Leave Your Phone at the Door: The Joy of OFFLINE
Howard Lewis
Radius Book Group (March 2025)
Here is a lively and entertaining exploration of reality on the other side of random serendipity
I cannot recall another book that I have read in recent years that I enjoyed more than I did reading and then re-reading this one.
Paradoxically, it is also one of the most difficult books to discuss. The author is identified as “Howard Lewis” but it seems to have been
written by Charles Luftwidge Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) in collaboration with Kingsley Amis, Noel Coward, Daffy Duck, Gertrude Stein, Elaine May, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Oscar Wilde.
Lewis: “The essence of OFFLINE is two-fold. On the one hand, it is simply the antithesis of online. Not that online is all bad. On the contrary, online is rather good, but what is not good at all is this latter-day obsession with it, whereby all those skills you learned at your mother’s knee, like reading and writing and talking, are becoming dying arts. Yet the curious thing is that humans are social animals by nature and that physical interaction is a fundamental part of our being.”
Warren Buffett once characterized habits that limit us, that diminish us, becoming “chains too light to notice until they are too heavy to break.”
Lewis does not suggest permanent residence OFFLINE. He then focuses on “another dimension to OFFLINE that is arguably even more important. Most people follow a fairly conventional path through life for good and sensible reasons — commercial exigencies, the demands of parenthood, all the usual suspects play their part — but what typically occurs is that they fall into a sort of comfort zone, an area densely populated by straightforwardness, by convenience, by familiarity and, I dare say, by a hint of laziness.”
Most of us have to earn a living, make a marriage work, help raise children, stay healthy, pay bills, etc. To venture OFFLINE is to explore what is for you extra-ordinary, unconventional, exceptional, or at least different. If only for a brief time, seek or be receptive to an unusual situation and/or location; modify a custom, habit, or routine; turn off your cell phone; put your watch in your pocket or purse; and become engaged in the given situation.
“I believe it is very valuable and, indeed, very necessary, as you pursue that straight path through life, that you periodically veer OFFLINE. You can veer back on that path, of course, but sometimes that deviation of mind, body, or soul can yield some surprising consequences and their manifestations might just challenge your world.”
As I worked my way through Lewis’s lively narrative, I was again reminded of the key insight in Ernest Becker’s classic work, Denial of Death. No one can deny physical death. Only a suicide can decide when, where, how, etc. But there is one form of death that anyone can deny: the death that occurs when we become wholly preoccupied with fulfilling others’ expectations of us.
Lewis respects and accommodates reasonable expectations. He has several of his own, as do those who read his book. My take is that he wants his reader to make occasional, modest but significant adjustments of their lifestyle. He hosts OFFLINE dinners several times a year and maintains an OFFLINE mindset in between. Details are best revealed in context but I will note the dinners’ success indicates the human need to loosen up sometimes but not be sloppy. Common courtesy (often uncommon these days) is among the few prerequisites of interaction with others.
“The irony of social media
Howard Lewis invites you to read his book, then leave your reluctance “at the door” and begin to explore your own OFFLINE. adventures with random serendipity.