I have a recurring daydream.
In my daydream, I sell everything I own and buy a piece of land in Northern Arizona, near the reservations. Then, I buy an Airstream and outfit it with solar panels. I pack a few precious belongings, wave goodbye to Phoenix, and drive there. On my way, I throw my smartphone from the car window, and it bounces dramatically behind me on I-17, where a semi-truck crushes it. (I sit in this fantasy for a while. I smirk at the flying shards of glass and iPhone components. No more chat messages, texts, or notifications from CVS, making me think my prescriptions are ready as a covert way to tell me Cheetos are on sale.)
I pull out a flip phone, looking like it travelled through time from 2006, and sit it in the cup console of my Bronco. My family and friends can still call me, but that’s it. I tune for an FM radio station and can’t find one, so I switch to AM and get some weird broadcast out of California. I have no other options, after all. My podcast connection is obliterated behind me.
The Airstream is waiting for me. I had it towed up there. I move into it in two trips from my car.
I spend two weeks disconnecting my nervous system from the grid. I only read paper books, write in a paper journal, and watch DVDs from TV shows and movies made before 2005.
In the evening, when I sit outside in my comfortable lawn chair, I can see for miles, the mesas jutting from the ground with sharp edges. Somewhere, a coyote howls. I hear the rustle of an eagle’s wings. Rabbits dart from sagebrush to sagebrush, and I tell them to hurry before the sun is gone entirely. It’s not safe for them.
At night, I see the edges of the Milky Way in the night sky, littered with stars so bright I don’t need a light to move around.
I can see, feel, and hear God.
By the end of week two, I’ve met three stray dogs from the reservation, and they’re living with me. By the end of month one, I’ve got at least ten stray dogs, and I’m calling my friend Shellee on my flip phone, asking her to do a traveling vet visit. She agrees, of course.
I build a porch for them, with a little fence, not to trap them, but just to deter predators. None of them go far anyway. We all really like each other. I meet a nice couple who run a small gas station about ten miles from me. I drive there with my at least ten dogs in my Bronco to pick up the dog food I ordered from Chewy. I’m sure I’ve ordered a lot of protein bars and protein shakes for myself, as well. While I’m there, I fill water jugs. They’re kind enough to receive all my mail and packages for a small monthly fee.
At night, the dogs and I pile into the Airstream together, and I’m sure it smells bad because my daydream hasn’t figured out running water yet, so none of us have bathed.
This daydream is explicit, and I can go there at a moment’s notice.
This usually happens when work is too busy and life is too demanding. I get oversaturated by the grid, technology, demands, and people. The impulse to return to a completely analog world is followed quickly by an even deeper urge to become a hermit and live only with dogs in Northern Arizona or Southern Utah. It’s always there, too. I never daydream about a cottage in the Northeast woods or Pacific Northwest. Idaho would be a good place for this, but I never go there either.
I want spacious views, red dirt, and a connection to the high desert of my birth.
I might do it one day, too.
I quit social media years ago. I have a vague memory of it. I used to post on social media all the time. I jumped into the digital revolution without hesitation. Bought the first Kindle. Rendered all my music to the cloud. Stopped renting and buying DVDs as soon as digital options arrived. I started streaming Netflix the week it was available. I donated hundreds of paper books. Sold my CDs.
But now I have digital regret, even as I make my living working in cloud software.
Around the same time I started thinking social media wasn’t healthy, I began longing for more rootedness and physicality. A book to hold while I read. A house phone to ring when someone calls. A newspaper delivery in the morning. A garden to tend. Vinyl records to play on slow mornings while I sip my coffee and watch the birds in the backyard. (Sheryl Crow and Leonard Cohen sound different on vinyl, friends.)
When I watch movies and television shows set in the 1990s, I’m struck with pre-digital nostalgia. Life before social media and Wi-Fi.
But I’m no Luddite. I’m writing this on a laptop. I have YouTube TV and 5G internet. I like ordering my groceries on an app and picking them up without walking into the store. I used to dream of a life like Sandra Bullock had in The Net. Ordering pizza from her computer and working from home.
I just want to consume things slower, at a more natural pace. That’s what this daydream is about. It’s a desire to consume more mindfully and deeply. To not be available and connected.
