Have you ever had one of those days where you're so fed up from the constant connectivity and the distraction that you wish you could just turn back the clock to the 1990s? I mean, I'm talking about a time where work couldn't easily follow you home. Like, if your boss wanted you after hours, you would have to call you on a landline, a time where you could build a delightful evening out of whatever random video you're able to pick up at the rental store. Well, not long ago, I met someone who is doing exactly this. His name is Chris Moody. He teaches journalism at Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina, which is a small scenic town that's perched right off of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Now, Chris lives along with his wife and his young son in a cabin that's located about 50 minutes outside of town that receives no cell reception and has no internet. Their only connection to the outside world is a landline phone. Now, this disconnection is on purpose. Chris and his wife used to live a frenetic life in New York City where Chris was a senior correspondent for CNN Politics, but after the pandemic hit, they decided to live more intentionally. Now, Chris's situation raises some fascinating questions. What's it actually like to live in 1990s mode and what lessons can the rest of us learn from his experience? Well, it's Monday, which means it's time for an advice episode of this show, which is the perfect opportunity to seek some answer. So here's what I did. I called up Chris because I want to find out more about what led him to that cabin in Boone. What is the actual reality of his current life? I have a bunch of questions about some like in the weeds details about how does he do this and how does he do that. And most importantly, what lessons can we extract for the rest of us who might also be tempted to try something extreme in the quest for a deeper life? Now, look, I love this conversation. You'll hear it in my voice. I was expecting to come away with mixed emotions like that was cool, but that seems like it was pretty hard. But to be honest, it was almost entirely inspiring. I think Chris his brand of hybrid simplicity really is pretty compelling, especially when he discusses the impact of this way of living on his young son. Let me give you a spoiler from later in the interview. He tells me about recently taking his three-year-old son to a modern dance performance. They were sitting in the front row. And he said his three-year-old son, who has only grown up around 1990s tech, none of these like screens and iPads and blue or whatever, was able to sit and give full focus to this modern dance performance while the boomers around them couldn't help but fidget and look at their phones before the performance ended. All right. So anyways, look, if you've ever felt like a taking an extreme step towards intentional living but are maybe worried about the reality or looking for some inspiration to make changes, you have to listen to this episode. I think you're going to love it. As always, I'm Cal Newport and this is Deep Questions, the show for people seeking depth in a distracted world. Well Chris, I'm glad we finally found this opportunity to get you on the show. I feel like I talk about you to people all the time so now we can actually spread your story more widely. I wanted to start. If you could just set the stage about where you currently live and what that lifestyle is like. And then we'll go back and kind of build up the story to how you got there. Well thanks so much for having me on the show Cal. It's great to be here. I live in Southern Appalachia in Boone, North Carolina with my wife and my son. He is three years old now. And for the past three years, we've been living in a log cabin without internet access or cell phone service. We're kind of deep in the hauler. So the cell phone towers don't really get to us. And three years ago, we went to the cable company and had our Wi-Fi turned off and had a landline plugged in. We did that for many reasons that you and I will discuss today. But we realized that the life of permanent constant digital connection was not serving us, was not serving our family life. And I found it personally to be so powerful and intoxicating that the only thing we decided we could do was to cut it off inside our home and live a life together in our home without digital connection. We certainly engage with the internet outside of the home. But when we're at home, it is our sanctuary, our Sabbath space. And we did that for many, many reasons. We started doing it when my son was just a couple of months old, so an infant in the house. And anyone who has children knows what a household like that is is like. And I found myself, especially after our son was born, just getting deeper and deeper into screen time. As maybe a lot of people can relate, I think my screen time app at that time had said maybe four, six, maybe sometimes eight hours a day just looking at the phone. When you have a newborn in the house, there's a lot of sitting around together, waiting, just being together and I would pull out the phone and just scroll, scroll, scroll. And it got worse and worse and worse. And my wife told me that when you pull out your phone, it says, though, you disappear. And I started to think, is this what life is going to be like for the rest of our lives? Because it's pretty mediocre. I'm not really enjoying this. And one day I said to my wife, I think we need to do something different. And she said, sounds like we should get rid of the internet. I said, when? She said, right now. It was something we thought we'd do for a couple of months, maybe for a summer. That was three years ago. And we have not gone back. And it's the greatest decision I've ever made. I have a long list of questions about the reality of your internet free life. But let's now, let's back up the tape to get to this point. So what I'm going to start is how did you end up in boon, right? So where were you before that? Because I get the feeling to move there, you were already thinking in terms of being intentional about your life. So back up the tape to before you move to the haulers of North Carolina. And how that decision emerged. Well, I was a senior correspondent for CNN politics, covering presidential campaigns, Congress, and living in Washington DC and later New York City. And as you might imagine, a life of a political journalist is very connected. I was working constantly. Work was my life. It was my religion. It was my, it was everything at that time. And I would be connected in the middle of the night. I would wake up and check stories to make sure they were okay. I would check social media. If I told you at that time that I had a hobby, I would have been lying. Work was everything to me. And so I always dreamed of a time like maybe someday I could live and be disconnected or something like that. And my wife had been talking about doing this in different ways. But it just was impossible as a political correspondent in DC and in New York. But we would play around with this at times. We would in our apartment in New York City, where of course, you know, you can't get away from cell service or anything like that. We would put our phones in baskets by the door between like six and 8 pm. And we would call that cabboning, kind of pretending that we were off the grid for just two hours. And it felt so rebellious to just be alone together without any