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A Rich Awakening

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,392 words)

We all the know the stats, that by 2030 the richest 1 percent could be hoarding two-thirds of the world’s wealth. Tax the rich! Redistribute to the poor! It’s the kind of thing you hear lately set to some lame music in a weirdly cut NowThis News video of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Rutger Bregman. (It’s always some scrappy progressive, not some bloated billionaire because, I don’t know, *yawns, eats some cake.*) Perhaps the rich will be moved by the fact that income equality is not only bad for the collective mental health, but their own? No? That the 10 percent’s multiplying accessories — private jets and yachts and enormous holiday homes — hogs nearly half the world’s emissions, killing the earth we all share? No? Nothing? What’s that you say, infrastructure investment started plummeting just as inequality began rising? But all the philanthropy! Which, sure, America’s largest donors may give a little more than before, but they also make way more than they used to. And as Jacobin magazine recently noted, “those nations — mostly in Scandinavia — that have the highest levels of equality and social well-being have the tiniest philanthropic sectors.” When you have equality, you don’t need long Greek words.

To recognize this, as a rich person, you need to have a sort of reverse double consciousness. “Double consciousness” originates with W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the founders of the NAACP, who coined it in 1897 as one way to describe the experience of  being an African American in a white supremacist world. In The Atlantic Monthly he defined it as, “…this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others….” The concept is based on being oppressed. What I’m talking about is an inverted version based on being the oppressor. It is the recognition that not only do you have outsized means, but that they come at the expense of others. It requires not only self awareness, but other awareness, and it’s a prerequisite for change.

Roy Disney’s granddaughter, Abigail, for instance, has given $70 million away over the past four decades, which is more than she ever inherited. “The problem is that there’s a systematic favoring of people who have accumulated an enormous amount of wealth,” she tweeted after a viral appearance on CNBC last month in which she said CEOs were overpaid. “The U.S. must make structural changes by taxing the wealthy.” To say that, she had to have had some kind of awakening — but what was it? In her case it was a sudden burst of extraordinary wealth and its human toll — not on others, but on the wealthy themselves. In 1984, when the heiress was in college, Michael Eisner became the chairman and CEO of Disney and launched its stocks into the stratosphere. Abigail’s father embraced the excess income — the too-big private jet, the too-much drinking — and no one questioned him, not even about his alcoholism. “That’s when I feel that my dad really lost his way in life. And that’s why I feel hyperconscious about what wealth does to people,” she recently told The Cut. “I lived in one family as a child, and then I didn’t even recognize the family as I got older.” Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Irin Carmon, Joe Bernstein, Robert Sanchez, Amanda Feinman, and Lois Beckett.

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Other Rachel Lyons

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Rachel Lyon | Longreads | April 2019 | 23 minutes (5,849 words)

 

I signed up for Gmail in 2005, a month after graduating college and outgrowing my .edu address. Technically the service was still in beta testing. It was early enough that I could claim my entire name, beginning to end, no numbers or crazy characters. The simplicity of my “OG handle”speaks to its vintage. I have to admit I’m rather proud of it. It also means I get a lot of correspondence not actually meant for me. Since I joined Gmail, it has grown to more than 1.5 billion active users: 20% of the world’s population. Since I joined Gmail, the world’s population itself has increased by 1+ billion! There are only so many words in the English language. There are only so many variations. Social media handles are stolen and sold like Uranium on the black market. IP addresses are finite.

I am included on the timesheet of a Melbourne store, Boost Juice — scheduled to work the closing shift on March 24 — and on the agenda for the 64th annual general meeting of the Citizens Advice Bureau in a small town outside of London. World Vision UK writes to thank me for my “donation of 10” (ten what, I don’t know). Kid to Kid Utah thanks me, too, for a donation of $9.32 worth of used children’s items. I am notified that my job application to teach at primary school in Leeds, UK, has been received. The school is rated 2.6 out of 5. One review reads: “Want your child to be bullied then send them there.”

One November I receive a note from Matt, who thinks he knows me from East High. “You Freshman Scum! A belated happy birthday this week. Hope all is going well.” (My birthday is in April, and no one would have called me “scum” when I was a high school freshman. I would have blushed. I might have cried.) December, I get a photo from Zoe — subject line: “SNOW,” body copy: “Happy Winter!” — of a courtyard, stone walls, and iron grate, blanketed in white. Adam sends me a photo, accompanied by no text at all, of three men in a lush, walled garden, one holding a Smart Water, the second holding a Starbucks cup, the third showing off three tickets to a Colts game. An American flag is stuck in a flowerpot.

