No Place Left Unplugged

We forgot the most important life lesson back in the 20th century

An offline beach isn’t unique. But in a world that sometimes provides internet more easily than drinkable water, it’s getting rarer. This July I spent a week going every morning to such paradise, Calblanque Beach, in southern Spain—sun, sand, wind, waves, and most importantly: few people and no internet access. Seven days sufficed to restore part of the sanity I lose at work; news of AI tools that promise much but contribute little to make this place better occupies my mental bandwidth. Freeing my mind felt good.

I was swiftly reunited with a forgotten past of refreshing disconnection. Back in Madrid, I’m used to leaving my phone out of sight while I write. It works surprisingly well considering I can extend my arm anytime and reach for it. But Calblanque Beach is special—it turns my beloved phone into a weirdly polished, mostly useless metal slab. I can reach it but I don’t. My arm doesn’t even pretend to care. The dopaminergic hook fades and the landscape’s colors intensify.

Am I doing rosy retrospection again? Whatever, it was warranted this time: One night, amid all that tranquility, I went to dine at Cabo de Palos, a nearby port village, and took a picture.

A mere two miles separated these kids from a beach where the world shuts up and silence takes over. There they were. Eyes downcast, transfixed; headphones sealing them in a cocoon of noise, drowning out the melodic hum of evening chatter.

It had to be my cynical premature judgment, right? “Of course, they go to the beach,” I thought. Sometimes, surely, they don’t play with the tablet, they play with each other like normal siblings. That was an unlucky serendipitous instant that I, unjustifiably, extrapolated to their entire life. Shame on me.

But the more I peeked out the corner of my eye, the less confident I was. Still on the first course, I had plenty of time to watch, unnoticed. I saw them being spoonfed by their parents, unable to take their eyes off the screen. I saw them exchange a grand total of zero words. I saw them not seeing the sea nor the seagulls soar up and behind the sun.

I didn’t even see the typical pique that might annoy their parents, who looked delighted at the quietness. But their little ones weren’t captivated by the endless blue stretching between the harbor and the stunning skyline. They spent dinner absorbed in the smallness—literal and metaphorical—of their screens. It worked all the same.

Shakespeare would be proud, they were and weren’t at all.

I didn’t spy on them out of a morbid pleasure to feel morally superior—I was genuinely taken aback, shock so deep I couldn’t look away. Perhaps I’m still overextending my subjective perception but the entire night was a sight that certainly warrants some rosy retrospection.

And I know this: I wasn’t like that at their age, not because I was better, but because I had no access to such tempting brain-eating candy, which would’ve eaten my brain just as easily.

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As I sat in the healing sand the next day, reflecting on Plato’s Phaedo (which I was reading as part of Ted Gioia’s humanities syllabus), I saw a sailboat. Still, on the distant horizon, only the sun’s reflection betraying its location. My girlfriend and I, not yet over our dismay at the modern family we had witnessed, imagined the sloop as ours. How peaceful it’d be to sail away, rocked by the pristine waves of the Mediterranean, together with the happily oblivious fish that’d swim alongside us.

The sharp contrast between the two scenes—one in my head, the other, sadly, very real—revealed what I thought was my perfect life: no tablet or phone, no self-imposed collective isolation, and nowhere to be found a vision as bizarre as three siblings acting as strangers.

But that boat lulling me was also, as I quickly realized, a trap fruit of my reverie. I can’t pretend to equate the smoothness of fantasy with the asperity of reality; daydreaming isn’t subjected to the incisive trial of our duties and responsibilities. How would I write this newsletter from a boat? Do I know anything about fishing? Hemingway and Melville taught me it can be daunting. Not to mention the often taken-for-granted comfort of living in the big city that neither the beach nor the open sea can provide—I don’t really like the sun much, the sea is salty and treacherous, and eating fish forever is not what I’d call a feast of God’s delights.

Boat or not, that wasn’t the life I wanted either.

