Screens aren't all bad: How FaceTime helps me stay close to my kids



I recently covered the harmful effects of screen time. But like most technology, screens have also improved my life. Let’s explore some of these positives, which come with problems of their own.

When I travel for work, FaceTime connects me to my children. When I'm hundreds of miles from home, I feel impossibly far from my family. Nothing is more important to me than seeing their faces and hearing their voices. There’s a redemption to the warmth and comfort that these video calls provide.

I like to think of these apps and platforms as connective. They unite the sender and receiver despite any real-world obstacles.

Skype and WhatsApp allow me to chat with family and friends overseas, and Instagram can serve as a kind of video telegram that exists in perpetuity. Thinking back to the isolation caused by the COVID-19 lockdowns, where would we be without Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams?

Video communication also appears throughout social media. YouTube brought cinema and documentary into our hands, fracturing visions of a bloated system of channels by transforming mass media into a network of content made by anyone and everyone. As a journalist, I rely on various video platforms to conduct interviews and gather information.

If Facebook lives up to its dreams of a metaverse, these interactions will be immersive. I’m a bit old for Snapchat, but the video messaging function adds levity to conversations. Twitch, X, Discord, and TikTok all contribute to the ongoing advancements of audiovisual two-way communication. Not to mention the luxury of our cellphone cameras. It has been a mere 60 years since Abraham Zapruder captured one of America’s darkest moments on an 8mm camera.

I like to think of these apps and platforms as connective. They unite the sender and receiver despite any real-world obstacles. After all, this is the era of the network, when the narrative of stand-alone humans no longer has legs.

Connective interfaces strengthen social bonds and provide much-needed clarity. There's none of the missing context that hinders letters, texts, and emails — even phone calls can muddle the reality of a conversation. They offer a version of telepresence, the feeling that everyone on the call is closer than possible.

Remote telepresence has caused many interesting outcomes. One is the death of geography. Distance is no longer absolute. This has led to a disintegration of the private space, which has proven disastrous.

Devotion to telepresence has disrupted a far more important experience: presence. It is truly a paradox of our time that the improvement is a fabrication that belittles the original, like meatless burgers and Marxist theory.

This muddies the distinction between the real and the virtual, a pornographization of the connective process, something as simple as small talk at the market, any interaction that slows you down.

A life of constant tele-action is bad for people. It denies us our need for a life without performance or observation. At its worst, it facilitates tele-surveillance. Like the nuclear family, the home is supposed to serve as a private institution apart from the State.

This divide between public and private life is crucial for the health of a civilization. Without this separation, we can easily collapse into a culture of deadening indulgence (“Brave New World”) or a dystopia of authoritarian stricture (“Nineteen Eighty-Four”).

Also, the speed of exchange is immediate. This worsens our servitude to a burnout society.

On the flip side, this remote transmission is nothing short of a revolution in transportation. Society is now an endless practice of live coverage. Real-time connectivity offers each of us a superhuman view of life in all of its complexity. Imagine explaining that to an 11th-century peasant.

So next time you feel overburdened by the pace of technology and the ubiquity of screens, slow down, if you can, and remember the good they can bring to you, that they allow you to meet with anyone, anywhere, in what could almost be called face-to-face.

Founder mode: Dare to vibe with tech’s latest buzzword



Scrolling through X today, past photos of Kamala Harris avoiding journalists’ questions by holding her phone to the side of her head while wearing Apple earbuds, I was painfully reminded why I have called her the first cyborg candidate and the first word-cloud candidate.

Then I remembered the Apple Vision Pro — remember that? — and the semi-viral videos accompanying the meh product’s initial hype blurp: tech bros wearing the thing while driving a Cybertruck, walking through the mall grandiosely swiping around windows and apps that only they could see. A naif could be excused for mistaking Kamala for a practitioner of the memeably absurd “beast mode” style of tech-world device-maxxing.

The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been.

But no one would mistake Harris for a founder — not of a company, not of a nation, not even of a cult, despite the fandom being manufactured around her.

A critic in the vein of Twain or Mencken might suggest that America has been running on cult leaders — the socioeconomic equivalent of an all vodka-Red Bull diet — for a dangerously long time. Today the secret is largely out that (as we covered at Return early this year) a lot of tech is really about talent-spotting cult leaders and “funding” them the way high-powered firms or family offices “fund” attorneys … so much so that today many techies and wannabe techies explicitly brand their operations as cults and themselves as leaders thereof.