Sophie writes to say how proud she is of my daughter, who “was such a sweet leader in the classroom today.” Marci tells me she signed up her son Cameron for the Abundant Life Garden Project, an after-school program at St. Philips Episcopal Church in Durham, NC, and she thinks my son Jack would have “a fabulous time” there, too. An automated message arrives from a public school in Cherryvale, KS, notifying me that my son Gary is failing English 11. His grade is 39%. What can you do with a kid like Gary? His future is looking bleak. I write to the school to let them know that the email address they’ve got on file for his mother, a different Rachel Lyon, is actually mine. They apologize and I don’t hear from them again — until the following year, when Marla writes to say she’s collecting pictures for a senior slideshow on graduation night, and will need photos of Gary no later than April 19. So Gary’s graduating after all! I’m glad he turned himself around.

One reason for all this misdirected correspondence is there are at least a few hundred people around the world who share my name. According to the dizzying website howmanyofme.com, there are 186 Rachel Lyons, Rachael Lyons, Rachel Lyonses, and Rachael Lyonses in the United States. The consonant-rich website uknames.gbgplc.com approximates 45 people in the UK, including spelling variations. (Canada — not known for its big egos, really — doesn’t seem to have an equivalent site; a search for an equivalent Australian site yielded suggestions for the following “related searches”: how many Daniels are in the world? how many people are named Mitchell? how many people in the world are named Humphrey? Apparently Daniels, Mitchells, and Humphreys are peculiarly given to egosurfing.) We Rachel Lyons are a not insignificant population.

Another reason I get so very much email, I suspect, is that when people are prompted to enter their email addresses to get something they want — free samples; access to 30 days of unlimited whatever — but don’t want to get all the spam that comes with doing so, they enter something else. What’s an easier address to think up than one’s-own-name@gmail? Given the number of digital receipts I get for things I didn’t buy, I know many Rachel Lyons have put my address down to misdirect their spam. If you’re a Rachel Lyon and you’re reading this, please know: I am here, I am real, I am receiving your correspondence, and I don’t want your spam any more than you do.

I do, however, very much enjoy the non-spam correspondence. An email is a glimpse into another life, a fragment of a story. Maybe I love getting other people’s mail because I am a fiction writer. Maybe I’m a fiction writer because I love getting other people’s mail. Chicken or egg, I do not know. All I know is it gives me a little rush. I read my misdirected correspondence carefully. I read it nosily. I read it with a little voyeuristic thrill and odd surprising pangs of envy. Rationally I know that to share a name with someone is a simple, random thing. Irrationally I can’t help but feel connected to the other Rachel Lyons of the world.

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How Does a Person Lose Track of Their Diary?

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Sophie Lucido Johnson| Longreads | April 2019 | 9 minutes (2,226 words)

 

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When Zora and Langston Took a Road Trip

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Yuval Taylor | An excerpt from Zora and Langston: A Story of Friendship and Betrayal | W. W. Norton & Company | March 2019 | 30 minutes (8,692 words)

 

Ornate and imposing, the century-old Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Passenger Terminal in downtown Mobile, Alabama, resembles a cross between a Venetian palace and a Spanish mission. Here, on St. Joseph Street, on July 23, 1927, one of the more fortuitous meetings in American literary history occurred, a chance incident that would seal the friendship of two of its most influential writers. “No sooner had I got off the train” from New Orleans, Langston wrote in The Big Sea, “than I ran into Zora Neale Hurston, walking intently down the main street. I didn’t know she was in the South [actually, he did, having received a letter from her in March, but he had no idea she was in Alabama], and she didn’t know I was either, so we were very glad to see each other.”

Zora was in town to interview Cudjo Lewis, purportedly the only person still living who had been born in Africa and enslaved in the United States. She then planned to drive back to New York, doing folklore research along the way. In late 1926, Franz Boas had recommended her to Carter Woodson, whose Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, together with Elsie Clews Parsons of the American Folklore Society, had decided to bankroll her to the tune of $1,400. With these funds, Zora had been gathering folklore in Florida all spring and summer. As the first Southern black to do this, her project was, even at this early stage, clearly of immense importance. It had, however, been frustrating. “I knew where the material was, all right,” she would later write. “But I went about asking, in carefully accented Barnardese, ‘Pardon me, but do you know any folk-tales or folk-songs?’ The men and women who had whole treasuries of material just seeping through their pores, looked at me and shook their heads. No, they had never heard of anything like that around there. Maybe it was over in the next county. Why didn’t I try over there?”