So I was in the middle of paradise, reading of virtuous minds and immortal souls, and under the distant spell of pale, beautiful sails yet well aware I was cheating myself at solitaire by imagining a life I don’t have as better than it would be.

In that moment of inner conflict, it dawned on me: It gotta be both.

We need to find our unplugged places.

Because we forget we can so we don’t. We’re always connected, available, online, plugged. Your phone doesn’t weigh in your pocket anymore but it weighs in your mind, like an earworm. And when you burn out, you dream of escaping to the most secluded places so that no one finds you. Those cannot be our options.

A middle ground. Pluggable but unplugged. That’s what I want.

It’s also what we were promised. The internet was a virtual place we could access and leave. What sounds like the fever of an idealist was once real. As real as the sun is hot and the sea is full of fish. As real as our society is obsessed with busyness and distraction and the fake kind of connection. It was something to strive for, the best of both worlds. But the hope vanished.

We’re now left, quite often, with the worst of each: absent-minded during family meals and an addiction we can’t get rid of.

So find your unplugged places. They look nothing like distant paradises in the middle of the ocean or ever-scarcer offline beaches. They’re everywhere, awaiting your conscious decision to find them in the interstitial gaps of your modern routines and habits. They’re meditation and yoga sessions. They’re slow walks in the park down the street. They’re deep work hours dedicated to exploring the hobbies you left forgotten back in the 20th century.

They’re the laughs with your friends who, coincidentally, left their phones at home this time. Oh, how crazy of them! How could some spam number their mom contact them like that? Well, for 99.9% of our time on this precious Earth, that was the default. We lived, unplugged, and were just fine. We’d be just fine.

The place to start is to not believe a perfectly perfect life is what you need. A sailboat is a fantasy, a luxury reserved for those who pathetically believe it hides the secret to a fulfilling existence. Oh, the shock on their faces when they see the truth—the cliched truth that holds the most important life lesson: You already are in the right place.

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If you’re still unconvinced, let me remind you that everything online is fake.

Social feeds are a window to that impossibly desirable living style, exempt from worldly affairs and oblivious to the daily news: wanderlust nomads that live by not living anywhere; chefs cooking succulent meals in the middle of nowhere; and beautiful couples sharing landscapes as enchanting as from God’s dreams.

The trick is that those people spent just as much time, if not more, setting up the camera, preparing the lighting, the angles, the spot, the calculated movements, and taking a gazillion of footage to show us. They need to document everything. They need to be terminally online. They need to design and manufacture their lives for social media likes and engagement.

I wonder if anyone out there has found their unplugged places like that, in the isolation of their presence. I don’t know. I can’t know—does the tree make a noise if no one’s there to hear it? Even those who don’t do it for clout fail to stay away much. Remember that viral video of a neurosurgeon quitting to go to the mountains? He recorded it. Then posted it on YouTube. Huxley’s Savage tried his best but couldn’t. It chases you.

Travel is no cure for the mind. Because you’re already in the right place.

But we haven’t yet cracked the code—if you’re slightly online, you’re always online. If you’re offline, you aren’t at all. The internet’s gravitas is so powerful that if something doesn’t happen online it may as well not have happened at all. It’s ironic that as I write this, I’m sitting alone in silence in my room, as Blaise Pascal wanted, but my thoughts won’t be real real until I hit publish and you read them, proving my thesis while betraying my hopes.

It can’t be otherwise, though, for the paradox of modern life lies in a dark irony: I can share my ideas with more people than ever before yet to be born they require the kind of silence—of trees whispering in the wind and quiet sailboats in the distance—that we can hardly find anymore at home.

Ideas flourish in the unplugged places but spread through the wired currents of the internet.

It gotta be both.

I want to be faithful to that ideal so I won’t share a pic of Calblanque Beach or that white, beautiful boat that has been accompanying us today. I didn’t take one. This time, I didn’t document everything. This time, I remained unplugged. As the sailboat faded to the other side of the horizon, searching for calmer waters, I instead looked down, wiped the soft sand off my hands, and took up my book.