The hidden costs of going offline

Warren Buffett has an old flip phone. Christopher Nolan doesn’t even have an email account. What do they have in common? Personal assistants.

I don't have a personal assistant. I have my wife.

As she more wisely put it: I'm renting space in her brain.

We spent the last couple of weeks on vacation, and I soon realised that it isn't easy to convince someone that buying a map and spending a few hours finding your way around an unknown city might be fun when Google Maps can do it in minutes. Nor to trust a local resident's recommendation for dinner when you can check all the restaurants in the area, including reviews from thousands of people.

Unable to convert my wife to my offline sect, I began using her as my online crutch. “Where should we have dinner tonight?” “Our train is late, is there an alternative bus that can take us there?” “Was Nadal born here?”

She wasn’t happy with the additional cognitive overload. I didn't help much with planning our vacation. Actually, I don't think I helped at all. So I was just becoming increasingly useless and adding to her stress and exhaustion by asking random stupid questions I could have asked Google or ChatGPT.

And despite all the real estate I was occupying in my wife's mind, and my willingness to enjoy the white sandy beaches and sunny skies of Mallorca completely disconnected, I must admit: I took my smartphone with me.

My excuse this time was that, as we are selling our apartment in Brazil, I had to have a way of signing the contracts online while I was off travelling - something unachievable with my beloved Nokia. Being able to sell an apartment on another continent with very little bureaucracy, entirely online, would have been unimaginable even five years ago. This is one of the wonderful things about technology I don't want to give up.

Again, I'm not really trying to get rid of technology. I'm trying to separate the useful parts from the things that keep me hooked. Selling an apartment from another continent is a convenience I don't want to give up. Watching short videos for hours isn't.

There's also a cost to giving up the useful side of the smartphone.

Twenty years ago, you needed several different devices to do what a smartphone can do today. For this trip alone, I'd need a camera, a GPS, travel guides and a few more items that would be expensive and inconvenient to carry around if I didn't have my wife as my online supporter. Without a SIM card and no Wi-Fi at the beach, I mostly used my iPhone as a camera to capture the wonderful moments I was spending with my kids.

To be fair, the Nokia also has a camera - it's just a shitty one. I want to keep those memories with my kids in high resolution, as we always print some of the photos and build an album after each of our vacations. It's a way to keep these memories at hand instead of sitting among thousands of pictures, most of them duplicates, as I usually take more than one photo of the same scene to ensure at least one of them will turn out to be good.

I also resisted the urge to post everything that was happening. Whenever I post something, I usually have a person in mind (usually my parents or a close friend) that I think will like to see that. Instead of posting to the whole world, I was just sending the photos directly to these people in the evening by WhatsApp.

With no reliable internet connection, my phone usage naturally fell to a little over an hour a day. Most of the time was spent taking pictures, but I was also checking WhatsApp and the news twice a day. My father always sends me a good morning message, which I like to read and respond. And with an election coming up in Brazil, there was always a new political scandal to keep me entertained and outraged.

I did check the work email in the first couple of days though.

It's hard to immediately disconnect, and being always available through a smartphone has blurred the borders between work and personal lives. Work has become a huge part of who we are, and checking the work email was a way to feel needed, useful, even meaningful.

There were two particular emails I felt I needed to respond to, on topics I hadn't discussed with my manager before leaving. I was anxious because I hadn't addressed them. Also, in my mind the team wouldn't be able to solve those issues without my help.

Of course that was nonsense. As my father usually says, "There's a remedy for everything except death". That became evident to me when my manager replied, thanking me for the help, but also telling me to stop checking my email and enjoy my time off.

I followed his advice and stopped checking my work email three days into my vacations. I realised that the issues would still be there when I got back, and anything truly urgent would be solved by the people who were still in the office. It was a humbling and freeing experience to let go and admit I'm not as important as I like to think I am.

Free from work-related thoughts, I could focus on more fun activities. I have a tradition of buying a postcard in every city I visit. It began the first time we traveled with our daughter, back in 2021. I write about the trip in these postcards and keep them in a folder so my kids can read them when they're older.

This time, I also sent a card to a great friend that lives in the US, whose birthday I had forgotten. Hopefully he'll enjoy the postcard more than the generic message I would have sent in one of the WhatsApp groups we share together, probably copied and pasted from another friend.

We also visited a cave called Coves del Drach. Among stalactites and stalagmites, a group of musicians played classical music on a boat gliding over an underground lake of a deep blue colour. No photos or videos were allowed while the musicians were playing, and an usher called out the people who tried to sneak out their phones for a picture.

I felt as if he was my own personal assistant.