Langston, meanwhile, had been touring the South for months, penniless as usual, making some public appearances and doing his own research. He read his poems at commencement for Nashville’s Fisk University in June; he visited refugees from the Mississippi flood in Baton Rouge; he strolled the streets alone in New Orleans, ducking into voodoo shops; he took a United Fruit boat to Havana and back; and his next stop was to be the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. It was his very first visit to the South.

When Zora invited him to join her expedition in her little old Nash coupe, nicknamed “Sassy Susie,” Langston happily accepted. (The car looked a lot like a Model T Ford, and could only seat two.) Langston adored the company of entertainers, and Zora was as entertaining as they came. Langston did not know how to drive, but Zora loved driving and didn’t mind a whit. They decided to make a real trip of it, “stopping on the way to pick up folk-songs, conjur [sic], and big old lies,” as Langston wrote. “Blind guitar players, conjur men, and former slaves were her quarry, small town jooks and plantation churches, her haunts. I knew it would be fun traveling with her. It was.” Read more…

How Do You Move a Warhol? Really, Really Carefully

Emalee Beddoes-Davis, museum curator, adjusts a Warhol at the Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, 2017. (Aaron Chown/PA Wire URN:33563052)

You don’t always have to fly to Paris to see the Mona Lisa; art, even priceless art, constantly moves around the world for specific exhibitions. And that means logistics! For The Guardian, Andrew Dickson goes deep into the world of fine art transportation, where the objects are precious and singular, the stakes are high, and a damaged shipment means a piece of art is forever lost to us.

None of this comes cheap, needless to say: getting a single object to the UK from Australia and back might cost £60,000, while trucking works from France might cost £25,000. Shippers request “must-ride” status for their artworks to avoid the risk of them hanging around in airports, but it can still be trumped by higher-priority cargo. The registrar told me: “Horses tend to win, because they have to travel same-day, and no one worries about the cost. I had a case recently where they’d lost the forms at the airport and were going to bump my shipment. I nearly lost out to some fresh fish.”

The registrar recalled one courier who watched his crate go on, signed the paperwork – and then missed the flight. “He called me from the departure lounge, saying that the work he was meant to be couriering had just taken off. I was like: ‘You had one fucking job … ’” (In 2010, a courier lost a portrait by the 19th-century French artist Corot worth some £850,000 while drunk in a New York hotel bar. It turned up a few weeks later.)

Assuming they have both made it to the destination, the courier watches the crate leave the plane, before joining it in another climate-controlled truck for transit to the host museum. If an overnight stop is required, either a secure, climate-controlled fine art warehouse must be booked en route – there is a network of these across Europe, owned by different shipping firms – or, more likely, someone stays in the truck at all times, to the extent of sleeping in it.

Even a medium-sized exhibition may contain 80 artefacts, each of which needs to reach its destination at exactly the right moment (installations for a major show are so tight that courier arrivals are booked on an hour-by-hour schedule). Multiply that by the number of touring exhibitions – the V&A currently has 12 on the road – and you can see why a registrar might be in need of a mindfulness poster or two.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

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This week, we’re sharing stories from Molly Redden, Sarah Schweitzer, Andrew Dickson, Namwali Serpell, and Lukas Hermsmeier. 

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On Flooding: Drowning the Culture in Sameness

A 37-meter-long floating sculpture by U.S. artist Kaws in Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong, March 2019. (Imaginechina via AP Images)

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | March 2019 | 7 minutes (2,006 words)

In 1995, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1996, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1997, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. That is: Two cop shows set in New York, two medical shows set in Chicago, and some aliens, spread across four networks, represented the height and breadth of the art form for three years running.

I literally just copied that entire first paragraph from a Deadspin article written by Sean T. Collins. It appeared last week, when every site seemed to be writing about Netflix. His was the best piece. Somehow, within that flood of Netflix content, everyone found that article — it has almost 300,000 page views. I may as well have copied it for all the traffic my actual column — which was not about Netflix — got.

