“I’ve got 4G. Three bars.”

NO.

It was the first thought that came to mind. I saw my son looking down at his phone, as shocked as I was that on this rocky island off the coast of rural Maine, we had steady cell coverage for the first time in three visits.

“That’s unbelievable. Put it in Airplane Mode.”

“Yeah.” He agreed without even a second word.

We dropped our heavy packs and got to work, setting up camp under tall pines in a routine now familiar from years of doing it. Stake, tie, hitch, gather, chop, light, organize. Food over there. Flashlights by our sleeping pads. Lines tightened up. We wordlessly helped each other by instinct, and the two phones sat over by the fire ring while we worked.

But they were on my mind the whole time.

This changes things.

We’ve camped together since he was a toddler, but in the last five years—the last of his youth—the destinations have been more remote. Baxter State Park in northern Maine and Isle au Haut in Acadia National Park had been, previously, near-total escapes. Our trips have been exercises in getting back to basics and each other.

Long after you lose cell coverage on the drive to Baxter’s North Gate, you’re bluntly reminded by a wooden sign that help is many hours away and you are responsible for your own safety. Isle au Haut, while not as remote, is six miles off the coast, and reachable only by a mailboat that makes daily runs to the island’s small village, four miles to the north of the campsite.

Once you’re at either, it’s you and what you chose to haul in on your back. At Baxter, I learned to carry dollar bills and Post Its so that I could pay a buck to any outgoing visitor I encountered if they’d text my wife that we were safe. Trivia: all but one held up their end of the wilderness deal. People are generally good.

On Isle au Haut, there previously had been a large rock on the shore where, if you stood still for a while, you’d get 3G and one bar. Not great for anything but texting home you were safe, but that was all I’d need.

Now, with 4G, the time away would be changed. Home, world news, texts, work, emails were all there if we wanted them.

The week before we’d left, I told a colleague about the remote nature of our camping. She said, “That’s good. Get your kids off their phones.”

It’s not really that simple. I’m as guilty as anyone of being glued to my screen, and if you look around any idle crowd, it’s clear phone time is an equal opportunity distractor. They’ve got us, these companies. This technology.

We talked about it at dinner that night, Triscuits and pepperoni grilled over smoky, hot coals. The rule would be, aside from texts home that we were safe, no phone for anything but photos. I took a photo of dinner, because of course I did, proud of my perfectly charred cracker.

That ban on data lasted 45 minutes. A storm rumbled and I found I could get radar for the island.

Ok, just this one other use. Other than that, Airplane Mode.

And then the notifications popped up every time I turned data on. An acquaintance joined Duo (!). A person I don’t know would like to add me to their professional network on LinkedIn. Google asked me to review the campsite. Facebook wanted me to know a friend posted pictures of her trip. My daily activity level was reported to be excellent (Yeah, no joke, I’m almost 50 and that pack almost killed me walking uphill to the site.). Starbucks was offering a deal. Capital One let me know my breakfast that day at shore charged to my card.

Off, off, off, off their switches went in Settings, one by one, until I finally just decided they were all getting turned off. I had no idea how many apps I even had set to notify me of something.

The icons remained and I realized they still tempted. Laying on my sleeping pad that night, I moved everything social, everything news, everything but camera, phone, messages, and voice recorder to the farthest right screen, five swipes away from home. Deleted others. Made a home screen shortcut for radar. All of the rest of it…out of sight, out of mind.

And my brain changed. I lay in the dark, and what had been a low-level state of worrying about what I was missing turned into serenity.

They can’t reach me now.

I fell asleep.

I woke up and found my always-spinning brain, well, still. My phone alarm didn’t wake me, because the morning sun did. Listening to the birds, the distant sound of a lobster boat checking its traps, and the wind. A quick text home to assure that we were still alive, and back it went back into Airplane Mode and back in my pocket.

I didn’t miss it. At all. For four days.

I don’t regret keeping the radar icon. A nasty storm blew in on Day Three, and it was good to know how long we had to get back to camp and hunker down.