It can be left to the reader to contemplate just how irresistibly the dark worlds of perversity and spycraft mingle with the realm of cults and for just how long.

On the other hand, few cults really work well as businesses, which is why, for the past quarter-century or so, the East Coast vector of the cult/workplace dynamic has run the opposite way from the West: The purpose of human resources is to turn corporations into cults, not the other way around. So there’s a certain logic to the tech industry taking the edge off the whole cult thing by refocusing on what a would-be cult leader could be that would actually be better for business.

Enter founder mode. Legendary VC Paul Graham dropped one of his legendary blog essays a few days ago minting the founder mode meme. In sum, he maintains, “There are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it.”

Importantly, he continues, “There are as far as I know no books specifically about founder mode. Business schools don't know it exists. All we have so far are the experiments of individual founders who've been figuring it out for themselves. But now that we know what we're looking for, we can search for it. I hope in a few years founder mode will be as well understood as manager mode. We can already guess at some of the ways it will differ.”

The details in the thesis are interesting, but still more interesting is the overall context, because until the 21st century, the character of the founder has been overwhelmingly more closely associated with politics than business. If the 1619 Project people and the borg they belong to hadn’t been so successful in nuking the Founding Fathers from the popular imagination, perhaps more Americans would still think of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, etc. than Jobs, Bezos, Musk, and so on. Maybe I’m a little ahead of the times in thinking we’re already there, but that’s certainly where we’re heading.

Yet the techies leaning hard into founder mode are themselves increasingly cognizant of the way that the founding spirit (or whatnot) is increasingly absent from political life, especially at the top, no matter how symbolic Biden’s use of the White House Franklin Roosevelt portrait might be. The whole point of the Kamala cult is to liberate citizens from any proper political education or contemplation altogether, unburdening them from what difficult details of self-governance have been.

“One cannot say it too often," wrote Tocqueville. "There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free; but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom. It is not the same with despotism. Despotism often presents itself as the mender of all ills suffered; it is the support of good law, the sustainer of the oppressed, and the founder of order. Peoples fall asleep in the bosom of the temporary prosperity to which it gives birth; and when they awaken, they are miserable.”

Politically speaking, the post-Trump years have been, perhaps above all, the years of men in tech awakening to the alarming reality that America needs to be re-established on its foundations in order to survive — and that both political parties have failed to produce an elected official capable of carrying out this refounding.

This is something of a dilemma. Long before Silicon Valley arrived, the urge of American businessmen in America was to see politics as a kind of management task ancillary to the real work of leading a business. At the same time, however, with the emasculation and bureaucratization of the military, it’s hard to find any other executive talent pipeline into government besides business. The classical political theory of dictatorship is that decadent regimes must turn in the late game to men of iron, not men of money. However well intentioned or skilled any of us are in this knotty situation, we are all in fairly uncharted territory.

That is a big reason why we’re hosed without focusing attention on finding the spiritual aspect. For a better analogy than late-game pagan Rome, we should turn to the foggy years of the early-game Middle Ages, when the pious duke of Aquitaine founded numerous monasteries but none more notable than 1,114 years ago this September 11, Cluny Abbey — a pillar of order in the fractured post-Roman world focused primarily on liturgy and perpetual prayer. More illustrative still, in a way that bears deep reflection, is another founding monastic, St. Benedict, who owed his monastic life to a little-known figure with lessons for us all on the character of founders in an age of new frontiers: St. Romanus, a hermit monk who set up the wandering Benedict with a habit and a home — a cave above a Tiber tributary where Benedict would live for years before finally going founder mode.

Can the right wing save sci-fi?



It’s an open secret that sci-fi is the genre of the left. Pick out any landmark title, and you’ll likely find the author fits into one or more of these three descriptors: progressivist, rationalist, and atheist. And while there are standout exceptions, for every Heinlein, there’s an Asimov and a Clarke. For every religious Walter M. Miller, there’s a dozen other sci-fi authors espousing various iterations of the revolution.

While I wouldn’t say science fiction is necessarily defined by this strain of leftist thought, it’s undeniable that the genre has served as a hotbed for progressive ideas since the early days of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Gene Roddenberry’s "Star Trek" wasn’t a step into a bold new frontier so much as it was advancing ideas that had long been coalescing among these writers. Ideas that, upon hitting the mainstream, calcified into the tropes that we now consider part and parcel of the genre. Uploading minds into computers, human evolution guided by a higher intelligence, the idea that the world can unify under a global government — they are all expressions of leftist ideas.