There was definitely a twang of why bother? while I was writing last week, just as there is every week. Why bother, and Jesus Christ, why am I not faster? The web once made something of a biblical promise to give all of us a voice, but in the ensuing flood — and the ensuing floods after that — only a few bobbed to the top. With increased diversity, this hasn’t changed — there are more diverse voices, but the same ones float up each time. There remains a tension that critics, and the larger media, must balance, reflecting what’s in the culture in all its repetitive glory while also nudging it toward the future. But we are repeatedly failing at this by repeatedly drowning ourselves in the first part. This is flooding (a term I just coined, so I would know): the practice of unleashing a mass torrent of the same stories by the same storytellers at the same time, making it almost impossible for anyone but the same select few to rise to the surface.
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Namwali Serpell on Doing the Responsible Thing — Writing an Irresponsible Novel

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Tobias Carroll | Longreads | March 2019 | 18 minutes (4,830 words)

Namwali Serpell’s first novel, The Old Drift, tells the story of several families living in Zambia, encompassing over a century of their interwoven lives. The novel takes its title from a region located near Victoria Falls (otherwise known as Mosi-o-Tunya, which translates to “The Smoke That Thunders”), which is also where the novel begins. Along the way, The Old Drift touches on many moments in history, from the Second World War to Zambia’s foray into space exploration.

But Serpell isn’t content to simply tell the story of a nation through several generations of its residents. Instead, her narrative extends into the near future, and each of its sections is paired with a short passage written by a strange collective voice — one which doesn’t seem to be human. It’s a bold narrative choice, but it’s one that pays off brilliantly at novel’s end.

Serpell’s bibliography covers a broad range of styles and territories, from the theoretical to the metafictional. Her first book, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, explored the works of writers like Tom McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Ian McEwan. She’s contributed the introduction to Penguin Classics’ edition of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s novel Devil on the Cross. And her short story “Company,” published in the “Cover Stories” issue of McSweeney’s, reimagines a Samuel Beckett narrative along Afrofuturist lines — a process that Serpell described in one interview as “a Janelle Monaé cover of a Philip Glass song.” Read more…

Twitter Won’t Miss You: A Digital Detox Reading List (and Roadmap)

Follow the crowds to a world with less screen time. (Photo by davity dave via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Sara Benincasa is a quadruple threat: she writes, she acts, she’s funny, and she has truly exceptional hair. She also reads, a lot, and joins us to share some of her favorite stories. 

Have you ever needed a break, but just not known from what? Everything seems fine…ish. Your job is OK, your friendships are all right, your health is decent, nothing dramatic to report. And yet, you’re stressed. Dissatisfied. Bored. Sometimes you even feel exhausted and overwhelmed. Maybe you should distract yourself by looking at Instagram. Maybe you should find someone with whom to argue on Twitter. Maybe you should see what your ex is up to on Snapchat.

Or maybe you should get the hell off social media for awhile.

At least, that’s the prescription issued by an increasingly vocal crowd of psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, writers, philosophers, performers, and general opinion-havers. The common term is “digital detox,” whereby an individual commits to a cessation of specific actions on one’s Internet-enabled devices for a finite period of time. One can go on this adventure with friends, family, or a likeminded group of strangers from, you guessed it, the internet.

I’ve been an enthusiastic and sometimes addicted social media user since approximately 2003. But after beginning my research for this column, I went on a digital detox of my own. It is small and manageable, and nothing so impressive as author Cal Newport’s suggested 30-day detox from all nonessential online functions. But it has improved my life already in measurable ways. Here are some writers whose approaches to their own vacations from the Matrix helped me shape mine.

1. “Unplugged: What I Learned By Logging Off and Reading 12 Books in a Week.” (Lois Beckett, The Guardian, December 2018)

Beckett nabbed what must’ve been the plum journalistic gig of the year: head to a tiny cabin in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and read. Books. Made of paper. “This was a perfect assignment,” she writes. “For journalists on many beats — including mine, which includes the far right and gun policy — it had been a year of escalating violence during which conspiracy theories had moved into the mainstream.” And off she went, blissfully unencumbered by wifi. She brought a stack critically acclaimed books purchased at different independent bookshops and a plan was to read 30 books in a week, a number that sounds patently insane to me. She read 12. I’m still impressed — and envious.

