On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 6:16 AM, Shoba Narayan <[email protected]> wrote: > This sounds fascinating even though I've never tried it. I've tried being > away from cellphone for a month. On a practical note, where does one go to > get away from the news though?
It's not easy I agree. It's possible to be judicious about what you consume as Eugen says, but it's usually only possible when you have something else to occupy your time with. Once you stop reading news / RSS and watching TV you'll suddenly have a lot of time on your hands and unless you have an alternative use for it, you'll just be bored. In my case I intensively took up sports. Last week I worked a full week, but I also ran 40+ kms ^800m, hiked 70+ kms ^4000m (was without cell phone signal for at least 24 hours), spent a night in the woods, got wet in the rain multiple times and enjoyed it every time, read the latest issue of National Geographic cover to cover in one sitting, spent at least 8 hours talking with friends while running and hiking, attended German classes and enjoyed it, watched a James Bond movie at home because I felt like watching one, and I still managed to learn that the volcano was spewing ash again over Europe, there was an election in UK with some sort of awkward result and there was some commotion in India over something unimportant - yet again. In addition, in the last year I've deleted my facebook account, simply stopped visiting a lot of my web haunts - dopplr, linkedin, flickr (...), unsubscribed from most of my mailing lists only choosing to keep a handful. In addition I don't receive any newspapers at home, though I do subscribe to the National Geographic magazine and that's something I like. I didn't have a TV until some months back, even now I don't have cable so I only use it to watch movies - and that's rare. I don't listen to the radio, though I have mp3 players. I keep twitter around for some social contact with people I can't meet physically, but I've stopped blogging since it takes too much time to write a post. It's harder to get away from media if your family routine is centered around it - such as reading the newspaper at the breakfast table, or watching TV at dinner time and so on. It's useful to be alone, you obviously control a lot of what you do then, but not necessary. It's very important to be able to get away - I don't currently have a work requirement to be reachable all the time for example. Cheeni