chance of anyone reaching us, even just for a couple of hours. And we realized the freedom of time. It harken back, listeners might have experienced this. You go on vacation in the 1990s or something like that to a cabin or a lake house. And time sort of expands. There's no phone, there's no internet, there's, I mean back then, certainly. And you were just alone with your family, playing backgammon, taking long walks, having those deep conversations. That cabin life that we cherish on those long summer days. Over time, when I would meet with my family, those cabin days started to dwindle down. First it was flip phone games. And then it was laptops out in the common area. And until finally, it was smartphones. And all that kind of deep time we had together was was slowly eroding. And fast forward to the 20 teens. My wife and I really wanted to kind of take back what it felt to be in a cabin in our apartment in Manhattan, in New York City. And so we had these kind of small little rebellions, things like that. It felt like we were getting away with something. Then in 2018, there was a reshuffling at the network where I worked and I was laid off. And we had an opportunity at last to kind of give up that digital connection. So we actually gave away most of our possessions. And we built a solar-powered tiny house into the back of a used cargo van. And my wife and I lived for two years traveling the country in a cargo van, living in national forests, national parks, mostly off the grid, largely in search of other people that were dissatisfied with modern life and finding alternatives and new ways to opt out of modern kind of distraction and opt into new ways of living. And then we took that and then actually moved back to New York New York City right before COVID started. And we had never installed the internet into our new apartment in New York. So we were living internet free, in an apartment in New York City, and then COVID happened. And everything went online. And COVID kind of moved us out of New York City again. And we ended up in Boone, North Carolina where I teach journalism at Appalachian State University. And that presented itself this wonderful opportunity. Here was a place where we lived it does not have cell service because it's rural. And we can turn off the internet and have that log have an experience that we always wanted to have. And now we're doing it with a child in the home and the challenges that come with that, being able to keep the culture at bay and then allow it into our home on our own terms and not on its terms. And that's really what motivates us. Hey, let's take a quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Have you ever had that experience where you put something off again and again? And then when you finally get around the doing it, you kick yourself for having waited so long. I mean, I felt that way about this podcast. People kept telling me, you need your own show. 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Is that how you describe it? Yes, but has Wi-Fi, thank goodness, yeah. I have to back you up, though, about this cargo van situation. Like, okay, let's go there. First of all, when you say cargo van, are we talking about one of those sprinter vans? Are we talking about one of those like white vans that the painters drive around? It's a white ram promester, like something that an electrical company or a painter would have. And it was nondescript because our plan was to live as long as we could without paying rent. We were paying off about a lot of student loans, let's just say, the six figures of student loans. And we were just trying to live rent free so we could pay off our student loans. And we just lived in places that didn't have access to the internet. We learned the joy of living together without those distractions as a couple. At this time, we did not have a child and getting to know one another kind of on those terms and realizing what an abundant rich life that we had together without constant distractions in our lives that we had when we lived in New York and in Washington. Where are some of the places you went? Well, we did 50,000 miles. We kind of go back and forth following the weather. We didn't have heat or air conditioning in the back cabin of the van. So we would follow, you know, when it got hot, we went up, when it got cold, we went down, you know? And that included national forests out in the West. You know, for anyone interested in this, you can camp for free all over the United States of America and Canada and Mexico if you want to, you know? And so you don't always have to like pay for a campsite. And we built systems into our van that allowed us to be off grid for long periods of time in many ways. And it transformed the way we approach a more normal life today with a child, with a job, with a house and not just traveling around in a van. It's like, let's say like, I'm just fascinated by this. So let's say it's like a day where you're not driving your parked at a state park somewhere, you know, out West. What would you do during that day? Yes, wake up. We have enough solar power from the sun to boil one pot of water for our coffee. We sit and read for three hours in the morning. Go out into the woods, collect wood for a fire. Build a fire, have breakfast, maybe take a hike, do some writing, you know, maybe I travel into town, get on Wi-Fi, send pitches to editors. I'm a writer, you know, write magazine stories and things like that. Then go back into the woods and write and cook and read. It was really was a really ideal kind of situation. And then pack up the van and move on to the next place, however long we were staying somewhere. But it involved a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of time together, really understanding how we wanted to live. We were on the brink of wanting to start a family and have children and just it was really a blessing to be able to think deeply about the kinds of Americans, the kinds of people we wanted to be. I tell you, it really feels like living the standard way where you just go with the flow is not leading people to a happy place. I think you need to be intentional and follow your north star and know what that is. But you have to give yourself the time to understand what you think about things. And I feel like with so many distractions coming at us, so much content flooding our lives and even our most private spaces, people don't really have the time anymore to think, what is the good life? What is the life I want to live? And this provided us with that time to come to those conclusions together. So you were getting insight, because you could introspect. So you're getting insight into what mattered to you and your wife. And the answer was not, we want to just live in a van forever. It was more the simplicity of the van gave you the time and space to figure out what you actually cared about. Is that the way you would think about it? Yes, we paired everything down to its just most basic for us. We only had a couple of hundred watts of solar. So very limited amounts of power. We had 72 square feet for two people. You know, you can imagine the privacy. You know, you got to be with someone you really trust and know and like, you know, a lot. There's nowhere to escape arguments you're together all of the time. Not just together, but five feet from each other. You only have a couple pairs of clothes, kind of a capsule wardrobe. Just living very, very