I miss solitude.
I like going to Bookman’s, a used media and bookstore in Phoenix. One trip, while browsing DVDs, I remembered buying a new season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 2003. Life was simpler then. If I stuck to my budget, on the last payday of the month, I could pay rent on my tiny apartment, buy dog food, groceries, half a tank of gas, and afford to spend $30 on books or DVDs. A season like Buffy strained that budget, so I’d trim food spending. I remember that weekend. The walks with Scully (my beloved golden retriever), the cheap meals that sustained me (Hormel chili, eggs, 99-cent pizzas, frozen Albertson brand chicken and hashbrowns), and watching Season 3 of Buffy, one episode after another. It was the first time I binge-watched anything.
This memory took me back to times before, when I’d set the VCR timer to record my favorite episodes of TNG, Babylon 5, Buffy, X-Files, so I could watch them in the evening. I checked out stacks of books and videos from the library. I had enough to eat, read, watch, and I had Scully.
It never occurred to me then that I didn’t have enough. I had no FOMO.
Sometime around 2010, that feeling changed. My tiny world felt so much bigger. I needed more. More money. More education. More options. More media. It wasn’t all bad. I left a job I hated. I started on a decade-long push to prove something to myself and the world. A decade later, I had two master’s degrees, a cross-country move, multiple promotions, an investment portfolio, four books, and an endless list of goals set for myself. I subscribed to multiple new sources, social media platforms, with actual followings. Life felt very full and connected.
Then, 2020 struck like a prize fighter, and I went down. Rheumatoid arthritis forced me inward. Those ten years of expansion and growth were followed by a sincere, heartfelt, and necessary desire to retract and root more deeply in place.
Before, I desired connection, involvement, and engagement. Now, I crave only organic connection, simplicity, and peace.
I often look around my small house and wonder if I could downsize even more. How much simpler could I make my life? I always run the risk of overcorrecting in the opposite direction, like a pendulum, swinging too hard on its pole.
I’m only remembering the freedom of that time with Scully in my 500 sq. ft. apartment. Not the empty checking account or inviting myself to dinner at my parent’s house as I waited for payday with empty cupboards.
My urge is to find the space between that time of austerity and simplicity and now, where I am abundant and secure. Walk the line between presence and long-term security. When I was poor, surrendering to the present was easier because it’s all I could afford. I only had the moment I was living in.
I’m willing to concede that fleeing to an Airstream in Northern Arizona may be a bit of an overcorrection. But I can dream.
I want the benefits of the digital age without the noise. I’d like us to collectively roll back time and never use X, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. I want days like the day I described with Scully and Buffy, where I disappeared into a different world, thoroughly disconnected from this one. I don’t want FOMO. I want there to be mysteries again. I want to wonder what happened to the kid who teased me in high school without the option of finding his Facebook profile.
Until the past decade, my long periods of disappearing and not responding to people were just one of my quirks. Now I get feedback about my availability.
A few years ago, I discovered May Sarton’s journals and read Journal of a Solitude and Plant Dreaming Deep. This sent me into a six-month-long deep dive into every book of similar topic, including those that extol the virtues of cutting all digital ties and the reasons none of us can concentrate anymore. All those words just told me what I already knew.
I was consuming information faster than I was meant to do so. The world was too big and noisy, and I needed to retract. I wanted to engage in a world with edges. DVDs run out of episodes. CDs run out of songs. There is no closing the reading app and scrolling a news feed when you hold a physical book. Newspapers contain a finite number of articles until another comes the next day.
Before constant connectivity, people disappeared from your life. Movies left theaters and didn’t immediately arrive on Prime. An episode of ER aired and was gone until summer reruns. Sometimes, I recognized an actor in a show and couldn’t place them, and I wondered what else they’d been in. I lived in that wonder because I couldn’t Google them. When I left work, I was gone from work.
When I start to have this daydream now, I’ve developed a “Temporary 1995 Protocol.” The phone goes in the other room. I read a physical book with KBach on an FM radio. I turn off work chat notifications. I write in a paper journal. I pretend streaming services don’t exist.
Occasionally, though, I open Google and browse land for sale in Coconino County. May Sarton did buy a cabin in the country, after all.