Digital Justification

A friend and I had an interesting revelation the other day while visiting over coffee.

The visiting over coffee part itself has become a really rewarding part of my life lately. I’ve been taking some breaks from consuming social media – I’ll still post “outbound” (i.e. taking a photo on my phone and posting it) but I’ve been limiting the amount of time I spend actually visiting the sites themselves so that I don’t fall into a mindless rut of scrolling the newsfeed. It took some adjusting for me and for others since I don’t always respond to a message on a dime (30 seconds after a question is posed), but for the timebeing it feels like a healthy approach.

Another recent adjustment is inviting a friend or neighbor to occasionally join me for a cup of coffee in my living room. I enjoy coffee shops, but the cost-savings and comfort of visiting barefoot on my own couch or front porch is awfully nice.

I’ve been on a bit of a mission lately to work on simplifying and living the good life. I’m particularly enamored of a couple of resources in that vein: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, the blog Small Notebook by Rachel Meeks and the blog (and e-book released today!) Zero Waste Home by Bea Johnson. I have a long, long way to go on simplifying, creating less waste and generally being a better and more pleasant person, but these three women have become something of a personal muse team along the way. I want to make more time for this:

Lately I’ve been culling all sorts of clutter and unused items, repairing clothing and, in my ongoing effort to live closer to paperless, I finally made the leap to switching my magazine subscriptions (which have long been one of the worst of my environmental sins) to digital.

So, this friend and I were discussing digital trappings and how, since switching so many books and magazines to digital, I suddenly feel compelled to report my online activities to my family. “Just going to read a book” I’ll announce as I pick up my phone, or “Flipping through a magazine” as I reach for the tablet. I’m 100{cab58b9493bca9eccefbf3ae00ef5a3add1991efca1fb728a890b19984c3cc67} certain they do not care what I’m doing, but I feel as though I have to justify my screen time. I’m not even sure why one online activity seems less noble than another, and my family may very well be watching a soccer game on a screen themselves. However, something makes me feel like I have to confirm that I am not (per above) mindlessly trolling around on Facebook. My pal had the same compulsion with her family.

Despite this weird new strain of self-reporting/guilt, I’m pretty ok with our family screen time. We don’t play video games deep into the night or leave a television on from dawn to dusk. Sometimes, the whole fam may be camped out on the couch with one playing Doors & Rooms, another looking up local birds, the little one playing an alphabet learning game and me reading my digital mags. We are a pile of blankets, pillows and legs with a good amount of interaction. And, we are just as likely to unplug and go walk our real dogs on real leashes until we get to real trails where we can all run amok.

Works for me, no justification needed.