simply, there's no room to store anything like that. And that, getting those distractions out and just focusing on the essentials of life. Something as simple as what do we eat today, okay? Do we have enough water? We have to collect water. We have to collect wood, those kinds of chores. And I'll tell you, just from a family perspective, the time in the van kind of made me realize that I had been a lazy husband because in 72 square feet cow, if one person is lounging and the other person is working, there's no escaping the contrast. So I'd be lying on the bed reading, while my wife maybe is cooking dinner. And it was just so obvious. The balance of labor was completely off. And so we had to do things together and continue till the job was done. There was no husband kind of escaping to another room and not being found, you know? And it frankly, it made me a much better husband in realizing the work that I needed to do to make the household run, or in our case, the van. And then the question was going forward, how do we apply this to a more normal life? And I think we got sidetracked a little bit, and with the intoxication of modern life, when we came back from the woods, so to speak. But in our current lifestyle, living in a log cabin without the internet, we have really found what we were looking for the entire time. - So what are some of the other insights you had during that experience that you've now carried through to the life you created now? I'm curious. And like what type of epiphanies one might have in those situations? There are so many, certainly communicating with one another as a married couple, doing things together. Learning that time when it's not distracted and punctuated by those distractions can expand and feels almost luxurious to have time together where there aren't things that you're seeking for just constant consumption, constant entertainment. Living with very little will make you think a lot about how much you consume, how much you own, how much water you use, those kinds of things, how much power you use. We had to get by on very, very little power and just as much water as we could carry. And so it just makes you hyper aware of all of those things. But also just the contrast of going back into society, maybe having dinner at a restaurant and sometimes they have TVs at a sports bar or something. And once you've been in the woods for a long enough, television and commercials start to look crazy to you. Just everything is kind of lower quality in terms of the things that they're advertising don't look enticing anymore. You've had the richness of the woods, the richness of nature, of true quality time with one another and you go and you watch an ad for a new Verizon cell phone and you're just like, I don't really want that. Or certainly coming back into a city and this was the time in the mid-20 teens when we were making the transition to 100% smartphone adoption for the most part and the streaming wars. And so all of the sudden the world had shifted while I had been in the woods for a couple of years. And now there are all these things I'd never heard of, Disney+, Apple+, all those kinds of things during that time. And it was as though there was just a flood of consumption content being put on people. And it was really overwhelming to see everybody else had kind of gone through it like a slowly boiled frog and we just jumped into the deep end very quickly. And to see that contrast, it allowed us to know what we want and what we don't want. And sometimes you have to separate yourself from the culture in order to see it clearly. Otherwise we're just kind of looking at it as part of it. You do have to back up a little bit. But you can only do that if you allow yourself the space to do it. Imagine being a political, like a reporter in a major city, like there's two big driving forces or hard to escape would be money and fame. Like your reporter in New York City, you're like, I guess I want to be Anderson Cooper, I want to be Jake Tapper, whatever you. How did you're thinking about money and fame and notoriety? How did that change when you got some space from it? That's a hard one. It really is because it is fun to be on TV. It is fun to have your name published in major publications. And I still do that. And I get to use those skills. But in a way you are saying goodbye. I think it was a real wrestling in our minds when we decided to leave New York. I didn't want to go. I grew up in the suburbs, there's just kind of like normal town. And to be in New York was everything to me. It was the epitome of all of my life's work dreams. And to leave it was very difficult. But Cal, I had made work my identity. I had made it my idol. And that's an unhealthy relationship with work. And I think leaving that allowed me to have a better relationship with work to allow me to do what I want to do to write, what I wish to write and appear. I continued to appear on shows, things like this. But not have it consume my life in the way. I have no regrets that I was able to do that. Incredible work, travel around the country, chase Donald Trump around, you know, ask him questions, those kinds of things as a reporter. Absolutely loved doing it for that season of life. But I never would have been living the way I am, never been raising my son the way that I am, if we hadn't left. His life in Manhattan, if he were living there now would be extremely different than it is now in a log cabin where he has access to the woods, the streams, the rivers, the trees, you know, it's really an abundant life I think we're giving to him. So moving forward the tape a little bit more. So you returned to New York, COVID hits, like, okay, we're going to leave here. How did you end up where you are right now? So how did Boone enter the picture once you decided, like, okay, yeah. Yeah, we got back into the van, traveled south, just kind of looking for the next steps. This is in the early days of COVID things are really dark at that time. I spent some time in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where we have family, lived there for just a little bit. And then there was an opening for a teaching position at Appalachian State University in journalism and broadcast media, things that I've done for many, many years. And I applied and they gave me an invitation to come. And at that time we were just finding out that we had a baby coming on the way. We had been traveling for five, six years at that time, kind of off and on, a very, you know, jet setting or van setting kind of life. We had lived all over the country. We only had a van with two seats. We didn't have health insurance, you know. And the thought of having a little bit more security when my wife gives birth and we can raise a child was very enticing the ability to teach and also continue writing. And that's how we got to Boone, which is a lovely small town in a medium size, small town, I would say, in northwestern North Carolina, right on the Blue Ridge Parkway and has a large public university part of the UNC system. And we found this cabin in the hall and turned off the internet and that's how we've been living. So what's the town like? So it's a college town. Is it like, I was just an Asheville recently, which I know is in the general sphere. It's like a smaller version of Asheville, like you have like a down, old historic downtown. And you have like standard suburbs, I assume, like what's the, what's the vibe like in the actual