The ensuing story is littered with gentle shade, which I always appreciate, and she’s a damn good writer: “I was not going to finish all 30 books at any cost, skimming to the right section of the right chapter in order to say one smart thing — in the U.S., we call this skill a ‘liberal arts education’ — but instead wanted the books’ authors and their protagonists to collide and argue with each other, to give me some different understanding of what had happened in 2018.”

2. “#Unplug: Baratunde Thurston Left The Internet For 25 Days, And You Should, Too.” (Baratunde R. Thurston, Fast Company, June 2013)

I adore my longtime friend Baratunde, though perhaps not as much as my mother, who has met the man twice and still has a copy of his 2013 Fast Company cover story somewhere in her house. He’s a great human.

And now that we’ve established my utter lack of objectivity, let’s hear from his 2013 self: “I’m an author, consultant, speechifier, and cross-platform opiner on the digital life. My friends say I’m the most connected man in the world. And in 2012, I lived like a man running for president of the United States, planet Earth, and the Internet all at once.” That very accurate description is exactly why it was so interesting that Baratunde Rafiq Thurston, of all freaking people, did a digital detox.

At the time, I remember worrying that he might burn out or possibly just suddenly up and die due to lack of sleep, so it was clearly a good move. I can’t imagine replicating what he did (no email?!), but since he was self-employed with a personal assistant and has an incredible amount of willpower, he was able to pull it off. His nine-point digital detox preparation checklist is incredibly helpful, and I intend to use it the next time I do one. My favorite line? “She transmitted this data by writing down the names on a piece of paper.” And yes, he was happier and healthier by the end of the experience. To this day, he goes on regular social media vacations, and I believe he’d tell you his life is better for it.

3. “Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend On It.” (Cal Newport, New York Times, November 2016)

“I’m a millennial computer scientist who also writes books and runs a blog,” Newport writes. “Demographically speaking I should be a heavy social media user, but that is not the case. I’ve never had a social media account.” Newport lays out in plain, accessible language the notion that social media distracts from good work because it is designed to be addictive. It’s a notion with which I agree, based in no small part on my own lived experience; I have no doubt my writing output has suffered as I’ve devoted more and more time to social media. As Newport writes, “It diverts your time and attention away from producing work that matters and toward convincing the world that you matter.”

4. “Cal Newport on Why We’ll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes.” (Clay Skipper, GQ, January 2019)

Fast forward two and a half years. Newport, by now an in-demand speaker and author of two books — the latest is Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World — expands on his November 2016 Op-Ed. Newport is a reluctant self-help guru who would undoubtedly reject that label. In this interview (as in the one I heard with him on fellow PoB (Pal of Baratunde) Lewis Howes’s podcast “The School of Greatness”), Newport stresses that he doesn’t typically offer a program or prescription. However, his recommendation for a 30-day digital detox seems simple in concept and necessarily jarring to execute: one dispenses with all digital products that are unnecessary to one’s career and personal health. Check your work email and log into your bank app to ensure a direct deposit has gone through, but let Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts lie fallow for 30 days. Skipper is an able interviewer and Newport is a clear, experienced, and intelligent interviewee.

5. I Quit Social Media for 65 Weeks. This Is What I Learned. (Kareem Yasin, Healthline, February 2018)

Yasin interviews David Mohammadi, who left social media for over a year and loved the experience. A newly minted New Yorker, he abandoned the online pseudo-friendship industrial complex because he was worried he’d obsess over what was happening back in San Francisco. And he had good reason to suspect he’d be homesick — he’d tried the East Coast thing once, been endlessly captivated by his Bay Area friends’ Facebook updates, and ended up moving back to San Francisco. Years later, a more mature Mohammadi quit his job and decided to start a new career in New York with a clear mind unclouded by social media-induced FOMO. You likely won’t be surprised to hear his take: “The first week was hard. The second week was nice. And as I got closer to the end date, I just was like: ‘Wow. It feels great to be so present, and not just on my phone.’” But the benefits didn’t just extend to mental health — he made more money, too! Yasin writes, “Working as a boutique manager, [Mohammadi] noticed how his coworkers would constantly check their phones. Those two-minute breaks from the real world robbed them of opportunities to get more commissions — opportunities that would be theirs if they would just look up and notice the customers.”

