Digital Detox—Surprising Insights from 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks & Amish Farmers Featuring Carlos Whittaker
Episode Notes
In this unmissable bonus episode, Dr. Alison chats with Carlos Whittaker, best-selling author and podcast host, about his life-changing experience of going screen-free for seven weeks.
Immersing himself in the world of monks and Amish farmers, Carlos took a bold step away from the digital grind to reclaim his sense of connection with God, his community, and himself.
Tune in to discover the profound life lessons Carlos learned from his digital detox, and how you, too, can find the simple joys of human connection in your daily life. You'll leave this episode inspired to make meaningful changes that enhance your connections with those around you!
Resources:
- Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human by Carlos Whittaker
- Other books by Carlos:
- ReconnectedBook.com
- The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
- The Best of You by Dr. Alison Cook
- Episode 136: Sacred Attachment—Escaping Spiritual Exhaustion and Trusting in Divine Love with Michael John Cusick
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 36: An Update on My Social Media Detox & How to Create Boundaries With Toxic Distractions, Numbing, & Unhealthy Coping Tactics
Thanks to our sponsors:
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone. Welcome to this week's bonus episode of The Best of You Podcast. I want to try something new over the next few months. As we've entered into 2025, I've thought a lot about the podcast and where I want to go with it.
I decided I want to bring you some bonus conversations that delve even deeper into some of the topics that resonate with you. So many of you have shared how this podcast has become a bit of a touchstone or a refuge in your week, a space to pause and feel seen and encouraged, and that feedback really means the world to me.
It's why in this new year, I'm committed to offering content that continues to encourage and empower and invite every single one of us on this journey of healing, on this journey of becoming even more of our true selves in God.
There's never been a time where that is more important for each and every one of us where we stay focused on this work of inviting God into every single part of who we are, so that we continue to grow and heal and become wise and radiate that goodness and wisdom and strength into the world around us.
Today, we're going to dive into a unique spin on this idea of a digital detox. Most of us struggle with our phones, with our screens, how to help our kids with their phones and their screens. There's no surprise that that's a hot topic in many bestselling books and in the media, but today's guest has a unique spin on the topic that really meant a lot to me.
I really enjoyed his new book, and I wanted to have him on the podcast to talk about this experiment that he did. The book is called Reconnected and it's by Carlos Whittaker. Carlos is a new friend of mine. Though I've followed him on Instagram for a while now, along with his Instafamilia, I read his new book over the Christmas holiday.
I was actually sick. We were on a family ski vacation, and while I was stuck inside the lodge, unable to join my family on the slopes, I read this book, and it really spoke to me. We'll get into more of why it's a unique spin on this topic in today's episode. But let me read you the subtitle because it'll give you a great teaser of how unique this project is.
The subtitle of Reconnected is “How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human”. I really loved it. What I find so compelling about the book is that it's not about trying to convince us to get off our phones or spend less time on the screens, or even give us sort of practical steps on how to do those things.
Instead, Carlos is drawing us into a story that creates a longing for something more–for a richer, deeper way of life that we tend to forget, or at least set aside, because the screens are so compelling and quickly draw us in. Back in Episode 136, I talked about the power of imagination with Michael Cusick and how envisioning a different life or a better way of being can catalyze real change in our own current circumstances.
Carlos's book really helped do that for me in this realm of thinking about technology and screens. It helped me re-imagine what life beyond screens can look like.
If you're not familiar with Carlos Whittaker, he's an author, a speaker, and a storyteller who has built his career creating authentic, meaningful moments, both online and in person. You may have come across him during the pandemic. That's when I came across his work, when he became a source of wisdom, humor, and grace-filled conversations about some of the hard issues we are all navigating.
Carlos has an incredible gift for drawing people in and talking about difficult topics in a way that's both hopeful and encouraging. He's the author of several books, including the bestselling Kill the Spider and Enter Wild. His latest book, Reconnected, is a USA Today bestseller that takes readers on a journey through seven weeks without screens of any kind.