town? Much smaller than Asheville, not standard suburbs. People live either in the town or in the county, in the mountains. So there's a pretty hard drop between city life and then mountain life. There are student housing, of course, around the town, but not suburbs and the sprawl in any way that you might consider in a place like Asheville or something like that. There's about 20,000 people plus the students, which is about 20,000. So the city expands and retracts throughout the year. And it's, you know, it is a college town, but it's also a tourist town. It's where people come and a lot of Floridians have second homes there. And so you have an interaction that swings between 20 year olds to 70 year olds, you know. And then the major employers in Boone are the university, the hospital, and there's a major nonprofit there as well. Franklin Graham's Samaritan's Purse is there. So you have a really a really neat mix of people. It is a place of very high social trust, which I value very much. When I'm working in coffee shops, I don't even think twice about leaving my laptop on the desk. I don't even ask somebody to look for it, look after it when I step out from a moment. It's really a place where your kids can run in the woods where they can play in the parks where parents don't necessarily hover over their kids very much. You can always tell when somebody is from out of town because they're kind of following their children around the playground. And so, you know, and it's also a place where people really came together when Hurricane Helene hit very, very hard at that time. And we really learned who our neighbors were and we found that they were incredible people that look after each other. So it's a pretty splendid place there in the mountains. You know, it's part of the Appalachian. It's the highest in the east of the Mississippi, highest mountains. And so we have ski resorts and it's an ideal place to live for sure. Yeah. So when you were coming out there to take the position, it seems like it would have been a no brainer, I guess, right? You're like, look, we will live not in town, but in the mountains because then we have cabin life. But we can also I can go work at a coffee shop or at my office at campus. So was that a no brainer when you got there? Like, yeah, this is great. Let's find something like a cabin. This metaphorical cabin that we've been simulating now we can actually do it without also having to be off grid in the sense of it, we really aren't around any civilization. It actually became a lucky accident given the real estate crunch that is happening all over America and certainly in in Boone, we had to be beggars more than choosers in the place where we live. We just wasn't a lot available on the market. And so we were able to rent something just by accident that happened to be between the mountains that didn't get sell service. So it wasn't on purpose at all. And in fact, we installed the internet when we first moved in. We're just living a normal life. We have a baby coming. We have to have the internet. What if something happens? We didn't even think that it would be possible to do it until we found out what living with full time Wi-Fi did to us. We had to re-understand this or I would I use us, but it's really certainly me, I think is the real problem in this. We live about 12 to 15 minutes from town. I can get a cell signal a mile away if I want to get closer and just send an email off or something like that. But really, once we turned off the internet, it required me to drive into town to my office or to a library or coffee shop. And that really allows me to segregate work life from home life. I go to work. I do my work. It turns off I come home and I spend time with my son and my family. And that separation, I think, is really, really essential, Cal. We have blended these things out of convenience. And for some people, look, it's been really great. I think there is a cost to that choice. There's a bargain we've made that your boss can always reach you and that you can always be distracted or always wonder, is there an email? Whereas what I really try to do is I close the laptop and that's my time away from the office and now I'm home. And that separation has made things a lot better for us and I would recommend that people in their own way try to find a way to kind of draw a strong line between work and home life if they can. Well, I have some questions about this because I'm interested. So like let's start with work. People are used to, so you have bosses, right? I mean, you have bosses, department chairs, I assume at the university when you're working on articles, freelance, you have editors, that people just adjust, like tell me about people fear if I'm not available, like if I don't, I'm not around to that email at five because I'm home and I won't be around till the next morning, it's going to be a big problem. It's going to, everything is going to fall apart. What was the reality of the lack of communication at home when it came to your work? What ended up happening with the other people in your professional life? Far less than I ever anticipated. I actually, I think you say this all the time when you're showing people are thinking about you a lot less than you think that they are, you know. I thought that we would turn off the internet in our home for a summer and that once the semester began where I was teaching again, I got to go right back, like I just expected that. And I was speaking to my chair and I was telling, like, don't worry, I'll be back online by the fall. And he just said, I hope you're not. I hope you don't stop doing this. And there was a privilege to having that kind of license, certainly, to do that. It requires you setting up systems for work, certainly. You have to make expectations clear. I will answer your email between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. and I will answer it within 12 to 24 so I'm pretty good on an email when I'm on, you know. People don't really expect me to respond to emails after 6 p.m. and that's been just fine. I've received a couple of phone calls from colleagues after that time. Not a big deal, especially if it's, you know, a breaking news kind of thing, something really, really important, but it's just so rare. People don't want to bother you after work hours. So I would imagine that in many cases if a boss sends you an email after it's 8 p.m. or so, they don't really expect you to respond. Now this can be not true for a lot of people, but the consequences have been low. It does require me to get in the car and drive out and maybe check an email at the bottom of the hill, you know, here and there if I'm working with an editor on a freelance basis and trying to, you know, be there for people. But I make things very, very clear when I start a project with someone. Here's how you can reach me, you know, between these hours, just call my landline and we install the landline and you can talk to me there and that just hasn't been a problem. In fact, it's actually kind of a novel, fun thing for people to call on a landline to your home. But once people, you know, have the expectations set and you're also diligent. When you're at work, you're at work. You're on. You're available. I'm available to my students. I'm available to my colleagues. I am here for them. I'm not distracted or I try not to be certainly. And I think when you make those things clear, they don't mind that you go home