Are faster-than-light technologies truly a boon for humanity, or would their use unleash absolute chaos? What are the consequences of a genuinely abstracted consciousness? Is there a point where we say no to certain technologies because their costs are too great?

Take the first, for example: The left presumes that humans are nothing more than blank, abstract consciousnesses piloting meat sacks. Leftists see the mind as completely separate from the body and the body as irrelevant to the self-expression and identity of the mind. In today’s political terms, this is the “trans” movement. In sci-fi, this is taken to the nth degree, where the mind itself is often separated from the body into a computer to become an abstract self-identity.

But of course, this assumes the essence of a human mind is the electrical firing of neurons and not emergent in the physical reality of those neurons. The left believes the problem of sapience is one of sheer processing power, that self-awareness is merely translating neurons into ones and zeroes. But how many people would agree that a neuron and a computer program written to model a neuron are ontologically the same thing? Or to put it more simply, how many people would say Gary and the little black box running a computer model of Gary are indistinguishable in every way, shape, and form?

Science fiction is riddled with these often unquestioned assumptions. Or, when they are brought under scrutiny, they are shuffled off-camera to avoid the harder implications. As much as I love "Star Trek," I always groan in frustration when they bring up an interesting concept because I know it will only last as long as the episode. A duplicate of your entire crew created from a learning metallic liquid? A virus that rapidly ages its victims? A nonphysical entity mentally interrogating your officers? Welp, these things happen, I suppose. Nothing a vacation on the Holodeck wouldn’t fix.

It all raises the question of what, if so much of sci-fi is left-wing, might right-wing sci-fi look like? Anything more than a predictably ideological counter-spin on the conventions of the genre? Or might we find, somewhere, visionaries and luminaries capable of more? Might we create an artistic scene where new Frank Herberts are more a rule than an exception?

Well, the first problem we have before us is what even defines right-wing sci-fi. We need a definition or a set of criteria before we can say something is left-wing vs. right-wing. And I don’t mean right-wing in that cringe-inducing manner where conservatives are just dunking on the left. I mean genuine art that seeks after the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Live long and prosper

CBS Photo Archive/Getty

What I propose here is not the be-all and end-all. It’s more like the start of a conversation, a set of principles that can helpfully distinguish what is genuinely right-wing from what is subversive. I myself will probably modify these rules as time goes on. But definitionally speaking, I think these three criteria are essential. So, here are Isaac’s three laws of right-wing science fiction:

  1. Technology as a social force is viewed skeptically, not optimistically
  2. Human nature is unchangeable, not malleable
  3. The creation of utopia is not the purpose of mankind

Let’s break down what I mean with each point. The first rule speaks to the beating heart of sci-fi, which is man’s relationship with technology. The left sees progress as an inherently good thing. All problems of the human condition are of information processing. If there is a problem facing society, it is either that we lack the required knowledge to solve it or there are inefficiencies in our processing speed.

Progress and technology are increasing both, so they must be fundamentally good. We can solve the famines in the third world with advanced agriculture and infrastructure. We can fix our economy with sound policy decisions from think tanks and academic experts. We can end all human suffering if we just automate everything and turn existence over to machines to do everything for us.

It never occurs to the left that technology often creates as many problems as it solves. Advanced infrastructure in the third world brings questions of how to maintain such infrastructure. Complex systems require ever more complex maintenance. And if the will and human resources aren’t there to do it, then it won’t be done.

Sound economic policy decisions assume objective actors who will act for the ultimate good. But no one is outside the system. Bureaucracy inevitably breeds more bureaucracy because bureaucrats need to make a livelihood. And no matter how much you try to optimize self-interest for the better of all, corruption is always more profitable.

None of this is to say that technology or advanced systems are inherently bad. I mean that technology should be viewed as it actually is — a series of trade-offs. Modern plumbing is undoubtedly a godsend, but there are still costs that come with it. We don’t think of its maintenance as costs because we are so inundated with its use, but those costs remain. A significant amount of time, money, and investment from someone are required to keep your plumbing functional.

And if you try to automate those things, the automation itself will require even more maintenance. The best solution isn’t always to double down on ever more complex systems until you eventually run out of energy to maintain them all.

The first rule posits a very simple ask of sci-fi authors — that technology isn’t necessarily a force for good in and of itself. If science fiction explores the realities of mankind’s relationship with technology, and if it is to undertake this task honestly, it must understand that more is not always better. Right-wing sci-fi must take a fuller approach to technology, dissecting a given technology from all angles, understanding its full implications, and weighing its use. And, if necessary, to reject its use outright when the trade-offs are not worth it.

