{"id":10789,"date":"2014-09-02T12:09:07","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T19:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bradblog.com\/?p=10789"},"modified":"2014-09-02T12:08:49","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T19:08:49","slug":"david-roberts-returns-to-the-internets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/?p=10789","title":{"rendered":"David Roberts Returns to the Internets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just over one year ago, the great climate blogger David Roberts of Grist<\/a> (we fondly call him “Dr. Grist” around here, as based on his Twitter name: @DRGrist<\/a>) announced he was unplugging entirely from the Internet for a year.<\/p>\n

“I am burnt the fuck out,” he lamented at the time<\/a>. “I spend each day responding to an incoming torrent of tweets and emails. I file, I bookmark, I link, I forward, I snark and snark and snark. All day long. Then, at night, after my family’s gone to bed and the torrent has finally slowed to a trickle and I can think for more than 30 seconds at a stretch, I try to write longer, more considered pieces.”<\/p>\n

“It’s doing things to my brain,” he explained. “I’ve gotten to the point where I’m irritated and impatient with pretty much everything everybody says about anything. And I feel bad about that.”<\/p>\n

I know the feeling — including the part about “tweeting in the bathroom”.<\/p>\n

And with that, a few other related thoughts and explanations of what he’d hoped — or guessed — he might do over the next year in his “Goodbye for Now”<\/a> explanation piece, he promised he’d return a year later, after Labor Day 2014, with a hopefully healed brain and a re-invigorated sense of purpose.<\/p>\n

“I’ll let you know in a year how it went,” he promised at the time. And then he was gone and on his well-deserved, if virtually unheard of, year-long unpaid sabbatical that I’ve been quietly envious of, on a very regular basis, ever since. If I could figure out how to afford the same, I’d do it. If I could figure out how to afford it for even a month — hell, I’d take seven uninterrupted days in a row — I’d do it. I need it.<\/p>\n

The very technological innovations that were supposed to have made all of our lives better — and, still, arguably do — may also be slowly killing us all and rotting our souls at the same time.<\/p>\n

In any event, today, as promised, David Roberts is back on the Internets<\/a>. Just reading about what he’s learned over his year of digital detox<\/a>, as published today by Outside Magazine<\/i>, helps calm my own brain and slow my own heart-rate…a bit. It may very well do the same for you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just over one year ago, the great climate blogger David Roberts of Grist (we fondly call him “Dr. Grist” around here, as based on his Twitter name: @DRGrist) announced he was unplugging entirely from the Internet for a year. “I am burnt the fuck out,” he lamented at the time. “I spend each day responding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","bb-type-bradblog"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10789"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10789\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10789"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bradblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=10789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}