But other than that, what did I miss?

Absolutely nothing.

On the trip home, my son took a shift driving, I mentally prepared myself, flipped on data, and checked my apps. Dozens and dozens of posts, comments, updates flooded in. But if I’d suddenly died in the second before I checked, I’d have died no poorer.

The president said what?
How many people were killed in the accident?
We’re doing what now?
My friend really posted that?

It reinforced to me that the connection we have through our little dopamine devices is mostly fake, and mostly unhealthy. I could feel my anxiety increase, I could feel my focus to here and now fade.

After what seemed like five seconds but actually was 22 minutes, my son chimed in, “Hey what exit do I need to look for?”

I looked up. I’d been connected to the world in those 22 minutes but profoundly disconnected to what was around me. It was startling, and totally unlike the experience on the island, when I noticed things…the way the wind shifted leaves, the subtle and perfectly rhythmic pattern of waves, how green the trees appeared, the deliberate manner in how a squirrel checked out our campsite.

It was no different than if I’d been at home on the couch, honestly. A house full of people, near each other but far away.

We’ve lost so much. And gained so little.

I made a social post about my trip the next day. Of course I did. Posted my favorite pictures. Of course I did. It got a lot of likes. A few loves. Some nice words. I’m glad people enjoyed seeing and sharing in the beauty of the island. One friend may go there with her own kids sometime. That’s nice. They’ll love it.

But the island they’ll visit, or the woods they’ll see, won’t be the same as the one I did. Certainly not the one I had been used to seeing.

I’m no luddite. I embrace technology. But you can embrace something and still realize how harmful it can be.

There’s no profound lesson here; no call to action. The technology of connection will advance as quickly as our lights have blotted out the natural night sky. This connection is, largely, good. Lives will be saved.

But when we each take our last breaths, what will matter won’t be any of that. It will be in the connections–the real connections–we make. Technology can support but not replace it.

And the two should never be confused.

Try the Triscuits and pepperoni over smoky, hot coals some time. So good. Tastes better when you’re disconnected to the world, yet so connected to what’s around you.

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster 
and treat those two impostors just the same” 

“If—“ by Rudyard Kipling 

In the last few months, I’ve been invited to several alumni-student networking events at UConn, my alma mater. At the rough halfway point of my career, how seemingly far I’ve come from my 1.3 first-semester GPA.  

The event planners gave me guidance for topics of discussion; a consistent one was to tell students about the path I took to get to today.  This exercise caused some thinking and reflection, which uncovered some trends.  

It is,  of course, nice to be framed as an example of a “successful” alumnus for future Huskies. In my prep, though, I came to realize that I’m a study in failure.  

• I entered UConn as an engineering major—hence the 1.3—studying computer science, and I left computer science just as the need for that skill was about to skyrocket. I changed majors twice more.
• I received my degree in journalism at the dawn of an era when everything sustaining journalism—circulation, business models, public trust—was about to collapse.
• I did a double major in political science and was taking a class in Soviet political systems when the Berlin Wall literally crumbled. The professor came in the next morning, grabbed our textbook, threw it in the empty metal trash can, and said he’d support us trying to get our money back.
• I went for my MBA later in life and was sitting in a corporate finance class in 2008 when, in the span of a semester, the markets spasmed like never before in my life, and the Great Recession began.  

By any rational measurement, my educational choices had been extremely unlucky, essentially following one fiasco—or missing one opportunity—after the other. On one level, I should be distraught. My education could be viewed a waste. Maybe my career in tatters, or never getting off the ground.  

That’s not happened so far, more or less. What I took from my experiences was an appreciation of complexity. I have learned to be nimble in some respects. Semper Gumby, “Always Flexible.” To pick my fights as things fall apart. And they have. And they will. 

Twenty-five years into my career, I have also learned that life is rarely linear and certainly not animated bluebirds and a glowing, well-lit path. “Success” and “failure” are ying and yang; two sides of the same coin.

