Time for a digital detox? | thearticle

In 1722, Daniel Defoe’s _A Journal of the Plague Year_ was published. It was a chronicle of the bubonic plague that swept London in 1665. While there is no actual plague, the FOMO diaries is

a 2019 hallucinogen on the joys of missing out, a semi-digital detox logbook. If you suffer from the fear that everyone else in the world is having more fun than you, rest assured you are

not alone. Are you jealous of the career success of others and their perfect happy lives? Do you luxuriate alone in failure and misery? Suffer like the rest of us, sucker. Of course, we know

the solution is to get off social media, unsubscribe from Twitter, stop posting on Instagram, forgo your 20K friends and get a life.  I found myself unwittingly in this situation in the

gorgeousness of Chiantishire in a remote farmhouse on a hill where the internet worked intermittently, the phone signal was weak, and the TV was on strike. I had been cut loose from the

world and was existing in a virtual blackhole. I have written before about taking a break from the news. That was my reaction to Brexit and the election of the autocratic ruler of the USA,

President Trump. Listening to the news felt like having tinnitus. After I got used to the phone not pinging with emails and texts making me feel that I was alive, I felt oddly serene, not

knowing what was going on or even if I had any friends. A calm descended as I woke up smelled, and made the coffee. Nothing seemed to matter under the Tuscan sun. Sadly, there is no true

escape. On the day that the UK Conservative Party voted for a new leader, I sat with 100 other people in the Piazza Grande in the medieval city of Arezzo. Under the arches, I ate lunch and

listened to the Southbank Sinfonia. Away from the world, but not. We were waiting for the inevitable news that Boris would be the new prime minister. Between courses and chianti, the updates

would come in every couple of minutes until we got the confirmation. Then, we went back to eating our pasta and drinking our Prosecco and I rediscovered how many people suffer from FOMO and

how many needed a respite from information overloads and the pervasive sense of a dystopian malaise. I wish the enforced media ban had lasted because then I would have been blissfully

unaware that Boris is taking us into irrelevance and poverty. I would have missed the nauseating shots of Her Holiness Meghan Markle gazing up saint-like as she guest edits _Vogue_ and

changes the world.  Whatever appeal she once had, has evaporated with her imbibing the Kool-Aid of her wonderfulness.  Without access to the internet, I wouldn’t have seen photos of the

barefoot wunder-Prince Harry’s trip on a private jet (no carbon footprint there) to a climate change conference. No wonder we all need therapy and anti-depressants. And, it’s no wonder, too,

that the fantastic and brilliant best-selling author of _Sapiens_ and _21 Lessons for the 21st Century_, Noah Yuval Harari, has taken up meditation. With the imminent death of democracy,

the rise of Russia and China and the pervasiveness of fake news, I’m with him. Maybe it’s no wonder, too, that hilariously funny Present Laughter is sold out in the West End. The first

performance of Noel Coward’s play was in Blackpool. It was 1942, the height of the war and the German threat was ever-present. People needed something to laugh about and, it’s not so

different now. Bring on blissful ignorance and release the serotonin!