and live with your family after that. There's different jobs out there like with CNN, probably this wouldn't work. I'd be in big trouble. And but I still would try to build systems in that would help me at least have some time away from from work life. We have to have it. We used to have it, you know, when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s, my dad would come home and there was almost no way for people to reach him from work. They could call our house if they wanted, but that was really intrusive. He would come home every day and play catch with me until the sun went down or we couldn't see, you know, under the, we play under the lamp. I guarantee you, if my dad had a smartphone in 1995, we wouldn't have played catch all of those days. And it would break my heart, you know, if that hadn't happened. And I don't know who I would be today if I didn't have that relationship with my father. And we've lost that. We've lost that when dad comes home and he's just on his phone the whole time or, you know, just distracted. And I really want to give my son that time and attention when we're together. It's very important to me. What about second question I'm sure people are asking is like, okay, so what about entertainment? So what, you know, what do you do? It's Saturday, your home, you know, young kids are not that exciting. As you said, there's a lot of waiting, a lot of nap time in the evening. It's been the reality of entertainment without, because everything's internet fueled now. TV is internet fueled. So what's that like for you now? Well, let's talk about the principle behind, behind this first of all, we now live at a time where the entire culture is inside your house at all times. Yeah. And the entire culture includes wonderful things like thought-provoking books and documentaries and great TV shows, certainly. It also includes hardcore pornography. It also includes addictive gambling, all of the sudden, just in the past couple of years, we've allowed these things into our bedrooms, into our bathrooms, into our homes, whereas before, if you wanted to indulge in some kind of things that are maybe outside, something our Southern Baptist brother would appreciate, you know, our ancestors would appreciate, right? You had to go to Atlantic City or Las Vegas to gamble or, you know, to do things that you shouldn't be doing or so to speak, right? And now all of that is in our home. So that's a real change in life. And so we still engage with the culture, but it's on our terms. At the threshold of our door, we have far more control of what comes in instead of just the tidal wave. It's kind of like the ocean, right? I grew up as a surfer in California, love the ocean, but I would hate to have it, my house be underneath it, right? I know how beautiful it is, I know how deadly it is. And I kind of see just the vast scope of culture as that kind of, that kind of play, right? So we still have entertainment in our home. I go to the library and I think what kind of films would we want to watch this weekend? It requires thoughts, premeditation, kind of conversation with my wife, and then also even now our three-year-old. And we'll rent DVDs. We have a DVD and a Blu-ray player, but we don't have a television. We have, I bought a 1960s classroom pull-down screen that I attached to hooks at the wall, I have a projector, and I have to set all of this up if we want to watch something. So it takes about 10 minutes. There's friction. I can't just sit down and click on the TV. I have to think a few days ahead, rent the movies or whatever we're getting. I have to set up the film set up. And that friction allows us to be very thoughtful about what we're watching, and it also has the benefit of having a beginning and an end. There's no endless scroll on a DVD. There's some special features, but they don't go that far, right? There's no automatic, you know, rolling on YouTube kids or something like that. When the film is over, the film is over, and that matters a lot if you have a three-year-old. It also goes back to the library, so you can't just watch it constantly. So there's that. I also download magazines from the library onto an iPad, and I'll read that on the weekends. That also has a beginning and an end. You can't just scroll it forever, or I'll download the New York Times. And then we have an abundance of books in our home, and we have trails outside to go walk around. So I thought, Cal, that I would be desperately bored and wonder, what am I going to do with myself? Am I just going to stare at the wall here? I'm never bored. There's so much to do, when you get rid of one thing that's not serving you, it gives you an abundance of time to dive into the things you really want to do. On your terms, it's not just something that's popping up and saying, hey, look at this, look at me, or even the things that I shouldn't be engaging in, whether it's gambling or whatever things like that, and there's a power in that. It's really been very, very special, especially having a young child in the house. He has just an abundance of books that he can read, and you know how children are, they like to read things over and over and over again. I'm actually, right now, reading Daniel Mendelssohn's translation of the Odyssey to my three-year old. And he loves it. It's wonderful. It's very oral. It's very oral. Yes. It's very oral. Yes. Yes. And it's been magnificent to be reading that to him and have him just love these stories. You think children are going to consume content in some way, right? Whether it's bluey or something like that. I figure why not make the content something that can last their entire life, that they can have a relationship with something as enriching and enduring as Homer, where he can understand it as a three-year-old, and then in 10 years as a 13-year-old, and then as a grown man. I think it's very special to have that as a young age. So to answer your question, there's plenty of entertainment. But we do have to be thoughtful about it. It doesn't just pop into our house. Well, as an aside, I bet you're, you get probably much more benefit out of movie watching than the rest of us, because you're in '90s mode. I think about this a lot. When it's just, this is what I have to do. We're putting on this movie, and there's not something I can be doing at the same time. So I can't also be looking at a phone, or even if I put the phone in the other room, I don't have this constant in the back of my mind. There could be something more engaging. I could be doing, and I have to keep having that argument with my mind, but let's keep watching this. I bet without it, the experience of just watching something, because you're like, "This is what I want this, I want to get as much benefit out of this as I can." Even if it's not the best movie, I can get lost in the world and find interesting elements or whatever. You're probably used to it now, but I bet if we could transport someone into your mind for just watching a movie, that psychic experience for them would be like like going to the sphere in Las Vegas would be like whoa. That was completely different than what I'm used to. - It's true, there's no second screen and I don't have to have that constant battle of resisting urges to see if there's something better out there because I don't have access to it. And I require not having access to it because that little voice in my head that says, why don't you just check that email? Why