Nick Allison

I’ve been on vacation for the past two months. It was only supposed to be one month when I planned it. In a country where paid vacation is perhaps the most coveted and least distributed benefit in our particular version of capitalism—doled out by corporate masters who have spent decades training us to treat it less like a basic human need and more like a gift from a selfish and reluctant god, to be accepted with gratitude and not abused—I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already stopped reading at the casual mention of only one month off. Americans get an average of eleven days a year after their first year of loyal service, fifteen after five, and even then there’s the unspoken understanding that you probably shouldn’t take them all at once, and that you’ll be checking your email anyway. So a guy opening an essay by blithely stretching a planned month of vacation into two, well, I understand how that could land wrong.

But before you dust off the metaphorical pitchforks or cast the digital stones, please allow me to clarify. I didn’t actually go anywhere on this two-month vacation. I didn’t even take time off from work. What I’m calling a vacation was a deliberate, and at times effortful, tuning out of the stress signals of modern connected life, a dampening of the noise that most of us have stopped noticing, the way you stop registering how loud a stadium is until you’re out in the parking lot and you realize your ears are ringing.

In his private diary that accidentally became one of the most widely read books in human history, Marcus Aurelius writes to himself that people are always seeking to get away from it all, an escape to the mountains, the coast, the countryside, before reminding himself that this impulse, as common as it is, is unphilosophic and not especially productive. That we are more than capable of finding quiet within our own minds, and that we should stop waiting for actual vacations to find peace, because the quietest place on earth is already inside your own head and you can go there anytime you want, free of charge, no reservation required. It’s a genuinely useful idea, and I don’t want to be glib about it, because Aurelius was hardly a man free of distraction. He may have been the busiest man on the planet at his time, running an empire at the height of its complexity while fighting multiple wars on multiple fronts and watching the plague cut through his population.

What Marcus didn’t have is the particular kind of distraction we’ve engineered for ourselves over the last twenty years or so. The digital kind. The always-available neurochemical feedback loop that has been so carefully and intentionally designed to feel like connection and information and entertainment while actually functioning more like a slow leak in whatever reservoir we draw our attention and peace of mind from. Aurelius had the Senate and the barbarians and the plague, which is more than enough to keep a mind busy, but he didn’t have the dopamine slot machine in his pocket going off every few minutes, optimized by engineers who understood his reward circuitry better than he did and had strong financial incentives to exploit it. The ancient Romans, confronted with an iPhone, would almost certainly have assumed it was a curse sent by angry gods and destroyed it with fire. I can’t say I’m wholly unsympathetic to the impulse.

Back to my extended “vacation.” About two months ago I decided to cut the signal for a while. I’d been deeply involved in political writing and local organizing for the primaries and midterms and the constant keeping up with current events that those activities require, and I’d noticed the volume had started getting harder to turn down. So I disconnected from the attention stealers entirely. Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, closed and shuttered, which wasn’t particularly challenging since I’d mostly abandoned them anyway. Zuckerberg has enough of the world’s attention already, he doesn’t need mine, and Elon Musk can have the digital wasteland he paid forty-four billion dollars for all to himself. Certain editors occasionally encourage “engagement,” so I begrudgingly kept one social app technically alive—Bluesky, which has its own particular brand of insufferability but at least isn’t owned by either of those guys—but deleted it from my phone, and promptly forgot it existed. Then the broader sterilization: news apps gone, daily headline emails unsubscribed, the screen stripped down to music, maps, texts, camera, phone. If I wanted to know what was happening outside my immediate corner of the planet I’d have to actually decide to find out, rather than passively absorbing it 173 times a day through muscle memory so deeply grooved it barely qualifies as a decision anymore.