Kipling was on to something. 

The art of failing that first semester had value. I’d never failed anything. Graduated near the top of my high school class, did good activities, all that. But I failed and failed hard when I hit college. I wish it was because I was having fun; the truth is I just wasn’t smart and adaptive enough. 

It was good training for everything since. We fail at a lot: jobs, the compasses that guide us, friendships, marriages, parenting, health, life goals, wants and needs. I fail in varying degrees in each of those on a daily basis. We let ourselves down, we let others down, and others let us down.  

I told the students to get used to failure, that failure is essentially the default setting for life. I don’t think they were expecting to hear that. Perfection provides few lessons for improvement. Failure provides them in buckets. Most of the time, I’ve learned. Sometimes I haven’t. I’ve tried. 

Failure is an important lens for me to explain my college experience and “path” to them.  My degrees made me who I am, in profound ways. 

In my liberal arts classes, I learned about so many topics I’d never even heard of. Anthropology, for one, which was far from my suburban upbringing. After that 1.3 GPA, it gave me the notion that perhaps engineering, all I’d ever known, was not the only subject I could study. The knowledge of the wider world opened my eyes. 

My political science education taught me that we are not all that special. That while not all systems of social and cultural organization are equally successful or worthy of emulation, the view of our own horizons is a limited one, which misses so much else.  

My MBA has been invaluable to whatever real or imagined degree of “success” I’ve had professionally. It opened doors, connections and opportunity. Whatever else comes in my career, I’ll always have those three letters after my name. On a personal note, I was a good ten years older than most of my MBA classmates, and I am exceptionally proud that I went for it, although it came at a price of missed Little League games and family dinners that I can’t ever get back. More failure. 

I spent the most time at these student events talking about my journalism experience at UConn. I am who I am because of this small department. I learned so much, like… 

• Words matter. My professors were relentless in their criticism. Articles I thought were completely fine were judged far lower than completely fine. I was not rewarded for mediocrity. I was told to respect the reader.
• Details matter. When you had a typo in your article, Professor John Breen took off a full letter grade. We were using very early Macs, and spell-check was turned off. You used a dictionary and the AP Stylebook, and you lived in fear of a typo. The small things are the big things.
• Dedication matters. Breen told a story about a class assigned to cover a local town meeting. Most of the students left after the main agenda item. One student stayed for the whole meeting and was there to witness and cover a serious medical emergency. Everyone else took the easy path; this student was dedicated to the unglamorous work.
• Emotion matters. Professor Wayne Worcester taught us feature writing and would play his favorite music for us as we wrote. Work and emotion are intertwined. It’s hard to do anything well without emotion.
• Passion matters. These were hardscrabble reporters at their core. John Breen was about as close to a movie reporter as I’d ever seen. He used a manual typewriter. He smoked in his office. There were stacks of newspapers literally piled around him. All he needed was a fedora with a piece of paper labeled PRESS sticking out of it. He didn’t “phone in” to teach us. He was a reporter at his core and it showed his passion.
• Critical thought matters. Breen was my professor for Newswriting 101. In the very first class, he told us, and I quote, “If your mother tells you she loves you, check your sources.” Think for yourself. Dig. Accept nothing at face value. In this day and age, when we are repeatedly lied to, manipulated, allowed to easily retreat into the warm bed of thought that is just like our own, this is a jarring statement. I would argue it’s the most powerful single sentence I’ve ever heard. 

Critical thought, passion, emotion, dedication, attention to detail and clear communications are invaluable in any life or career.  

I never became a reporter, never got into politics or law, and never made a fortune in business. But I learned to leverage different parts of all of my experiences to the point where I have had what seems on the outside to be a moderately successful life at mid-point. To that, I can only shrug and say, “We’ll see.”

Success takes many forms,  and the journey of life is defining what the word means.  

I’ve failed. A lot. I routinely do. Hopefully always will.

For better or worse, it’s made me what I am.