In our conversation today, Carlos shares the story behind this bold experiment. I loved his answer when I asked him at the very end of the episode, what was it like for you to come back online after these seven weeks away?
There's a lot of really, really great gems in this episode today. I'm so excited to bring you my conversation with Carlos Whittaker.
***
Alison Cook: Carlos. I came across your work in 2020 when we were all in the pandemic, on our phones, on Instagram. I really loved what you were doing. I have a very complicated relationship with social media.
To this day, you're creating authentic, beautiful moments. So this is what you do. This is your livelihood. It's your vocation, it seems like you enjoy it. There's a joy about it, which is why I like following you. It doesn't feel forced. And then even you have this moment where you're like, I am here seven hours of every day. I have to do something. Something has to change. Tell us about that.
Carlos: Yeah. Yeah. It is so weird whenever anybody asks me, what do you do for a living? I can say I'm an author because I have written a lot of books and I'm a speaker and I talk about my books, but what I really do every day is I look at my phone and talk to it.
And then I hit send and it whooshes off somewhere and lands on some server somewhere that sends it to this guy and then to everyone else's phones. Like you said, I love this kind of accidental career path that I've landed on, where I talk to people every day.
2020 was probably the year for me that my Instagram really exploded and people started coming to listen. I was talking about a lot of hard things that we were going through. I tried to talk about those things in grace-filled ways.
I felt like people could find a new friend, like I've got this kind of, I don't know, I haven't ever been able to pinpoint this, but people trust me very quickly, they rapidly come to trust me, and then I'm their buddy. Like oh, Carlos is my friend. So if I meet someone in a book line that follows me on Instagram, they will literally look at their friend and go, so this is my friend Carlos.
And then they catch themselves saying that and they're like, I know we've never met and you don't know me, but you're my friend. So all of that to say, yes, I love it and I love that and I love everything that social media and screens have allowed me to do.
So 2020 happens and we're all really on it. Everyone's got a podcast, everybody's doing Insta lives. We're all there. 2021, I'm doing it more and more. And then it was early 2022 when I got that notification that comes across my screen that we all get on Sundays, unless you turned it off. I learned recently that you can turn that off.
But it said that I was averaging seven hours and 23 minutes a day on my screen, on my phone. I was sitting in church. I remember being like, ooh, what? I'd seen that number many times, but for some reason in that moment I was like, wait a second. How many hours am I awake? Let me do a little bit of math.
So I started doing my math, which I'm not very good at, but that kind of equaled 49 hours a week. I was like, whoa. That's two full awake and sleepy times that I'm staring at this thing. Then I kept doing the math. It was close to a hundred days a year. Then I was like, if I live to be 80 something, I'll lose 12 years or I can't remember how many years of my life, and that was when I said, I have to do something.
No matter how much I love doing social media, no matter how much good I see happening and there's been so much good that has happened on my account, this can not go on. There's no way I was created as a human with some semblance of a soul in me to do this.
It became the journey of what am I going to do? I read a phone detox book and I read all these things. I started putting rules in place and I set up screen times. None of it worked. I was like, I'm going to have to go all in. I asked anyone that's tried to fix it with all the little things that we try to fix it with, how's it going?
And nobody has figured it out yet. So I was like, that's it. I'm going rogue. I'm going completely offline for two months. And it was a few days short of two months. I did not look at a screen for almost seven and a half weeks. I didn't look at an Apple watch, an iPhone, a laptop, a TV, nothing. I didn't consume anything.
I lived with monks and I lived with Amish farmers and I got my brain scanned by a neurologist before and after. I said, I'm going to make this a thing. And so it became a thing. That's where the book you're reading, Reconnected: How 7 Screen-Free Weeks with Monks and Amish Farmers Helped Me Recover the Lost Art of Being Human, came from.
Alison Cook: Okay. There’s so much that I love here. You are a storyteller and I love how you turned this experiment into a story about how God works with us. It's like there's a nudge–something's got to give, something's got to change, and then the storyteller creates a story about it.