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Like you, probably, I have a personal Instagram account. Except it isn’t personal, really — with 14,200 followers, it is ostensibly a way to cultivate and grow an online brand based on me, myself, and I. I write essays and books; I do comedy shows; I lecture on mental health awareness at colleges; I pop up as a talking head in various capacities in various venues. Like you, probably, I want to be seen as an attractive person, so sometimes I use filters or put on more makeup than is absolutely necessary for a selfie. Like you, probably, I want to be seen as a capable person worthy of being hired, so I do my best to seem witty and fun but chill, man. Given that I want to write more for television and that a lot of my work falls under the category of “entertainment,” I have followed the conventional thinking in my industry, which boils down to “Always be selling (yourself).”

This thinking extends to my “personal” Twitter account (77,400 followers), despite my many qualms about the ethics of its overseers with regard to threats and harassment. It extended to my Facebook fan page, until I quit Facebook altogether because I don’t care what my least-favorite racist relative ate for breakfast — if I want to know what’s up with a boring person from high school, I’ll make private inquiries. When the current Russian government really loves something, I have to ask myself if I need that something in my life. (Note: I am aware that Facebook owns Instagram, and that I’m a hypocrite sometimes.)

Then there’s the Instagram account for my podcast (679 followers) and the Twitter account for my podcast (457 followers) and the Instagram account for my progressive lady-coat art project (26,200 followers). I don’t use Snapchat, because once I joined for 24 hours and my drunk friend sent me a dick pic framed by monogrammed his-and-hers towels in the master bathroom he shares with his girlfriend; I’m a Scorpio, and pseudoscience and common sense immediately told me the power of the Snap was too great for my personal constitution to handle. I also recently joined a few dating apps. And that led to more swiping, more clicking, more texting, more aggravation of writing-induced carpal tunnel issues. When an ex-NFL star asked me on what I’m sure would have been a super safe and not-gross date to his house at 3 a.m., I decided that Tinder was also too much for me.

At this point, and considering my sore wrists, the signals seemed to say, “SARA. TAKE SOME TIME OFF THE SOCIAL MEDIA.” I had 104,000 followers across social media, some of whom were double or triple followers and some of whom were robots, and while I loved each of them like my very own imaginary baby, Mommy needed a vacay.

First, I enabled the Screen Time function on my phone and discovered that I use it, on average, over seven hours a day. This horrifying fact led me to design the parameters of my moderate digital detox: I’d continue to use my email for work and social reasons. I would continue to use Twitter, but only to share my work or the work of a friend or charity. I would post a note announcing that I was taking an Instagram break until April 9, the day the second season of my podcast debuts, to give both a heads up to any former professional athletes that I wouldn’t be interacting with them there and to announce the premiere date. I would text when I felt like it, but leave my phone facing down when I wasn’t using it. I would remove Instagram from my phone, just as I’d done with Twitter months prior. At night and during my daily meditation practice, I would put the phone on airplane mode.

Following those simple rules, and only occasionally breaking them, I managed to reduce my phone time by 10 percent in the first week. I resumed the regular at-home yoga practice I’d attempted a month prior. I finished the outline of an hour-long TV drama pilot. I went on actual face-to-face dates with humans during daylight and appropriate evening hours. I visited with two friends. I got the “annual” physical I’d put off for two years. And I wrote this column.

While I intend to resume using Instagram on April 9, I will do as Cal Newport recommends: use social media like a professional, for specific purposes, and do not stray from said purposes. Twitter and Instagram will remain places for me to share my work and the work of friends and charities I admire. Sometimes, I will use these places to discover great writing, music, and more. Moving forward, I want to reduce my screen time by 10 percent each week until I average under four hours per day on my phone — and then I’ll try to reduce it even more.

I’m pleased with my progress. It may seem meager, but it’s a start. And I feel better already. So if you’ve considered quitting social media but have some qualms, do what I did: start small. Pop your head above the churning surface of our wild, untrammeled internet, and take a look around. Stay awhile. Your eyes will grow accustomed to real sunlight soon enough, and it’ll be easier to breathe. It’s pretty nice up here.

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Sara Benincasa is a stand-up comedian, actress, college speaker on mental health awareness, and the author of Real Artists Have Day JobsDC TripGreat, and Agorafabulous!: Dispatches From My Bedroom. She also wrote a very silly joke book called Tim Kaine Is Your Nice Dad. Recent roles include “Corporate” on Comedy Central, “Bill Nye Saves The World” on Netflix, “The Jim Gaffigan Show” on TVLand and critically-acclaimed short film “The Focus Group,” which she also wrote. She also hosts the podcast “Where Ya From?”

Editor: Michelle Weber