Out of Reception
The Connection Dilemma
Five years ago I was standing on a small island of the Limay river in Patagonia. It was late at night, we were far from everything and the sky was full of stars. I was admiring the inverted constellations of the Southern Hemisphere when suddenly a line of small white lights, like miniature em dashes, emerged in a row over the horizon. My friend had told me about these satellites though I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. I’m glad he did because otherwise I would have lost my mind and prepared for interstellar invasion.
That was Starlink, of course, and it was still new back then. On the island where we camped there was one tree where the guides got a weak cell signal and they hung their phones if they were lucky they could get text messages from their girlfriends or the lodges. But nobody sat around the fire staring at their phones. Instead, we grilled and drank beer and slept in military tents and felt far from everything.
Now the guides have Starlink on their trucks and, if you wish, you’ll rarely be out of reception. On this trip I never got the password, I didn’t want to the option of being connected. My friends did—they had to check in with jobs and wives and people in the snowstorms back home. It’s not a judgment, being in touch is the price of going on a trip like this.
But I tried to live without. I knew if I logged in once then I couldn’t be trusted to stay offline. The habit of checking in, with apps, with podcasts, with the analytics that inform our lives (followers, subscribers and the rest) is so pervasive that it’s almost invisible. We reflexively look at our phones so often that it takes more than a week on the water and away from all that to break the habit.
Everybody is struggling to find the right balance with technology. I’m obsessed with audiobooks, with podcasts, with news apps, it’s the hum of how I engage with the world. And there are so many ways modern phones help us. I mean, Michael and I recorded and sent out a podcast while we were in Patagonia, which is still wild to me. Unfortunately these check-ins are not daily, they’re not hourly, they’re constant. Turning off notifications was a small step. Some people delete apps, keep their phone in another room or do whatever they can to end the habit of relying on convenient digital stimulation.