It's such a good book and it draws you in with the story. The other thing that is really beautiful, and I want to get into this, Carlos, is it really becomes about what you experienced in these two places, and we forget about the devices.
Carlos: Yeah, I'm so grateful you even said that, because that's what I'm trying to tell people that maybe don't know about the book or aren’t interested– this isn't even about a phone. It is for three days out of 7.5 weeks, and then day four to the end, it wasn't even about that.
There's already so much good data and research done on what phones are doing to us. I didn't need to write that book. What it quickly turned into is not why phones are bad, but why it's so beautiful on the other side. Yes, that is where the stories in this book aren't necessarily teaching us how to not be on our phone.
They're reminding us of all these beautiful things that we used to do before the phones. Now, because I'm doing those things, I'm on my phone less. I literally haven't set up any rules. I don't have screen time on my phone. I've fallen back in love with all the things I learned at the monastery, all the things I learned with the Amish.
Once you taste what life is like, once you taste that goodness, once you taste a good steak, you don't want to have the sizzler steak anymore. You're like, oh, why would I want to go do that? So yes, I'm glad that you felt that because I tried to write a book that wasn't shaming people into getting off their phones. It was more about making people excited about what's on the other side of them.
Alison Cook: A hundred percent. That is what I was so drawn into. Again, that word longing. There was a longing. Oh, I want this. This is so good. It's not, “I don't need my phone”. I was thinking back to things I used to do as a kid.
I live now back in Wyoming, which is where I grew up. It's very rural and I'll try to explain to my young adult kids the joy of cruising Main. And they cannot understand it, Carlos. They're like, why? I'm like, we didn't have phones. We couldn't text each other. We didn't know where people were. So we had to drive up and down to find people.
And you were delighted when you found people and you pulled over and you had this impromptu get-together. They just don't get it. So I was thinking about all those things, and that was not what you were talking about, but it was reminding me.
So let's talk about it. Start with the Benedictine months. You get dropped off for two weeks. Tell us a little bit about what that was like.
Carlos: So I'm on my way there. I'm flying there. I'm in the car with my friend Brian, I'd already gotten my brain scanned, and so now I'm actually starting to feel as we're getting closer, literal physical symptoms of anxiety. My heart was palpitating. I was like, oh my God, am I having a heart attack? What's happening?
The closer I got, the more I couldn't swallow. I get there and they lead me up to father Patrick. He leads me up to my tiny little hermitage at the top of the hill, overlooking the monastery. My friend Brian helps me with my bags and I'll never forget. We go back down and he gets in my car. He takes my phone and takes my backpack, takes my laptop, takes out everything and he’s like, all right, dude I'll see you in two weeks.
I was like, what? And then he left me and I still haven't felt this feeling since that moment. I don't know what the feeling is, it's the, “you're dropped off on a deserted island and someone drives away and you have no way of getting off of it”. So then all of these massive realizations start hitting me.
Immediately, within two minutes, I reach into my pocket to grab my phone and it's not there. I go back up to my little hermitage and so begins the worst three days of the whole experiment. Those first three days were terrifying. They were lonely. The Benedictines spent a lot of time in silence. I was actually spending the first three days, about 23 hours of my 24 hours, in silence.
I know introverts hear about this and introverts are like, oh, I would love to spend 23 hours that way. But I don't know that you would, except for maybe if you're a monk that's really called into that. I had a lot of physical manifestations, like heart palpitations, night sweats, I couldn't sleep, I was tossing and turning, tightness in my chest, and it was rough those first few days.
I thought I was actually getting sick, like I thought I was getting the flu. Come to find out, after talking to my doctor when I got back, I was coming off of this drug and detoxing. So those first few days of detoxing from what I was consuming on my phone screen were horrible, but then it was day four.
I'll never forget, Alison, waking up, because for three days it felt like, the only way I can describe it is like if anyone has asthma that's listening to your show and you can feel an asthma attack coming on, and then you can't breathe for a minute but then you take a hit of the inhaler and then suddenly you go from not being able to breathe to whoa.
