We need an internet that leaves space in our heads to enjoy creative peace

 Jemima Kiss spent long days in the hills, meditating and rediscovering the simplest of pleasures.

I was sitting on my own in the room I had for the week, looking out over a steep Spanish hillside of almond blossom and holm oak and olive trees. It was sunny but cold, and I sat at the table with a large cup of tea and a blanket over my legs. Beside me lay a broken internet router. It was very, very quiet. No TV, no music, no radio, no children. Not even a book. Dogs barking in a distant house, echoing down the valley. The house dog, Pablo, padding around outside. A faint rustle of the wind in the carob tree branches overhead. And a hum, like the hum of a refrigerator, which I do believe was the hum of my own mind.

This is luxury calm. At the end of my tether a month ago, I felt the internet had stolen my creativity. I came here out of necessity, for exactly this moment, to reset my restless, relentless, internet-saturated mind. I thought I might struggle when faced with so few choices, with so little input – but it was bliss, like slipping into an old pair of slippers. I opened my sketchbook. I started to draw. I wrote a letter to someone who’ll never receive it. I had an idea for a novel. I had an idea for an essay on artists and their muses. I made plans, reprioritised. I started to think again. The days in those hills started with long, chilly, muddy walks with dogs, scrambling off road, up hillsides and through olive groves. Goat bells tinkled in the distance. The dogs ran off and ran back again, but I was walking at my own pace. No discussion about the route, and I knew the way instinctively. My route, my pace.

With friends, we planned meals and cooked. There was no rush to cook to meet a deadline, or a bedtime, and food became enjoyable again, a delicately chopped salad, a two-hour wait for something in the oven, the satisfaction of a homemade cake. The smallest and simplest of pleasures.

I drew every day, observing and questioning and redrawing, remarking. There is no better meditation for me than drawing, which is not about a finished work but about the act of properly observing and understanding something. Cats and dogs sleeping, eating, washing, tiny moments interrogated and expanded, embraced in all their mundane detail. The mountains at dawn, the mountains at noon, the mountains at dusk.

Advertisement

I have meditated every day for a month – dismissing my own prejudices and excuses – letting my mind settle on the simple patterns of my breath, the feeling of my body resting on the floor. Of not needing to think, or react, and conclude, or judge. What do I find in those moments of stillness? Realisations about how I’m really feeling, about what’s exciting me, what’s making me anxious, and about ideas and expectations and plans that creep in.

I stand by my opinion that the internet is not made for us. It’s not made for the benefit of us. All those sites we use, that pull us in – none of them has our creative health or our wellbeing at heart. The mechanics of the internet – the bright lights and dopamine rewards – are deadly in combination with social expectations and instincts, and make it so hard to resist. It feels the norm.

But this haphazard attention war is not the norm. I said before that these companies need to build sites and services that better work for us, true. But we owe it to ourselves to be acutely aware of what we lose in all this noise.

Distractions muted, we have time and attention for the bigger picture. We face unprecedented social, cultural and ethical challenges from technology, which the industry itself isn’t objectively equipped to address: the redefinition of privacy; the balance of state surveillance and security; the life-changing opportunities of new healthcare, of transport, of education. But we don’t have the headspace to take on these challenges, we can’t scrutinise, and interrogate, and push for the better internet we deserve, if we are too overwhelmed by the superficial internet of the now.

If my journey offline has taught me anything it is balance; that this aspirational, hyperconnected life we see all around us is not normal. Life is all around us already, beautiful in its imperfections and its normalness, under our feet and under our noses, in the room with us, if only we would put our smartphones down for long enough to experience it.