the daily driver

Whittaker Chambers, in a 1954 letter to William F. Buckley Jr. and Willi Schlamm:

If I were a younger man, if there were any frontiers left, I should flee to some frontier because, when the house is afire, you leave by whatever hole is open for whatever area is freest of fire. Since there are no regional frontiers, I have been seeking the next best thing — the frontiers within.

I get up early in the morning, feed and walk Angus, make some coffee, check email and my RSS feeds while drinking the coffee I made, answer emails, post links or images to micro.blog and/or sketch drafts of posts for the big blog … and then get off the internet until late afternoon.

I have an old easy chair where I usually work, and before 8am I am sitting in it with

books

articles (printed out)

my notebook

my Traveler

pencils, pens, highlighters, sticky notes

my Sony voice recorder

vinyl records or CDs on the stereo

The key point is this: I do not have any internet-viewing device with me as I work. The nearest one is my Mac, across the room. I get up and use it when I have to check some piece of information I can find only online, but that happens rarely, and I try as I’m working to make note of what I need to search for so I can do all the searches at once at the end of the work day.

The internet is a dark realm which I do not visit except upon compulsion. My old chair is Hobbiton; the internet is Minas Morgul. I would not go there except upon compulsion.

Most of the time I write in the margins of the books I read, or on their endpapers, or on sticky notes appended to their pages. When I have longer things to write, I do that on the Traveler, which uploads files to a website from which I can retrieve them and edit them on my Mac. (That’s my only internet connection when I’m at my chair.)

Or, and this is increasingly common, I record my thoughts on my Sony voice recorder.

Here’s my workflow for audio notes: First, I record thoughts and in some cases whole drafts on the Sony, which uses the MP3 format. Then, near the end of the work day, usually around 3pm, I rise from my comfy chair and

plug the Sony into my Mac;

use an Automator action I wrote to (a) open a recording in QuickTime Player, (b) export to M4a, (c) open in Voice Memos, (d) quit QuickTime Player; after which…

Voice Memos transcribes the audio file, the text of which…

I copy and paste into a chatbot text field with the following prompt:

I’m about to paste in a chunk of text. Please punctuate it, add capitalizations and quotation marks where necessary, eliminate repetitions and grammatical errors, but otherwise leave the text unchanged.

It doesn’t really matter which chatbot I use — they all do an adequate job, and adequacy is what I want here: I still have to write the post or essay, I just want at the outset something that’s easier to look at than a huge block of unpunctuated text.

(I use chatbots for this, for summarizing product reviews, and for helping me write AppleScripts. That’s pretty much it.)

Now, I could simplify this whole process by dictating in the Voice Memos app, which would then automatically transcribe my words. But that would mean dwelling in Minas Morgul all day. Not worth it.

Then, in the evenings, I might read a book, or listen to music (probably on vinyl or CD), or watch a movie (probably on disc). When I’m walking Angus, or just walking, I listen to Morning Prayer on the Church of England’s excellent Daily Prayer app, and when I go to bed I might listen to a podcast. Also, I watch a lot of soccer on TV, and streaming makes that possible. But overall, these days the internet plays a smaller role in my life than it has in … 25 years, maybe? Yes, there are days when I need to be at the Mac for extended periods. But overall, it has become normal to me once again to experience the internet as a place I occasionally (and for some specific purpose) visit rather than the place where I live.

And this feels great. I am happier, more serene, more centered. I feel that I am spending my time more wisely and more enjoyably. I understand, of course, that many (most?) people will not be able to detach themselves from online life to the extent I have. But then, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible for me to detach this much. If you take it one step at a time you might discover that you can do more than you think.

For instance: I used to subscribe to Netflix and Disney Plus, but when I ditched those I suddenly had the money to start building up my Blu-Ray collection. Many video discs are quite inexpensive new, and it’s easy to find good used ones; Blu-Ray players are also pretty cheap. In a short time you can have a nice collection of your favorite movies, all of which will, to you, be worth watching repeatedly. You’ll often (always, if you buy Criterion editions) have some special features on the discs that enhance your appreciation of the movies. Once you start a movie you’ll probably watch it through, because the temptation to switch over to something else will be much reduced. And everything will work even if your internet goes out.

I could tell the same story about how I listen to music and have built my music collection. Also about what I read. It’s remarkable how many sites and periodicals I used to read religiously I now avoid religiously.

It occurs to me that if I could just ditch my footy habit I could probably cancel my home internet and get by with cellular service. Now that’s something to aspire to … but I love footy too much.

UPDATE April 2026: I’ve made one significant change to this pattern: I no longer bring my phone with me when I’m walking Angus. I just listen to the birds and think. Sometimes I pray.