And day four felt like I took a hit of an inhaler and I could breathe for the first time. It felt like an elephant stepped off my chest. It was the realization of, wait a second, this is maybe how we were meant to be. This, the way I'm breathing, the deepness, the stillness, the slowness, all of these things, the way these Benedictines are living, it took a few days, but when I finally got there, oh my goodness, I got there, and it was an incredible few weeks.
Alison Cook: That's amazing. It reminds me when you describe it a little bit of The Last Battle, the last book in the Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. If you've never read it, it's one of the most beautiful metaphors for what it's like to step into what we were meant for. We have so many bad cliches for heaven or eternity, but it's stepping into what we were meant for.
It's stepping out of this thing that we don't even realize is holding us back. When you go through that door, what you were describing, it's, whoa, this is the water in which I was meant to swim.
Carlos: Yes. I use the asthma example because literally when I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, I don't know, 15 years ago, I never had asthma in my life and we moved to middle Tennessee, I'll never forget, my wife after a few weeks was like, hey babe, you're wheezing every night. You're wheezing.
I was like, what do you mean? I feel fine. I'm not wheezing. She's like no, it sounds like you're not breathing. I was like, I'm fine. She says, go to an allergist. So I went to an allergist. I've been living here for a month now, but he had me blow into a tube and he's like, yeah, man, you're only using 60 percent of your lung capacity.
I was like, what? And he goes, yeah, the problem is, you're so used to it. You don't even know you're not breathing. So then he gave me an inhaler and after that first hit, I went from 60 to 100, and it was that narnia feeling you're talking about.
It was like, this is breathing. Oh, wait a second. I didn't even know I was suffocating before.
Alison Cook: Amazing. So you step into it then for these next two weeks, and you talk in the book about solitude and wonder. I loved that wrestling. Give us some highlights of some of that new awareness.
Carlos: Yes. I was living them. The first really cool realization that happened a few days in was I was sitting in the chapel. You would pray with the monk six times a day. It was a lot of chanting in Latin and a lot of praying very slowly. Those first few days, actually, I was really bored.
I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe they do this every day. I began to wonder why they do this six times a day. That's weird. I remember when I thought that, I tried to pull my phone out and Google it. All of a sudden I was hit with this realization–oh, I guess I'm going to have to wonder. This is weird.
Wait a second. Maybe God created us to not know everything. Maybe we're supposed to wonder as much as we're supposed to know. When I tried to pull out my phone, which wasn't there, the Benedictines were having this time of grand silence. So they have 14 straight hours where you can't talk.
This was during the grand silence, so I couldn't even ask one of the monks why they do this six times a day. I was stuck wondering. So that began seven weeks of me wondering about a lot.
Alison Cook: It was so relatable how quick we are to punch questions into our phones. Now we have ChatGPT, so it's even more instant.
Carlos: I know, I call Google the wonder killer, because what happens is when we're in a group, you're at lunch and someone's like, oh man, I wonder what…everyone pulls their phones out and your wondering is killed within half a second. For me, wondering became this thing that was annoying at the beginning, but then it almost became like a spiritual discipline.
It became this thing that I loved to do, because wondering led me to wonder. The wondering and wonder are two different things. I'm talking about wondering, not knowing, and having to think and question. And then wonder, the grandness of awe.
Those two are so closely connected, but people have lost their awe and wonder, because we know too much. We were never created, I believe, to know as much as we know. Wondering and wonder was one of the first things that I got reacquainted with.
It's funny because when I got back from this experiment, I did two weeks with the monks, two weeks with the Amish, and then three weeks with my family with no screens. Whenever I would have a question, or someone would have a question, and someone would pull their phone out, I was like no. I don't want to know the answer. I want to wonder.
Now it's funny because my kids, if I pull my phone out to answer a question or something, my kids are always like, nope, dad, we're going to wonder. We're not going to know. Wondering and savoring is slowly becoming a lost art. We get everything so quickly. There's Amazon Prime Now, which means you get it within two hours to your front door.
