Disconnecting and Reengaging

Getting offline and going for a walkabout. I will be back.

Nov 02, 2025

I am writing this from the other side of the world. Not for the people who live here of course, but from that side of the world that has been my home for so long.

I have returned to somewhere I have greatly wanted to revisit since 2016, and even though getting here was one of the longest two days’ travel of my life, I felt at peace the moment I arrived. I hope that continues to be the case throughout the next few weeks. I will be “away” until the end of November.

Where I am is not important for now, partly because of what follows about my writing plans, but also because you may have a similar place in your own life that you have found - or have yet to find. What’s important is embarking on the journey, making that trip. What’s important is following one’s heart. My heart told me to come here.

There is no great upheaval. I am not running away from myself, a) because I have learned from prior efforts that that is not possible and b) because I have come to quite like being myself. In a very literal sense, I am more than happy to get out of the USA for the time being, taking no joy in seeing it head so rapidly towards a white nationalist authoritarianism out of some Orwellian nightmare, and happy to be somewhere where that name and image, and the actions he is taking regardless of precedent or legality, is not ruining my everyday disposition.

But in a more descriptive sense, I am aware that no country is an island, and I have yet to find one without its problems. The place I have chosen to revisit is one of the most problematic, frustrating, challenging, and contradictory of countries in the world, and that is part of why it fascinates me.

Typically, I like to write about life in the moment, and I have done my share of that since coming on Substack; I reported on my shared trip to Costa Rica in real time in the summer of 2023, when I still had only a couple of hundred subscribers, and have offered lots of “on-the-ground” reporting from my trips back to the UK this last couple of years, including on timely museum and gallery exhibits. There can be a value to all this, from my perspective and hopefully from yours.

And of course, so-called social media invites us to upload photographs and/or update our lives with pithy posts on a daily basis and we mostly fall captive to that invitation; even if we have no personal determination to be cited as an “influencer,” we have a very common human desire to be seen and heard, and it is common now to publish holiday and travel pictures out of daily habit.

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For this journey, I have decided on a different tack. I will write about this month away, because writing is what I do. But I want to do it the old-fashioned way. I want to live it first. And that is partly why I am not naming my location, because as soon as I do so I will begin contradicting myself and writing about it by default. (Many friends know where I am, but I appreciate them not sharing that info in the comments, for the sake of those readers others I’m speaking to in more general terms here.)

I also want to practice something else on this trip. I want to practice disconnecting - from as much of the permanently online, perpetually wired world that has become our global norm as possible. It won’t be easy, because I’m as guilty of online dependency as anyone else, but I have switched phones in advance of this journey, primarily for a better camera, and in reloading old apps onto the new phone one by one, carefully selecting as I go, I have, for the time being, bypassed Facebook. I spend too much time on that platform - or at least too much time returning to it, as if doing so repeatedly will reveal a pearl of wisdom or something truly uplifting in there amongst the inanity, the insanity, the confessionals of collapsing lives, and the endless barrage of ads. And all this from the people I know and like in the default world!

And I perform this habit despite knowing that every researcher who has studied social media dependency has found that these platforms do not make an of us any happier; rather, they make us more distressed, more angry, more fearful, more isolated. The Dear Boys have already released three songs about this dependency and the surveillance culture we open ourselves up to in the process, of which “Scan Me” and “Gone Viral” were my own words on the subject. My bandmate Tony Page wrote the words to “Put It Down,” and he nailed it with these:

“You really don’t need
The web so wide
When life is so wonderful
On the outside”

For at least my first week here (the coming week as of posting), I am committed to stability of location and some work. In fact, I first thought of getting away because I have a manuscript to edit – for a new book I have coming out next year, which is of course incredibly exciting and something I will announce in more detail down the line - and I felt the need to disconnect from my daily routine and its myriad interruptions to do so. I felt the need to go somewhere else to work on it. That somewhere else soon became the other side of the world.

And then, after this first week, I am going on what the Australians call a “walkabout,” and once I head off, I am truly determined to disengage from the constant chatter of my online world, and reconnect in the process with the physical world of nature and the humanity of the beings that inhabit it. I am well aware that the friends I have who traveled when younger (which I did not) were used to just “disappearing,” getting from A to B all around the world without access to internet, without access to affordable phone calls, and obviously without mobile phones, and therefore without checking in to family and friends for weeks if not months at a time. The ubiquity of being permanently connected means that we have lost that ability to allow ourselves to lose ourselves, and trust ourselves to find ourselves.

While I will be happy to have a local SIM card in my phone as a back-up for getting truly lost, I hope to avoid signing up for WiFi on the occasions I will have the (fee-based) opportunity. Of course, I am only human, and there are loved ones I would like to stay in contact with, so I may succumb. And I will possibly pop up on my Substack comments if that happens, because I am glad to have this public space to call home, and it feels like a more productive use of time than the (other) social media apps that have us chained and bound.

I have lined up some wonderful posts for Substack over these next three weeks or so. I have guest writing coming from two former Fanzine Podcast guests – Tony D. of Ripped & Torn/Kill Your Pet Puppy infamy, and Alastair McKay of Alternatives to Valium, which is also the name of his Substack (itself named after his excellent memoir). And for my paid subscribers, who truly keep me going on this platform – I could and would not be able to put in these hours without them/you – I have more of the Johnny Marr mammoth interview extracts, and there will also be the intended pleasure of another Crossed Channels podcast. And if with all of that, a week goes by with but a single post, or even none at all, well, I consciously paid it forwards with the five Buzzcocks single(s) posts in five days this last month.

For everyone who has ever taken a leap of faith, this trip is for you. And for anyone who has not done so, life is longer than you think – until it isn’t. You still have time, while you have the time.