When Carlos Whittaker, an author and podcaster, realized he was spending seven-plus hours a day on his phone, he was struck by questions. If he set it down and walked away, who would he be? Who would God be? And who would he be to his family, friends, and 20,000 subscribers to his Más Familia online newsletter? To find out, he went screen-free for weeks, first at a Benedictine monastery, then with an Amish family, and finally at home. He writes his experiment's life-changing lessons in Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human (Nelson, Sept.10).
PW talks with Whittaker about looking up to God and others, not down to a phone.
It's been well over a year since you disconnected and then wrote Reconnected. Are you a changed man?
My kids would say yes. My wife would say, not changed enough. I think my wife wishes that I would have never gotten back on my phone, particularly after a third of the time in my research was spent living with my family without screens. We tasted something as a family that families haven't tasted in decades — a sense of presence that has just been all but lost. I am very purposeful in my screen use at home now. I use it for my work but only about three hours a day. I'm trying to get down to two.
Before I did this book, it was always in my pocket if it wasn't in my hand. Even if it takes your attention for just a second, that is all it takes for the person you're with to feel like something else is more important than they are.
Should we all shut down social media?
No. you're not just supposed to stick your head in the sand. But being online, on the phone constantly, doesn't work for really relating to people. Any semblance of trying to humanize somebody else via social media, via your phone, is just not accepted the way it would be if you were trying to humanize someone across the table from you. I was living with an Amish family and we had very different political opinions. But we were having 70- and 90-minute conversations over meals. There was safety. There was nuance. There was breadth. We were able to vehemently disagree but in healthy ways. We as a society have lost that. A lot of the anger, a lot of the polarization we're facing, is coming about because we are talking to people with our thumbs instead of breath to breath.
Did your experiences affect your understanding of God?
It was transformative. Before I was at the monastery, in silence 23 hours a day, my view of God was being defined by podcasts and books and sermons on YouTube and I was fitting God into all those little boxes. When I didn't have those boxes, God became huge, so much bigger and grander to me. I went from being a know-it-all to realizing, "Wow, I hardly know anything!" And I am grateful now that I know we can't fit God into the palm of our hand.
When you reconnected, you write in the book that you deleted 1192 texts in one swipe. Did you miss anything important?
No. We could all disappear off of Instagram and, to be honest, nobody's really gonna miss us. But I'm a way better person paying direct attention to my family and my friends than before I went on this journey.
What do you most want people to know?
This book isn't about how bad phones are. This book is about how beautiful it is on the other side of the phone. If you can lift your eyes up, you can fall back in love with everything you've been missing. And then you're going to pick it up less, you're going to just glance at it, not gaze at it for hours. My dad would say it this way, 'Carlitos, gaze at God and glance at life.'
