A very online person's attempt to be less online

What I've learned from two months of reading old books

Ever since Donald Trump won the election, I’ve been trying to be less online.

This is, of course, relative to my own prior habits. For me, being less online probably means being two standard deviations more online than the typical forty-something rather than three. In my defense, it is literally my job. Over the weekend, the Vice President of the United States started some shit on Twitter with me about American policy toward Ukraine, and I think it’s good that I was online enough on a Sunday morning to notice and fire off some replies.

Still, that’s often the trap I fall into. I think online negativity is making lots of people miserable and that liberals need to fight the impulse to rubberneck or hysteria-post about Trump, because these activities do not generate constructive political change. My job, again, is to post on the internet. But it’s easy to get caught up in an ego trip, believing that my artfully chosen RTs and QTs and carefully constructed quips — not to mention the fact that I know how to talk about foreign aid in a measured and pragmatic way that doesn’t play into Trump’s hands — is what’s standing between us and oblivion.

I spent a lot of Trump’s first term staying up late, scrolling Twitter and tossing in my two cents on everything, and at the end of the day, it just left me tired and stressed out.

So I wanted to make a change.

Patrick Collison’s year-end long tweet about reading important classic works of fiction convinced me that could be a good way to unscramble my brain. People in the past could not have been dramatically smarter than people today. But I do think it’s pretty clear that denizens of a less-entertaining, more boredom-filled time had a greater capacity for certain kinds of mental exertion than we do.

So, I figured, why not do a mental workout and take time to read novels every day, particularly in the mornings and evenings, in lieu of both waking and sleeping to the yelps of the infinite scroll?

Since January 1, I’ve read:

• The first two Hercule Poirot mysteries by Agatha Christie

• Dracula by Bram Stoker

• The Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

• All eight George Eliot novels

• Conclave by Robert Harris

• The two most recent Jack Reacher books by Lee Child

• Mansfield Park by Jane Austen

I’m a fast reader and writer (it’s kind of my whole thing), and it turns out that if I set my mind to it, I can read novels and not just a million mid-wit political columns that annoy me.

I don’t exactly want to discourage anyone from consuming political content (please like and subscribe), but I think a lot of folks could benefit from occasionally getting their minds off current affairs, not in the spirit of becoming apolitical, but in recognition of the fact that following the blow-by-blow of the news cycle doesn’t really change anything. You need to keep your batteries charged so you can do things that actually make a difference.

So here’s what I, an extremely online person, have learned by spending more time with the great books (and also Jack Reacher).

Artificial intelligence is your friend

Something I appreciate about 19th century novels is that even the ones that have been retroactively named great works of literature were, in their day, intended as popular entertainment. Like movies in my lifetime, novels in the 19th century stood at the intersection of art and commerce and were intended to be broadly accessible and entertaining, not just enjoyed by a boutique academic audience.

The problem, of course, is that things get old. We were watching The Matrix with our kid the other day and realized that he has no idea what a payphone is.