don't you just check that sports score? It's gone. It's not in my head. I mean, just not having access to it changes everything. Because the exhaustion is not necessarily in the consumption of the media. It's in the constant fight I have with that voice of whether I should be engaging with it or not at this moment. There's no clicking over to something else. And it's funny, you say that, Kyle, because in the week after we turned off the internet, I found myself ravenous for content. I was reading everything I could get my hands on 'cause my whole day was spent just consuming things online. And I was reading tags on pillows. And once I finished all my magazines and I was just looking at all the binding of my books and everything, just looking for something to kind of fill that addiction. Now that has lessened now. And it kind of feels very silly in hindsight. And certainly in the moments after the internet went down, I went around the house looking for a signal of some kind that I could find. And so once I realized that it was gone, there was no getting it back, it changed everything. - But you adjusted, that's interesting. So like now you're just operating at a slower, you're more careful with a slower pace at home is like I'm doing this now. And now I'm gonna do that. And that change, that's what that's interesting to me, is that sense of like I need content. How long did that take? I always hear two weeks. People always talk about two weeks being an important threshold. Was it roughly that for you? - I think so, a week or two, you had on your show a study recently about people giving up a mobile internet for two weeks. And I would say that that is what is required for that kind of detox. You will find how little you miss it and how rich real life can be. I don't know how people who do eight hours of screen time or consume videos on Netflix all day and have children actually do anything in the world. Just the time to cook the food and clean the house and take care of the child and do your work. That takes up all of the time, at least in my case. And also your thoughts are able to stretch for long periods of time. They are not punctuated by pings and things on your phone, coming up or even that kind of battle you have with a little voice in your head that says, maybe find something better. You just get to spend the day thinking a single thought for a long period of time. You really just can't do that in today's media ecosystem. I mean, the way I see it, Cal, there are billion dollar industries that know everything about us that want nothing but our attention and time. How are you and I fragile human beings any match for a billion dollars against us? There's no way, there's no way we can't do it. And that's why I say we have to have spaces where we can opt out of those things. And for us it's our home, for other people, it can be something smaller. But if we are living our life forever as these just digital consumers, they've got us. They know everything about us. We're no match for it. And we have to find a place where we can kind of dive into our own humanity and a space and a time to do that. I mean, it's part of the reason why there's an ancient tradition of Sabbath in the Jewish and Christian traditions where you are declaring independence from the secular world, from the market. And just saying, you know what, for one day I don't need you. If you're a religious person for one day, I can show that I only have reliance on God, right? But I think a secular person can embrace this in the same way that I do have independence. And sometimes you just need to prove it to yourself that I don't need these external things in order to thrive. And I think a lot of people haven't done that in a very long time. I certainly hadn't until we started. I want to take another quick break to hear from some of the sponsors that make this show possible. Look, I'm never someone who thought a lot about my skin, but as I've gotten older, I discovered something that, you know, 99% of women already know, but no one told me you have to take care of your skin. 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That's better, h-e-l-p.com/deepquestions. Do you think because of your situation at home and you've lost this craving for the easy engage in the content, how does that change now when you're at the office for a work day? Are you working, is your mind while you're working? Is it different than other people? In other words, is that you don't, for example, you don't find yourself so easily distracted, you're able to stay more on task. The day feels more productive. So what's the effect of that detox brain when you're actually at your office at Appalachia State just working on normal work? I'm certainly more refreshed. I come in ready to work. I know that I have a limited amount of time to do that work. And so I have to focus and do it, but I do get distracted. When I have access to those things, they just come roaring back. So I'm no saint in this. And I didn't do all of this because I am some kind of saint. I did this because I'm the chief of sinners. I cannot focus if I'm not in the right place to do so. But I've gotten much better at it. But it does allow me to focus on work and be present with the students and with my colleagues in ways that I think I was just kind of constantly tired and irritable and distracted before. So it really changes, because you know, you're just like, okay, here's my window to do the work. Let's knock it out. Let's get it done. And then try to take that intention home with family life. You're probably a very good email writer. I would assume because when you know, we can't just start unspooling a back and forth conversation that can just kind of last into the night or whatever. I bet you would be like the case studies in deep work. You're like, I'm actually going to put into this email, all of the information you kind of need for us to move forward because I don't have the luxury of just like, I'll just grab it on my phone when you respond to me later tonight. So I would assume your emails are good. Yes, deep work, digital minimalism, life without email. But that was a correct title, right? Life after a world without email. Excuse me. Your books have been very instrumental in how we've built our work life here certainly. Yes, I try to put everything in the email and they know that this co-respondence will end after six. And I also try to do things in person. Like let's try to knock this out in conversation. I'm a big believer in phone calls. There's so much faster. Just knock this thing out in a 30 second phone call or a brief chat. I do not like back and forth emails at all or text exchanges. I try to keep, my phone is just a Nokia flip phone, by the way. So I can't send long text messages. It's exhausting to me. And so I try to keep that to just good, yes, I'll be home, those kinds of things. And if there's anything more than that, boom, I'm calling you on a phone. Some people might find that ridiculously obnoxious, but I find it to be so much faster to do anything meaningful that you need to just communicate something very quickly between two people. OK, final question about life without internet. I talked about this before, I found it fascinating. Raising a young kid with no internet. What was that like or what has that been like? - Well, let me start by saying no regrets. This has been the best decision we have ever made and I cannot imagine doing this with a