We take our coffee to go. Everything is rushed and I think, oh, what I got to experience with the slowness of living with these monks, is I got to savor. I was drinking Dunkin Donuts coffee. I talk about this in the book, the breakfast blend. I'm, I consider myself a coffee connoisseur. I know the best pour over coffee in Nashville, Tennessee.
I know the baristas. My palate is refined for coffee. But my Dunkin Donuts breakfast blend tasted better than any cup of coffee I'd ever had in Nashville, Tennessee. Why? Because I was moving slow enough to actually really taste it. I didn't have Twitter on my phone as I was scrolling and drinking my coffee.
No, I was drinking my coffee. Savoring is something that we've lost. It's another lost art of being human. When I was with the Benedictines, I didn't have my phone to look down to as I was walking the campus, as I was walking the Abbey grounds.
I would see things and notice things that if I had my phone in my pocket, I never would have. I don't know if I shared this in the book. It's in the documentary, but at one point I noticed a little hummingbird that had fallen from a tree and I actually spent three days nursing this baby hummingbird back to health.
I would go feed the little hummingbird and then I was waiting for the mom to come and the mom never came. I thought the hummingbird was going to die. I had this Netflix story that I'd found myself in with this hummingbird. Then the mom comes down and rescues the hummingbird.
I had three days with this hummingbird that I never would have had, had I been looking at my phone and not noticed it. You can ask me this one question, Alison, and I can talk for 60 straight minutes on all of the things that the monks taught me that I was able to get reacquainted with, that I fell back in love with. Now I do those things on purpose, instead of by accident.
Alison Cook: Yeah. I love that. Once you leave the monastery, you go live with an Amish community for two weeks, which is different in the sense that there's a lot of labor. I relate a lot to what you were saying. I come from a line of ranchers who work in the land. My uncle understands weather patterns a hundred times better than weather.com.
You're like, where does this knowledge come from? My family, when we were in Boston, when the pandemic shut everything down, we came to Wyoming to spend a summer. That's where I'm from. We love it here. It's the mountains. Because of the way the world shifted and everything became virtual, we can be here a lot more, but it did remind me a little bit of what you were describing, because culturally, being in a rural, more agrarian culture, it is different.
When we're in Boston, Amazon arrives the same day. It takes four or five days here. There aren't big storehouses nearby. That's a silly example, but it’s real. I want you to share about this Amish community. There's the work, there's the kind of intuitive understanding of the earth, and then I loved this word because it is so true–the visiting.
Carlos: Yes. Visiting.
Alison Cook: Sitting around the table, visiting, tell us about that. You're going to have to read the book to get all the nuance of this–we're getting the highlights–but tell us a little bit about what happened when you joined this Amish community, this farming community.
Carlos: Yes. So by the time I left the monks, I had gotten it down. I was like a semi-pro monk. I was like, put me in, coach. I love this. I didn't wanna leave. I made all these friends. I'd learned to move at God speed, at three miles an hour, this was my new jam. I was contemplative.
And it’s a shock to my system when I get dropped off at LAX, right after I'd spent 14 days in 23 hours a day silence, and there are screens everywhere. I go to the bathroom and there's a screen on the wall. There are screens on the back of the seats on the plane. I'm looking down, like get me to the Amish, get me to the Amish.
I get there and I'm thinking to myself, okay, I'm going to be Monk 2.0. And. Oh my gosh, was I wrong. The Amish go hard. I got to the farm around noon, and at 9 pm, I had not stopped. I talked more in those nine hours than I had the entire two weeks I was with the monks. They were pouring me coffee at 9 p.m. They're drinking coffee.
It doesn't even matter if it's the strongest cup of coffee ever. They work so hard all day that they fall right to sleep. I was so tired. I tell people that it was like moving from a cave to downtown Manhattan, and downtown Manhattan was a four way stop in Mount Hope, Ohio. For these Amish people, the community, the visiting, the talking, the sharing, the stories, it was so a part of their culture.
