Ohio or Bust: Online Vs. Real Life

The thing that shouldn't be named.

[This post is behind the paywall. If you have paid and you can’t read it, there is likely an email glitch I need to fix. Please write to me and let me know if you’d like to read it. I also hoped to put this in podcast form, but I ran out of time.]

The other day, I saw a mother walking her baby in a stroller. The baby was awake, staring up at her and cooing. It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. Trees were all around with birds chirping. What was she doing? Looking at her phone. From that point on, that baby will know the phone is the most important thing in her life.

I didn’t want to be that kind of mother, but I’m betting I spent a lot of time raising my daughter focused on the online world, and I deeply regret it. It’s our world now, I know, as my daughter spent too much time staring at her glowing screen too - a laptop at first, then later a phone.

But watching that young mom with her baby gave me a sudden urge to run over to her and plead with her to put the phone down. I promise you, I would tell her, there is nothing on that phone more important or more interesting than the tiny baby cooing right in front of you. This is time you will never get back.

I didn’t plan on spending half of my life on the internet. It just turned out that way. The glow of the computer screen meant something fascinating every time I turned it on. How could anything ever compete, much less real life?

Now, as I spend more time in the real world, driving across this country for its 250th birthday, I find logging onto the internet a painful experience by comparison. Sure, real life is rough. I walked into a gas station in the middle of New Mexico, and the guy working there didn’t have a face.

A bandage covered most of it. His two eyes looked up at me briefly as he motioned to the bathroom, then quickly looked away. He didn’t make eye contact on my way out. I can understand why. He wouldn’t want to see the look of horror or pity on my face.

You only see real poverty if you spend time looking around America, just as you see real wealth. But most of it is just people trying to get through the day. A small business owner bringing supplies somewhere, a truck driver bringing goods somewhere, a waitress, a gas station attendant, a guy with no face.

Online, however, it’s an entirely different experience. Almost everyone lives in a fantasy world of one kind or another. I know that when I log on to X, my experience will be a frustrating and pointless exercise in trying to shake people out of this trance of unreality. It is impossible and a waste of time.

The writer John Nolte once told me that he used to think everything happening online and in politics mattered. He would spend every second of every day plugged in and online. At some point, he realized that it was ever-changing and ultimately, it wasn’t as important as it seemed. So he just disconnected.

Now, he spends his time camping, watching movies, reading, and only occasionally checks in. I think that’s the better way to go. It’s certainly my goal as I drive across this big, beautiful country of ours. I don’t always succeed, of course, but I try to keep that in the back of my mind — it’s not as important as you think.

The Start

My first stop was just a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles at a town called Barstow. The wind was so fierce, it almost blew my car off the road. It was so bad that we got this warning just after we arrived at our first hotel.