constant connection in the home. But I also say that it raises challenges. When your child has some kind of medical issue, you can't just Google it and look it up. You have to call the pediatrician or you have to call a family member. Now, I would argue that that reliance on your community or on your family is ancient. It's what people did forever. And actually having to make that phone call instead of just looking it up on AI or Google or something increases community. We are relying on each other more. My wife relies on the older mothers who have raised many children in ways she never would if she just was flipping through some kind of TikTok video to find the answer. It requires us to be very intentional of how we spend our time together. We don't just sit around and look at each other. We are reading books to him constantly. He has been read to since he was an infant. Hardback, you know, books, real books, including some of your scale. I think I read them a lot while he was very little while I was reading it. - Poor kid. Poor kid. - And we're reading him the Odyssey now. It also requires us to-- - I like that you put those next to each other. My books and the Odyssey. We're talking about the classics here. So it makes sense. - That's right, right, right, right, right, right, right. - The canon. - Of course. - The canon, the Western canon, yeah. - Yes, yes. It requires us also to seek out community because we do not have the veneer of community that a digital phone provides. Making us feel like we have community when we haven't even left the house. No, we created. So we have to go out. So my wife has started a volunteer forest school where dozens of children from the area come and run through the hills and swim in the rivers together and they build things in the forest. And so my child is constantly interacting with other kids in really healthy ways. Getting out there, we have to go to public spaces for entertainment. So a lot of the weekend is spent at the public library, at the public museum, play spaces. We are out and about constantly. And I would argue, Cal, that we wouldn't be. If we had the lecture of being home and just being able to turn on a screen, we'd probably just stay home and watch Bluey or something, which is fine, I guess, for sometimes, but we don't. Any kind of media consumption we have with him, it is premeditated. We pick out a film, a DVD, we sit with him and watch it. It begins and then it ends, screen rolls up, we're done, right? There's no kind of just turn on the TV and let him just kind of veg out, it just doesn't happen. And that requires him to kind of rise to the occasion. He has to learn how to behave when, you know, he's with adults and with other children. There's no iPad to save him and there never will be. Certainly not in public spaces at restaurants or things like that. And I understand that there's different circumstances for different people, but we've really tried to do the hard work. And I tell you, it is harder. It is hard, especially with my wife spending most of the time with him. What's been really important is that we are both on board. On this, it's an idea that we share together. If anything, she's been more of a zealot than I have and she's brought me along. And I'm on board too, but I, she's really, really led this. And I'm very proud of her for doing that. It's had its extreme benefits. I can take my son anywhere. I took him to a modern dance performance. We sat on the front row and he watched the entire two hours. Well, boomers all around us were playing on their phones. It was absurd. He can sit and watch a two hour movies, three years old. And he loves the Odyssey. So it's what we wanted to do, but it's required a lot of work. But I wouldn't trade it for anything. So let's try to extract a lesson or two here before being as close as it's been fascinated and inspiring. So I'll take a stab at a lesson. And then I'll let you respond or take a stab. So what I'm trying to do here is extract some ideas that the listener can take away with when thinking about their own lives. So one idea that comes to mind hearing from you is, I have this book I've been working on. It's coming out next spring about the deep life. And it's about the way I talk about on my show. It's like I have a very structured way of thinking about this. I care as much about the how you make changes as I do what the content of the changes are because I think that's a little bit more idiosyncratic. And one of the ideas that comes up in the book is that often doing something remarkable in alignment with your values really makes a much bigger difference, sometimes in just small things, right? Because you're signaling to yourself, you're signaling to the world. I take this really importantly. It amplifies benefits to like really big levels that we often wear a little tentative. Like, well, let's just nibble around the edges in safe ways. But sometimes it's in the remarkable changes in pursuit of values that you get the remarkable returns. Input in has to do with magnitude of output. All right, so I want to run your take on that lesson. And then what's another lesson that we might take away that we're not thinking about? Sometimes you do have to go big and do big things and make massive changes in order to make the life that you want. I think there's a lot of half steps that people take. And certainly ones that I took, but if there is very little friction in keeping you from the things you shouldn't be doing or things that are keeping you from a rich life, you're going to overcome that friction very, very easily. You have to sometimes do something extreme. And what I found is I thought I would do this extreme thing for a short amount of time. And now I can't imagine living any other way. And I can't believe it's been three years. Now, lessons for other folks, I recognize that most people are not going to throw their Wi-Fi routers into the sea. I understand. I get it. Life is kind of digitally connected in ways increasingly so all the time. But I'd like to ask yourself in the 2020s now, do you have a space in your life that cannot be touched by digital connection and all that comes with that? Do you have a single room? And not just a room, do you have a single amount of time, a single space, where you are free and independent of this? And I think that a lot of people would say, no, I actually don't. This thing follows me everywhere. Or even if I love there was a listener to your show a few weeks ago who called-- do what he calls "landlining," putting the phone in the kitchen. I love that. I can unplug it and take it to the couch. You know, it gets into the cracks. And so I think I would recommend create what I would call a Sabbath space somewhere in your life, whether it's a time or a physical space, where these things cannot go and never will go and do not have access. That's going to be essential. And that might be not just a space, but a period of time, where you really put your digital devices with you and your family away in a way you cannot reach them for even just try an hour, then try, and then 24 hours or a weekend. The other thing is if you want to try this, you can't just copy and paste 21st century life into this. And just, OK, we're going to live without the internet, and we're going to keep going. No, no, no, you have to build 20th century systems back that have atrophied since that time. And so we wanted to live in our home a little bit more like