A few days in, Willis, my Jedi Yoda sheep farmer guy that was training me to be a sheep farmer, he kept saying, okay, so tomorrow's schedule is we're going to get up in the morning and then we're going to go visit this person and then we're going to go visit this person. They love to visit.
I asked him, what's with all the visiting? He says, Carlos, we don't have Facebook. We don't have Instagram, all of the things that you have. This is the only way we know what's happening. We don't have TVs, so this is the way that we know things, and so we love to visit.
They were so hard working. I was so tired every single night when it was time to go to bed. I would put my head in the pillow and I would be drooling within two seconds, I was so tired from the hard work that they would do.
But also I started falling in love with the way they did community and the way they took care of each other. I unlearned a lot of things that I had previously learned incorrectly about the Amish. I had all these assumptions, all these things that I thought about the Amish, like why is it they don't use technology?
Why is it that they don't watch TV or they don't drive cars? I thought maybe they thought it was evil. This was actually so fascinating. One of the biggest things I took from the Amish is, I'm asking Willis one day, what is it about phones or cars or TVs? How do you guys choose what’s not okay?
Because there were some things that they had. They had a generator on their farm, e-bikes. I was like, so you have a generator to charge the e-bike, but you won't have a car? This is weird.
How are you guys making these decisions? He goes, every church community sets up their own rules. There are different orders of Amish.
There are some super conservative, there are some less so. Basically the decision that we make with any piece of technology that comes is we ask this question: Will this piece of technology bring us closer together as a community, or will this piece of technology take us further apart?
When he said that, I started thinking, oh, there's nothing wrong with cars. He says, my daughter, she's Mennonite, she has a car. Sometimes she'll drive me to Cleveland if I need something. But if we all had cars, and Miss Betty's barn burned down, and I was in Cleveland, and Farmer Joe was over here, and we were hundreds of miles apart from each other, we could not come back together to rebuild her barn in 48 hours like we can when we stay close together.
That is why we have made the decision that a car's technology is never going to be. But on an e-bike, we can't get too far away from each other. We’re going to have to come back to charge. So e-bikes are okay. Every decision they make with technology isn't about whether they think the technology is evil.
It's about, is this piece of technology going to take us farther away from where we want to be or closer to each other? And wow, if that wasn't a revolutionary idea for me with every app I put on my phone. Is this going to take me farther away from my community or closer? That was something that I brought back to literally every single decision I make with screens now.
Alison Cook: That's incredible. It's like the spirit of the law. I'm sure it could get dogmatic–anything can, all of us can, but that spirit is a question we could all be asking in our families. If we bring this new thing in, will it draw us together or take us apart?
Carlos: Yes. I mean if I could share one more story about Willis, and again, I need everyone to imagine Carlos who makes a living touching his thumbs to his phone screen, trying to shear a sheep. I'm trying my hardest. We're trying to cut the hay and it rained, and he's like, we can't cut the hay because it's raining.
All of these rules that I don't understand with farming. You talk about their intuition and you talk about being connected to the land. We've been trying for seven days to cut the hay and I'm like, why can't we cut the hay? He says, it can't rain. So it didn't rain for two days and I was like, oh sweet. It's dry enough. We can cut it.
So I walked out super excited, like today's the day we're finally going to cut the hay. I walked out my door and I was like, no, it's going to rain. You can see the rain. It's right there. You can smell it. You can see it. So I walked up to Willis and I was like, man, Willis, another day we're not going to cut the hay. He says, "What do you mean we're not going to cut the hay?"
I was like, it's raining, look, and I pointed at the clouds. He says, no, don't look up at the clouds. Look at your boots. I was like, what? What kind of weird Amish thing is this? Look at your boots. What's on your boots?
I was like, nothing. They're wet. He says, they're wet. He goes, my daddy always told me, and his daddy still lived on the property, that if there's dew on your boots, it's not going to rain. I remember literally laughing out loud when he said that. I was almost embarrassed that I laughed out loud. I was like, oh that may be a good hunch thing, but look at the clouds. They're coming this way.
