This is What Happens When You Disconnect

All I need is an Internet connection. Or at least, that would be all I needed if all I cared about was making money. I’ve been with my wife since before smartphones existed, so I’ve seen the world change as it has migrated online.

It’s still with a certain sense of amazement that I work remotely, able to make anywhere my home. I have a job that 20 years ago, didn’t exist. A job that, in the days before the Internet, I would never have been able to do.

But the trouble with working from anywhere is that, if you’re not careful, it becomes working from everywhere.

Efficiency, efficiency, they say. And you shall know a person by the content they produce. I’m a big believer in productivity myself. I dictate articles on long drives to use my time in the car more efficiently. Believe me, I get it.

But if you don’t keep an eye on what you’re doing, you can turn yourself into a machine. I’ve done it before. I’ve been extremely lucky to be able to build a life around remote work, but it took a lot of hours.

A lot of grinding out words for an astonishingly low hourly rate, trying to build a reputation in an industry full of scammers. It’s all too easy to get drawn into the productivity trap and measure your worth in terms of your word count.

Especially when you run your own business. Especially when you don’t know when or if the work could dry up and leave you broke and forced to contemplate getting — horror of horrors! — a regular job. The kind where you have a boss and a schedule and are forced to put on pants. There are some indignities no one should have to bear.

They didn’t have Wi-Fi on the ferry. The dingy white boat thumped along the whale-haunted and sullen sea between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and halfway between the two, the signal dropped. My brother climbs cell phone towers for living, hanging like a spider in a gulf of crystalline air to keep us all connected. But there are no towers out here.

So I was forced to close my laptop and stop writing about the world, forced to actually look at it instead. The part I could see, anyway. A sea almost too bright to look at, reflecting the sun in a broad golden band that seems to point right at the window I’m sitting at.

The dark mass of tree-furred mountains rising from the water, and the hazy blue shapes of tall mountains behind them. The rhythmic leap and splash of the water pushed aside by the boat, only to roll back again to form the foamy white wake.

And as the boat chugged along, a murmur of spreading excitement rippled through the passengers around me. Out in the silver sea, between the boat and the land, a plume of mist rose from the water.

A whale, splashing its fins and tail, leaping at times above the waves as though putting on a show just for us. One of those moments of unexpected magic that remind you that there is a vast and impersonal world out there, a world where the likes your last article got are completely meaningless. The real world, not the strange digital dystopia where we spend so much of our time.

It only takes a moment. Ripped away from the false and forced to confront reality. The bright impersonal world, no longer mediated by a screen lit up with notifications. The meat, not the shell.

I rely on the Internet the same way a whale relies on the sea, to keep me fed, to keep my body functioning from one day to the next. But it’s good that the digital sphere doesn’t reach everywhere yet. It’s good that sometimes, forces greater than Amazon and Google intervene to remind us of what really exists. Cut off from the online world, we can reconnect to something much older and truer.

But when we reach the harbor, and the bars light up again on my phone, I’ll be logging in to post this.