the 1990s, but not the 1890s, right? And so we had to go out and install a landline. And then we thought, well, we don't know the phone number for the movie theater, or the pediatrician, or the church. We have to get a phone book. So we ordered a phone book. They still have the yellow pages. It's called the real yellow pages, as though there's all these other yellow pages out there. Yeah, yeah, right. And we had to give everybody our landline phone. And we had to just kind of set these systems up for it to work, because this would never work unless we did that work to make it happen. So just acknowledging that you don't need constant access to this stuff that you can thrive and build a rich life. You'll be far more engaged with your community. You'll be far more engaged with your public library. You will bring rich texts into your house that will be so much better than the slop you're constantly scrolling through. And so there's many things that people do, but you just have to cut yourself off for a period of time. You just can't allow yourself to reach that cookie jar. They're also just won't work, because I guarantee you, give it enough time. You're going to reach up and you're going to grab that cookie. I like it. I think this is a great example of what I call lifestyle-centric planning, because you're working more generally speaking, working backwards from your vision of an ideal lifestyle, as opposed to working forward toward some goal you came up with in advance, because lifestyle-centric planning can lead you to really interesting but unexpected places. You never would have, in 2018, as you left CNN or wherever you were leaving, you never would have been like, "Oh, I know what I want to do next." That old cliche, picking a journalism job at Appalachian State and living in a cabin that doesn't have sales server. It's not something that you would have thought of, because it's not a common thing. You had a clear vision. You had developed a clear vision of ideal lifestyle, and then now you're open to see, like, interesting opportunities as they arose, it steered you through this sort of unpredictable path in advance to a really cool situation. So that's the other lesson I'll leave with people. When you work backwards from a clear vision of an ideal lifestyle, you'll end up in places you never would have conceived of in advance as this is where I wanna get. So working backwards from where you want your life to be really can be more powerful than trying to come up with a goal that's gonna fix your life. If we could just do this, then everything's gonna be better. So I think you're illustrating a lot here. Before we go, you just started a new sub-stack, is this right? I want you to tell people about it because I'm gonna go subscribe for sure as soon as we're done recording this interview, but maybe we tell us a little bit more about what you're up to here. - Yes, my wife and I have started a new sub-stack called The Opt Outers. And it will have a series of pieces of writing interviews, essays about our life living this digital off-grid life and how people can do it too. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to strive to be opt-outers in some way. And so I'd buy people to join us. And we're hoping to turn this whole journey into a book here in the next year or so. So lots of writing to be done. And I'm very grateful for anyway that wants to join us at The Opt Outers on sub-stack. - Yeah, so check out The Opt Outers. Also just search for Chris Moody articles in general. He's written a lot of great stuff, including a classic Atlantic piece about, this is like early in your move, right? Like that first piece about moving to boon. So if people want some more details, they should search that out as well. - Yes, that's right. It was just in the first couple of months that we had done this. I'd like to write a follow-up piece now after three years of doing this, especially the impact it has had on our child. And that has just been so important. I'm seeing how he has grown. And we've done this in such great contrast to the way the world has been moving. And I do just want to kind of reiterate Cal, we don't reject the culture. We're not, you know, abstaining from everything. We engage with the culture. We go out into the world and we devour it, but it's on our own terms, right? And we have control over what comes into our house. And that I think has been the healthiest way to live in these times where there's just a fire hose coming at you. And this is one way, you can turn off that spiket. - Well, Chris, I appreciate it. A lot of inspiration in here. We will for sure have a mailman on a horse deliver, a phonograph of this interview. Once, once, this is the downside of doing what you did is you're gonna get a lot of ban like jokes and a sides and reactionary critiques. And that's probably just to trade off your willing to make is a lot of telegraph jokes I assume, but that's probably a fair trade. But I appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much, Cal. It's been great to be here. - All right, so there you have it. That was my conversation with Chris Moody. I thought it was fascinating. I think what he's up to out there in Boone has some lessons for all of us. And remember to check out the new sub stack, the opt outers that Chris started with his wife, if you wanna keep up with what they're up to and the lessons they have for the rest of us. I gotta tell you though, here's something that's kind of interesting. Chris and I turns out have all of these sort of unexpected connections that we keep discovering. All right, let me give you some examples. I recorded this interview right before leaving for a trip out to Colorado. I was going to a small town in Colorado with my family for vacation. And when I called up Chris to do this interview before I left for the trip, I was like, "Oh, where are you recording from?" 'Cause I know he doesn't have internet in his cabin. He was staying with family, a family they know in the same small town I was about to go out to and visit. All right, right, unexpected connection. Unexpected connection number two. Chris's grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister who knew well my grandfather who was also a Southern Baptist minister. I think my grandfather had maybe taught or mentored his grandfather. Also it turns out that the town Boone where Chris lives is I believe named for Daniel Boone and I am a descendant. I can't really say of Daniel Boone. I'm descended from Daniel Boone's brother. My grandmother's middle name was Boone. And so the connections, too many connections. And of course the biggest connection of all, we share our distrust of a constantly connected life. So there we go. Fasting in conversation with someone that has a lot of almost like spookyly, spooky, spookily, spookily abundant connections to my own life. That's how we know this whole interview was Kismet. It's all right, so I hope you liked it. Long interview, I'm out of town. So we'll skip the normal like Q&A and what I'm up to that I would normally do. But I'll be back next week with another advice episode. So until then, as always stay deep. Hey, if you've made it this far, you must be ready to join my fight for depth in a distracted world. Now the best way to do this is to join over 125,000 people who receive my email newsletter each Monday. You can sign up at calnewport.com/ideas. 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