I call it a vacation because that’s exactly what it felt like. You know that sensation you get on a trip to the beach or the lake, wherever it is you go, when the first day your mind is still reaching back toward work and schedules and low-grade worries that really shouldn’t register as worries across the brief span of a human life, and then sometime around day two you realize you’re actually relaxed, that your brain chemicals have leveled out, that you haven’t been half-holding your breath waiting for the next shoe to drop, and the absence of that particular dread is so unfamiliar it almost feels suspicious? It’s kinda like that. A brain douche, as my friend Cynthia once put it, and I’ve never heard a more accurate two-word description of what it feels like when your nervous system finally remembers what quiet is.

I noticed a couple of things during my self-imposed exile from current events. The first was what I’ve already pointed toward, the general sense of peace, that particular relief of a mind that has stopped waiting for something bad to happen. I won’t go so far as to confirm the old adage about ignorance being bliss, as that might be overselling it, but ignorance is definitely less exhausting. I suppose none of that is particularly surprising to anyone familiar with the work of Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who spent a good portion of his career determining that the human brain is wired to maintain meaningful relationships with roughly 150 people at most. We simply did not evolve to cope with the collective outrage of 7 billion people, or even the family vacation posts of 500 online “friends.”

The second thing I noticed was more surprising, and not especially flattering. Somewhere in my deliberate and voluntary media blackout, I found myself developing something resembling understanding for some of the people I’d spent a good portion of Trump’s second term privately, and at times not so privately, nursing a fairly vigorous contempt for. The folks who seemed to be choosing comfort over conscience, who appeared to have surveyed what was happening to the country and just closed the tab. I’m not talking about the hard-liners, the people paying close attention and cheerfully endorsing what they see. I suppose I could dredge up some bodhisattva-level compassion for those folks too if I really committed to the exercise, but I’m a writer, for Christ’s sake, not the Dalai Lama. One spiritual journey at a time. But the people I’d smugly categorized as checked out, as willfully and hopelessly obtuse, I realized begrudgingly that I’d been so immersed in the signal for so long that their apparent ability to simply not engage had read to me as a kind of moral failure.

Because over the past several years, when I would find myself in conversations about the latest atrocity crawling out of Washington, I would come away genuinely baffled that some of the people I was talking to weren’t more outraged. The cruelty toward immigrants, the children in filthy detention centers, the attacks on courts and judges, the undermining of the free press, the corruption conducted so openly and with such confidence in its own impunity that it stopped even trying to hide itself, the staggering sums handed over by tech billionaires to purchase influence over elections, the gerrymandering of minority districts to dilute Black and Latino representation, the casual dismissal of charges against people who stormed the Capitol, assaulted police officers, and threatened to murder senators and the vice president, the gunning down of American citizens in Minneapolis streets, and the launching of an illegal and undeclared war in Iran… the list goes on. And yet some of the people I was talking to couldn’t seem to muster the energy to care, let alone stand up collectively and say enough, this is not the country any of us agreed to, and we are not going to sit on the sidelines while a petty, narcissistic, would-be dictator sells it down the river and spray-paints his name in gold on whatever he can get his greedy little hands on. It felt, at times, like dining in a restaurant where the kitchen was on fire and half of the customers were still casually perusing the menu.

It still feels that way, but after two months of blinders, I’m also looking at those folks a little differently now.

When I say I tuned out, I should clarify that I don’t mean completely. I didn’t throw my phone in the river and move to a primitive cabin in the woods, tempting as that sounds. A few headlines from reputable sources a couple times a week, the occasional text from a friend about the latest assault on democratic norms, an episode or two of Pod Save America. But otherwise the blinders stayed firmly in place. And somewhere in there I began to notice something I think I already knew was true: most people just aren’t paying that close attention, and a lot of them genuinely don’t want to, whether out of actual ignorance—the signal simply never breaking through whatever algorithm has been curating their reality—or out of something more intentional, a conscious withdrawal made in the interest of their own sanity. After two months of doing more or less the same thing myself, I can’t say I blame them.