Frank Herbert’s "Dune" is a landmark title partly because the author posits a world where certain technologies have been considered seriously and rejected. And then it dares to imagine the consequences of such a world.

How many plots of "Star Trek" are the exact opposite? How many episodes are spent in which the solution is some clever use of technology or some new knowledge to solve the problem? How many of the problems facing the characters are the lack of information and not the harder choices men are often called to make?

Moving on, the second rule is an extension of the first. If technology is not to uplift humanity, then it is merely an additive to humanity — a humanity that remains constant in its condition.

There’s no one serious in the world who contests that technology changes human behavior and the human experience. It obviously does so. But does technology change what it is to be human itself? Has technology changed the overall nature of mankind? Are we fundamentally different as a species than where we were 2,000 years ago? If you were to compare the two, would you find something essential in modern man that is not present in his earlier incarnation?

And if you were to strip modern man of his creature comforts, would he be any different than what he was 2,000 years ago? Would his children be any different? Would their grandchildren? If the answer is no, then we must conclude that it is the environment that has changed in the modern world, not the man himself. In this case, if our impossibly sophisticated world has not already made a measurable impact on human nature, why do we expect it to do so in the future?

It is easy to dream of machine life integrating with the organic as it often does in sci-fi. But has anyone ever stopped and asked what would happen if such a future were impossible? We assume that science will progress forever and forever, but what happens if we were to come across hard limits to our reality that could not be overcome? What if — dare I say — that more knowledge was not the solution to our problems?

What if reality itself has its limitations? And what if one of those limitations was the human condition?

The left has placed its bets on AI and trans-humanism, the latter concept being an oxymoron. To transcend the human means no longer being human, which means we’re talking about something completely different than humanity. Trans-humanism means the rejection of humanity in favor of something else — which is assuredly not human. If we were to put it in actual, real terms, trans-humanism is the abolition — or outright extinction — of the human race.

So, we are effectively placing all our bets on some unproven, utterly unknown entity, and we’re hoping that this entity is magically better than humanity itself. And if we were to create a self-learning AI somehow, there is no guarantee that such an AI would somehow be superior to mankind. Mere intelligence does not equate to morality, and I hope that’s obvious to anyone who’s seen his fair share of cheesy machine uprisings.

To be right-wing in science fiction is to make the simple observation that human nature seems to be sticking around for the long haul, and tampering with it does not guarantee a better world. If there is one single thing that conservatives have succeeded in conserving, it is human nature. And given the absolute failure of conservatives against the left, I think this is direct evidence that human nature is the one thing the left cannot abolish.

The third rule concludes the first two. If progress does not bring us to a better world and human nature is not malleable, then utopia is firmly out of our reach. So many of the left’s stories rely upon the implicit assumption that man is destined to achieve a perfect state of being in this universe, a post-scarcity society where all problems of existence are solved.

Spirituality and the stars

Bob Penn/getty

But what if mankind’s ultimate purpose is not to strive for infinite material gain? What is mankind if we are not a mere appetite that needs to be satiated, and what if existence entailed more than a constant string of dopamine hits?

This final point encapsulates a topic, the often-discussed but not properly explored religious aspect of sci-fi. In so many stories, the narrative’s true religion is some version of leftist progress, and all other faiths are an obstacle or interesting nuisance in the way of this goal. But imagine, for a moment, if another religion was true? What if different metaphysical claims underpinned a narrative?

This is a woefully unexplored part of sci-fi, and I think here is a fertile ground for new artists to break out of genre-defining clichés and exhausted plot lines. Warhammer 40k is interesting not because it reuses a bunch of sci-fi tropes but because it puts a new spin on them. In the setting, the dream of "Star Trek" is inverted. Instead of peace and prosperity, the galaxy is thrown into endless war and strife. Everything is collapsing, and the idea of a secular utopia has been thoroughly snuffed out.

The best parts of 40k are when the authors try to salvage meaning and hope out of this bleak situation. And what do those authors find themselves turning to time and again for new answers? Religion.

The message I want people to take away from this essay is not me crossing out tropes with a red marker and saying you cannot use them or else you are a leftist. But rather, questioning old tropes that seem exhausted and finding new spins or interpretations on them. Are faster-than-light technologies truly a boon for humanity, or would their use unleash absolute chaos? What are the consequences of a genuinely abstracted consciousness? Is there a point where we say no to certain technologies because their costs are too great?