He says, we're cutting the hay. It's not going to rain. So I was like, this is the craziest thing. Kathy and I, we take off. We're a mile away from the farm and it's dumping on us. It's pouring away. We spent the day at Ed, his son in law's house. It's raining the whole time. We come back, we're a mile away, it's raining. Then, literally I still can't explain this correctly how shocking it was.
We got within, I don't know, three quarters of a mile of his farm. It's dumping rain and then the rain stops and when I say stops, it's not like the cloud moved through and the ground was wet. No, it was dry. The ground was dry. We pull up into his farm and Willis is standing there with his arms crossed smiling at me with that look.
I got out and he looked at me. Sure enough, he cut the hay and it didn't rain. It was this thing, like you said, he's got this relationship with the land. There's something spiritual about that we've lost, because we look at our phone apps all the time and it's wrong half the time.
So anyway, I'd like to share that story because it showed me that maybe I'm not as in tune with my intuition as I need to be.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. It's God's time with the monks, and then on the farm, there's something about being connected with the land. I felt that difference when I came from Boston back to where I grew up, where there's this precision in the city. There's this precision.
Our son got married on a small piece of land out here in Wyoming and we were going to do it outside on the land. We needed to get it hayed, and I remember it’s not a time to get it done, like at two o'clock–it will be done when the conditions are right.
Carlos: Totally.
Alison Cook: I remember feeling in my body this different way of being with the land and nature.
Carlos: What gets thrown away for us city folk is efficiency. It gets thrown out the window. We get so efficient. We want to be so efficient. What I learned is man, there's so much life to be lived on the other side of efficiency.
There's so much wonder on the other side of efficiency. What if every once in a while, we're less efficient and we move a lot slower? Maybe that actually is more efficient. All of these things are going in my head, but yes. I'm in agreement.
Alison Cook: I want to finish out here. One, this is where I want to come back to Carlos. Because I'm dying to know, now you're back. You're back in Nashville. First of all, I love that in this whole conversation, we didn't talk about five steps to not having technology.
I love what you're doing. It's beautiful. You are someone who is using these gifts God has given you, and it's really beautiful. How do you come back into the world that you love? How do you come back and keep some of what you learned?
Carlos: Yes. I’ll let everybody know, it's not like I've not gone back on Instagram. I love it. I'm back with a force. I miss telling stories, I miss all those things–there's a whole documentary about this that I made–more content for screens.
I need people to know, my whole idea isn't why screens are bad. When I came back, first of all, to hold my phone in my hand, when my best friend, Brian, gave it back to me when he picked me up, it felt like it weighed 40 pounds. It felt like an anchor.
It took me another three days before I turned it on. I was like, I can't do it. Then I turned it on and sure enough, ding ding. It sounded like I won the lottery. My phone's going off. This probably can stress some of your listeners out, but I hit select all, and then delete, on all my text messages.
Alison Cook: I love that. Wow.
Carlos: Yeah, if someone needs to get a hold of me really bad, they'll come back to me. So I'm back now. Two years have passed since this all happened and this is what's so cool. There are little things that I set up in my life to help me. But there were no major guardrails that I put up or scaffolding I put up to keep me away from this evil phone.
No, it's really cool. I'm on my phone three hours a day. I literally gained more than half of my life back that I had lost. I went from seven and a half hours a day to three. When I launched a book in September, my screen time was five hours. Like it'll go up, it'll go down. But what's happened again, like you said, what's happened isn't that I’m off my screens.
No, I've actually fallen back in love with living all of these beautiful things. The noticing, the wondering, the getting lost and finding my way. So there are things that now cause me to be on my phone less. I pick it up less because I'm infatuated with living by wondering. I don't look things up anymore. I don't think we were created to know everything that we know.
So a few of the things that have been helpful for me are, for instance, I bought an alarm clock. I now don't charge my phone next to my bed. That's not a big deal, but that probably saves me a whole hour of screen time a day because I'm not in bed scrolling.