There were several stories during those two months that, had I known about them in real time, would have sent me to the laptop to hammer out a scathing piece or searching for the nearest No Kings protest. But I didn’t know about them when they were happening, so I didn’t get angry. What I did instead was hang out with my family, work, go on long runs and hikes and bike rides, watch baseball and soccer, and generally inhabit a fairly contented existence free from the exhausting monotony of the constant amplified bad news cycle.

The obvious problem though is that just because I wasn’t paying attention doesn’t mean bad things stopped happening to real people, to the country I served and still love in that complicated way you love a family member you’ve watched make a series of terrible decisions. The bad things, it turns out, were not waiting on me. When a tree falls in the woods it still has an impact, still makes a sound, whether or not I’m personally close enough to hear it. Which leads me to the question I’ve been turning over since I started paying attention again: how much is too much, and how little is too little?

It’s tempting to treat the man in the White House as the whole problem, the single malignant cause of everything going wrong, and god knows he’s earned the starring role. But he didn’t appear out of nowhere. He grew in soil that was already exhausted, in a country full of people who’d long since stopped believing their representatives were working for them, who’d been fed a steady diet of manufactured crisis for so many years that genuine crisis no longer registered as different in kind. When everything is the most important emergency of your lifetime, nothing is. The same outrage economy that wears down those of us still paying attention is the one that trained everyone else to file the genuinely alarming under the same category as the noise, and to distrust or dismiss anyone insisting that this time it’s real. So when masked and unaccountable federal agents kill a VA nurse filming them on a Minneapolis street, or fifteen hundred January 6 defendants walk free in a single afternoon, including the ones who beat police officers with flagpoles, it lands for a lot of people as just more noise they’ve already decided they can’t afford to care about. Or maybe they never heard about it at all, the story already buried under the next one by the time it might have mattered. That isn’t a moral failure so much as a predictable result. Trump may be the disease, but he’s also the most visible symptom of a country that stopped trusting the officials and institutions that were supposed to be holding it together.

Aurelius told himself the retreat was always available, that he could step into the disciplined equanimity of his own mind whenever the empire got too loud, and he was right. Solid advice, and like most good advice, harder to actually do than it sounds. But there’s probably something dangerous about disappearing too often or for too long, because the tuning out that keeps a person sane is the same tuning out the war machine is counting on. The interior retreat he prescribed as a discipline has become, for a lot of people, less a deliberate practice than a place they’ve been herded into and left, blinds drawn, while the people profiting from their inattention get on with the business of fucking things up.

I believe we have a duty as an electorate to stay informed, to show up, to call out our elected officials when they lean too hard on the constitutional guardrails or worse, decide those guardrails don’t apply to them at all anymore. But we also owe something to the people immediately around us, our families and friends—not to mention our own fraying nervous systems—and that debt doesn’t get paid when we’re so consumed by the national catastrophe that we’re not actually present for the people who deserve our attention. Buddhist philosophy has pointed toward this particular conundrum for about two and a half thousand years, and its answer, more or less, is to follow the middle path, the rejection of two harmful extremes, in this case total civic apathy on one end and doom-scrolling yourself into a psychological emergency on the other. There’s also probably something in Jack Kornfield’s idea of tending to the part of the garden you can reach. I don’t know that any of it is a satisfying answer, but unsatisfying and incorrect are different things.

What I do know is that two months of deliberate tuning out brought me back to the noise with a little more patience for the people I’d decided weren’t angry enough. At least some of them aren’t checked out because they don’t care, but because nobody has managed to break through and tell them what they’re supposed to be angry about. In a media environment specifically engineered to keep people outraged, maybe checking out isn’t a completely bad instinct. Either way, being furious at people caught inside that particular apathy, intentionally or otherwise, probably isn’t the most useful place to put my energy.

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Nick Allison is a writer based in Austin, Texas. His work has appeared in Slate, HuffPost Personal, CounterPunch, The Fulcrum, and elsewhere. (Bluesky @nickallison80.bsky.social)