This is not an exercise in condemning past authors or their works, only trying to understand the progression of ideas in the genre and where those ideas are leading. And finally, to leave it up for future artists to decide if they want to venture somewhere else in the bold new frontiers of their own sci-fi stories.

Escaping the digital rat race for a simple life



It was March 2020, still in the early days of the pandemic. My husband and I had packed up our entire existence and departed on one of the last flights from London, soon to be locked down, en route to Cluj, Romania, the nearest big city to where I had grown up and where we intended to make a home.

An elderly lady was in the row ahead of us, wearing a traditional paisley scarf over her hair. She was visibly agitated. She had defiantly pulled the mandatory surgical mask from her mouth. The stewardess tried to reason with her, but the woman was resolute. "It's just the flu. My daughter is a nurse!” she screeched. Even then, the whole plane was split between skeptics and true believers. You could hear faint rumblings of teams forming at the sight of this minimum viable battle.

Technology has become godlike under the cover of the invisible hand and with increasing complexity and illegibility to the layman. It's subordinate only to its own ends, as is repeatedly recorded in the anxious genre of runaway tech dystopias.

There was a general mood of bewilderment and irritation. The pandemic had knocked us all into a state of uncertainty, but our personal plans to change directions, to extract ourselves from London and set down our roots elsewhere, had begun long before the virus had forced our hands. We wanted a family, children, community, and a more connected, spiritually rich life that fit our values. London, despite certain advantages, couldn’t offer us what we wanted.

London is rootless by design; it’s one of its main attractions. You go there to consume: places, experiences, people. Even your self is driven to be a constantly updated creation. Living in a city like London is thrilling, and few places in the world are more suited to exploring what you want to do and who you want to be. But this consumption is not optional; it’s the point. You’re in flux, just like everyone else. Scratch almost any high-flying city dweller, and you find someone who longs to live in a cottage somewhere.

I’ll forever be grateful for my time there because it’s where I met my husband. We’d be a very unlikely pair as a Romanian and a Kiwi if metropolitan life weren’t attractive to us. But for both of us, the city was more a tool than a destination. It was a means to an end, and the end had come.

There were also more practical limitations. We had a lovely apartment in London close to work but were spending enormous amounts of money on rent. In our neighborhood, knife crime became a looming threat, and walking in the dark was close to an extreme sport. After I saw two, now traditional, moped muggings — two men swooping in on the sidewalk on a moped, one wielding a hammer to show they mean business — in one week, my baseline feeling of safety plummeted even further.

Having fifteen Nepalese restaurants in a two-mile radius didn’t compensate for us not knowing our neighbors and them not being that interested in us either. The city seemed built to feed consumption to its prized producers. We were trying to become a bit more than that and make some nutty, inefficient decisions in the process, like having children.

Romania

Kazakov/Getty

My old family home, which I have returned to, is in a small city in Transylvania. It's a small home, but it means our fixed costs are down immensely, and we have a lot more leeway to save or experiment with different opportunities — in my case, it was starting a podcast.

My mom is now my neighbor. This presents certain difficulties, as one might expect. My mother is a flamboyant, loud, creative Eastern European woman; my husband is a profoundly Anglo engineer from New Zealand. One person’s talking sounds like screaming to another; occasionally, lit cigarettes are left in places where they don’t belong.

We cook together once or twice a week and have a few different projects to improve our little intergenerational hub, but we do have enough space and distance to live together without a constant battle of wills. There is a lot of romanticism baked into the idea of multigenerational living. However, it can be a challenge given the immense cultural distance between recent generations and the additional pressures of marrying someone from a different culture.

Family is often tricky, but the benefits far outweigh the problems. "Who is staying home with the kids?" is not a question we must ask. It is just a short walk from the home office to soothe or feed the crying baby in the next room over. Though we do almost all of the child care, my mother is here to help when we need her. And likewise, we’re also here to help my mother with whatever she needs. As a widow, she’s become self-reliant, but giving back a little help is nice, even if she “can do it on her own.”

The garden has become a shared, central project where the nature of these relationships is especially pronounced. Tending one’s garden, as it turns out, is a helpful metaphor for a reason. Romania has scorching summers, abrupt autumns, and not rarely the casual -15° Celsius day in January. The garden sets its demands accordingly. Spring is all about pruning and planting. Summer means watering every day. Autumn is the time to harvest and preserve some of the few edibles we grow. Timing is everything. The work requires everyone to pitch in. The rhythms and harshness of the seasons, the responsibilities they impose on us, and the fruits of this labor have been an essential glue for our relationship.