This is a fun one, I no longer use Siri or GPS or Google Maps to find my way. I look it up before I leave my house. I look it up, and I write the directions down on a piece of paper. I drive, and my sense of direction is so much better. Yeah, so there are some things that I've done.
But more than anything, I have fallen back in love with, again, the savoring, the wondering, the noticing, the solitude. All of these things that we don't have anymore. I don't want to lose it.
Alison Cook: I love what you're saying. My first solo book, The Best of You, is a book on boundaries. My thesis in the book, Carlos, is that boundaries are less about what you're saying no to, and more about what you're saying yes to, what you're protecting.
This is what you're saying–it wasn't about setting boundaries with my phone. It was, oh my gosh, I want these other things in my life, and that's allowed some boundaries around this. I love that.
Carlos: Yeah. And here's the cool thing–we'll take that yes a step farther. When I was home for those three weeks with my family, at the end of the experiment with no phone, I didn't have a phone, but my family still did. They still had Netflix. They were still TikToking.
When I came home for those three weeks, I did not set up one rule for my family. I was like, you guys keep living your life. If you turn on the TV, I'll walk out, I'll pick up my book. My family's screen time went down 50%.
Alison Cook: Wow.
Carlos: Because I was not on mine. Again, this is not some scientific experiment. The whole thing's not a scientific experiment. This is one man's story, it’s what I did. But again, when I started doing these things, even the people around me were affected. Suddenly there were these boundaries that got set up around my family, and so even my kids screen times are different because of something that I did.
This book can not only impact you and your life, but it really can impact those around you. Because they're going to be like, wow, I never even thought of that. I want to wonder a little bit more too. So be that person at the party, whenever you listen to this, when somebody has a question and someone pulls their phone out, you be the guy or the girl that goes, nope, we're not going to look it up. Let's wonder.
Alison Cook: Oh, it's so good. It's so good. More is caught than taught. You're showing, hey, I want to go outside and watch the baby birds. Maybe someone else will come join you. I love it.
This is a little bit of a side conversation, but I tend to think of social media a little bit in the same category as alcohol. Some people can use it in moderation and they're okay. I can have a couple of glasses of wine a week without an issue.
I don't think I have that ability with social media, so I've had to really curb myself. A lot of that is case by case. I will say, you're one of the people who uses it in a way where it's like watching someone who can drink in moderation. Like, wow, that's amazing that someone can do that and enjoy the good in it. And maybe I'm not able to do that. Does that make sense?
Carlos: That not only makes sense to me but is such a great way for people to look at it as well. Again, because I've got friends too that do things that I think, man, I would love to be able to do it like that, but I can't. So I have to know myself.
Alison Cook: Exactly. I love that you're back online and you are telling us the story and you are showing us through the means that we need. Otherwise, how would we know? So it's such a great read. I loved it. I read it straight through. It's got your authentic self, your humor, and I know there's a documentary now that's with it.
So tell my listeners where to find you, where to find your content, the movie, the book, all the things
Carlos: Absolutely. If you go to ReconnectedBook.com, the book's there, the documentary's there, the trailer's there, all of the things are there. Instagram is where I hang out. Instagram and YouTube as I'm making things on screens for you to look at them on screens. I want to remind people that in this book, there's zero shame involved.
You will not feel shame about your phone. You will not feel, oh my gosh, I'm on my phone too much! It's going to excite you about a lot of the things that maybe we've forgotten how to do. I encourage everybody to pick it up and get reconnected, because that's the other reason why I titled it Reconnected.
When I first came back everyone was like, how was it when you disconnected? I'd love to disconnect. The more people said that, the more I thought, I get what they're saying, but I really feel like I'm actually plugged in now. I feel like I'm actually reconnected. Again, I'm trying to spin everything a little bit, but it's going to be helpful for a lot of people.
Alison Cook: It's a great read and it's a bestseller. So you're hitting a nerve and you're touching on things people really need. So thanks for doing it. Thanks for continuing to create content. Thanks for joining us.
Carlos: You're the freaking best. Thanks so much for having me.