These days, people can always find you, which is a statement so obvious as to be worthless. Be it on your phone, your messenger app of choice or even a gaming console like the PS5 some kind stranger inexplicably gave my family on New Year’s Eve (I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one), there is probably an icon with your name under it and a little green dot to indicate if you are “active”.
I can assure you, if the little green dot on messenger indicates I am online, I am being anything but active. More than likely, the only thing I am exercising is bad posture while I doomscroll on Facebook.
Even so, we want people to look for us, to seek out our company or failing that, at least our opinions. Did you see this? Did you hear that? What do you think about such-and-such? Like the line goes in the great Gen X anthem, Radiohead’s Creep, “I want you to notice when I’m not around”.
So we have to somehow make ourselves both available and yet not available. Luckily, the devices now take care of that for us. “AFK” was early internet lingo for “away from computer”.
You typed it into chat rooms to let others know why you suddenly went silent, be it a trip to the kitchen or the bathroom.
Now, there are convenient, clickable statuses to do the same thing on a much wider variety of platforms, but no one uses them. If people used them, how could they be simultaneously available and yet not available? They can’t notice you’re not around if they haven’t experienced the agony of an ignored message.
But when was the last time you really disconnected? When did you go totally radio silent, full dark, no stars? As a family man, the days when I can disconnect from all communications are fewer and farther between than February 29 on Leap Year. When I was young though, I would do it on a whim.
One summer, I disappeared from my friend group for two days for no other reason than I was reading The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny and became so wrapped up in the story I needed to finish it all in one go. It was the weekend, time to party, to drink and carouse and make mayhem— but if I didn’t get those five books finished as soon as humanly possible I might have blown a gasket.
My mother was bemused but understanding. I had left strict instructions to tell anyone who called or came by that she had no idea where I was or what I was up to. People noticed I wasn’t around, but I didn’t care. I wanted to know how Corwin lost his memory, if his eyes would grow back and if his curse had doomed the brother that blinded him.
During a food break before diving back into Zelazny’s world of shadow dimensions and cutthroat family intrigue, my mother told me of the time in college she skipped classes for three days just to read James Clavell’s Shogun. She had smiled as she told me.
Looking back, I understand that smile better each year. Ma died before the all-encompassing web of smartphones and social media swept us all up like fish in a net, but I doubt it would have caught her. She was the kind to turn off the ringer on the phone if it ever disturbed her peace.
I have been known to do the same, though like everyone else, I carry the phone around in my pocket. Usually, I’m just tuning out the annoying rings, pings and dings of my phone because I am being assailed by some other intrusive aspect of modern life.
The problem is I forget to turn the dang thing back on. This usually leads to piles of missed calls and strings of increasingly impatient texts, which might even be worth it if I was doing anything I enjoyed half as much as my two day trip to Zelazny’s Castle Amber.
Maybe that was why the kindly stranger gave us a free PS5? He had tried to escape for a little while into whatever game was his own Castle Amber— but that little green dot said he was “active” and some message kept dragging him back to the real world.
That’s the problem these days. No one really sees you or hears you, but they always notice when you’re not around.