The key lesson of the garden is that there are no opt-out clauses, shortcuts, or tech-assisted workarounds to these fundamental obligations. So much of the disconnection we experienced in London was based on finally having the option not to need one another. Every new layer of technology we've added to our lives in recent years has been a form of disintermediation, removing friction, costs, and especially humans.

Atomization is a revealed preference because each instance we get atomized is more comfortable and "utility-maximizing" than its non-atomized and human-friction-addled alternative. Every need and every urge has a tech-aided comfort shortcut based on supernormal stimuli. Digital forms of soma are everywhere. Any widget or screen is an all-singing, all-dancing amusement machine. Most food is a hyper-palatable ticket to instant comfort. Pornography is oozing out of every pore of the internet, and any combination of stacked genitalia that you might enjoy is seconds away.

When one transitions from such a chain of experiences to a far less glamorous and less immediately comfortable life, there is a sensation of waking into a cold bedroom. The dream fades. The blankets are peeled back. But the day has begun, and it is yours to make.

Escaping the Matrix

Ronald Siemoneit/Getty

In "Tools for Conviviality," Ivan Illich diagnoses the escalating problems created by the technological society and its logical successor, the technocratic society, resulting from a misunderstanding of the purpose of technology. Technology is simply a glorified tool. Any tool is subordinated to human purposes. A tool that does not serve human purposes is a bad tool. We've let technology become something else.

Technology has become godlike under the cover of the Invisible Hand and with increasing complexity and illegibility to the layman. It's subordinate only to its own ends, as is repeatedly recorded in the anxious genre of runaway tech dystopias. "The Matrix" and "Black Mirror,"among countless others, all tell the same underlying tale: Tech has been turned against us. The tool has become the master, but it doesn't have to be that way. Tech must re-engage with purpose and virtue, with what it means to be human. But first, the humans who make the tech must do the same.

For my family, putting purpose first and thinking about our values explicitly has served us well in this respect. This doesn't mean that we have a perfect relationship with technology, that we're not sometimes frazzled and chained to our screens, even tucked away in the shadows of the mountains of Transylvania. But, on the whole, using technology has given us significantly more freedom than it has taken. It has allowed us to be here in the first place, to ask these questions, and even seek the right answers.

The modern world sets out a default life script sculpted by myriad incentives and promises of status. It is not easy to have the knowledge and the confidence to take a step back and assess which of these pressures to follow and which to ignore. I don’t think I would have been able to make these decisions much earlier in my life without understanding what was on the other side. I was under the same spell as everyone I knew, riding along the same determined path toward a goal I couldn’t have honestly defended or even defined. Career success and a long checklist of novel, cosmopolitan experiences on the way there, maybe. But what about those experiences aside from a few nice-looking Instagram photos?

What happens once I arrive at the destination, assuming there is one? I guess more of the same stuff: “success” and “experiences,” whatever those things meant. Fortunately, I realized pretty early that the horizon line led nowhere I wanted to go and used my time in the default world to set myself up for a life I wanted, or anyway one I understood and could be fashioned on my terms. On our way out, we sacrificed a few things: convenience, culture, and yes, the restaurants. But the city often felt like an expensive amusement park where we paid for our ticket but weren’t going on any of the rides any more. Leaving it behind didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice in the end, and it doesn’t feel that way now, but time will tell.

I know my escape isn't possible for everyone. The opportunity to exit to a place where you have family, where you can live cheaply, and where intergenerational reciprocity is still a core value is a unique blessing. It would have never occurred to me that my mother didn't want to be my neighbor or would rather rent out the second house than have us live there. There wouldn't even be a second house in a different cultural paradigm — it exists to facilitate living closely to the family. There was an obvious path for us, but that’s not true for most.

At the same time, parts of this lifestyle are possible for many: creating new ways of depending on people in real life, using digital means to sell your time or your intellectual output to a bigger market on your own terms, being purposeful about how you use technology and avoiding the trap of becoming its slave. The possibilities have never been greater, but neither have the distractions.

There is no perfect recipe for harvesting technology's upside while leaving behind the negatives. You are wrestling with forces that know you better than yourself, and you will fail often. But remember that what you're dealing with is just a dressed-up tool surrounded by a moat of limbic candy. All you have to do is make it to the other side.

Here is a fine place to stop. It’s late; our dinner is bubbling on the stove, and I can hear the faint cries of a waking baby coming from the other end of the hall.