I often see posts from people who return from Internet sabbaticals proclaiming that they made an unexpected discovery — they didn’t really miss anything because nothing important happened while they were away. I don’t think that is an honest assessment of the offline experience. A more accurate description is that whenever you spend a significant amount of time offline, you miss almost everything — but that’s ok.

I just spent about 10 days with very minimal online interaction because we had a newborn in the hospital. I caught up on some reading today and realised that I missed a lot of great stuff. It made me anxious for a while — until I realised that the “I didn’t miss anything” crowd might just be a little bit caught up in their own reality distortion fields.

The secret to a healthy and balanced online life that doesn’t give you FOMO when you’re offline is not to deny that you’re going to miss a bunch of great stuff while you’re gone. The secret is to take a deep breath and realise that it’s ok to let the vast majority of information pass you by, as long as you really take in the things that matter. Don’t just retweet. Internalise. Write. Think. Figure out how the words apply to you. Make the time count, and then surrender the rest:

Surrender is the realization that you do not have time for everything that would be worth the time you invested in it if you had the time, and that this fact doesn’t have to threaten your sense that you are well-read. It is the recognition that well-read is not a destination; there is nowhere to get to, and if you assume there is somewhere to get to, you’d have to live a thousand years to even think about getting there, and by the time you got there, there would be a thousand years to catch up on.

Or as Chris Bowler so eloquently puts it:

If the quality is there, I’m thrilled to be weaned down on my quantity.

This is the only way I know how to make peace with the fact that everything happens while I’m offline.

You may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a few days. I just wanted to let you know that I have a very good reason — possibly the best reason. On Thursday evening at 9:15pm our second baby daughter was born! Things are a bit hectic right now because she is still recovering in NICU. I wrote down a few thoughts about the experience in case you’re interested. So please bear with me as we get back on our feet, and then I’ll start posting regularly again.

I do, however, want to share a post that has been on my mind constantly over the past few days. In A Brief Pause Ethan Kaplan talks about the role that Facebook plays in building stronger communities. At one point he said something that really resonated with me:

I missed seven years of people because I had no means of finding them. Finding them over the last seven years led me being there for a friend, however I could, in a time of the greatest need. I can fault Facebook for a lot, and scholars and critics can fault computer mediated communication for a lot, but I can never give enough credit to both for making that possible.

It’s true. We complain about Facebook a great deal, but I can attest first-hand to the strength of the community in time of need. But this brings up some other, more complicated thoughts. How comfortable are we with sharing our struggles on social networks? We’re having a good discussion about this on Google+ if you’d like to join in. At one point I said this:

I’m happy to post links, jokes, and sunset photos far and wide. But now that I need the community to support us, I’m a lot more hesitant. I traced the root cause of my reluctance to share more openly what’s going on in our lives to the fact that I don’t want to be a downer on people’s timelines. See, if the language of social networks is likes and hearts, doesn’t that guide us to only share the good and ignore the bad? Where is the room to say “Hey, I need help right now” when the nomenclature to respond to that doesn’t exist?

And with that, I’ll leave you with a photo of Emery, and a promise that we’ll get back to our regularly scheduled programming soon.

Joshua Gross’s post Nothing is Quite What it Seems struck quite a nerve for me:

In this world of constant communication, it’s easy to feel as though everyone else’s life is amazing, while you’re still sitting there eating cereal in your underwear.

Of your 2,000 Facebook friends and 300 people you follow on Twitter, it’s inevitable that some small percentage are doing something interesting at any given moment.

Looking at it the other way around, though, the vast majority of people are sitting around wondering why they seem boring, just like you.

As a father to a 3-year old, I feel particularly boring these days as the exotic photos fly by on Instagram. Joshua’s post reminds me of Sherry Turkle’s phrase “Who will hold a brief for the real?”, which I referenced in this post.

A few months before my daughter was born I created a virtual list in my head called “The dad I want to be”. The list got constant attention as I added, edited, and deleted stuff while I waited in line somewhere or lay awake at night. It was a good list, and I was proud of it. And then, on the morning of my daughter’s birth, I lost the list.

At first there was just no time to look at it, so I put it in a brain compartment somewhere for safe keeping. One evening a few weeks later I looked for it, but I couldn’t find it. I searched around for a while, but then there was a dirty diaper, and, you know. One thing led to another.

Today, more than two years later, I still haven’t found that list. To be honest, I stopped looking for it a long time ago, because I realized something very important. I realized that it doesn’t matter how many idealistic, theoretical guidelines you come up with before you become a parent. Once your first child is born, you just become the dad you’ve always been inside. The one that most resembles a personality that’s been shaped by years of experiences and the people around you. Some are lucky — they’re natural parents who slip into the new role comfortably. Others have a harder time with the transition, and end up making weird and scary realizations about themselves. I’m part of the latter group.

Nothing is more humbling than the day-to-day experiences of being a parent. Nothing is more effective at shining a spotlight on all on’s flaws and shortcomings as a human being. But luckily that’s not the only side of the story. Parenting is also a fantastic catalyst for personal change.

Those of us who spend the first few months of parenting with a look of total bewilderment in our eyes learn to do things a little differently. Slowly and with painstaking effort, I started to chip away at all the things that were not “The dad I want to be”. I failed constantly, but then one day I had a small victory over my instincts. The small victories eventually turned into big ones, until one day I realized that I’d just made it through a tantrum and managed to put our daughter to sleep without becoming flustered or losing my cool. I celebrated with a mental high five, and then I got back in the game immediately, because becoming a better dad is not a journey with a neat ending.

I wish someone told me this before we had children, so I’m telling you this now. Throw out your preconceived ideas of what it means to be a dad. You’re already a dad, and ther’s nothing you can do about it at this point. But once your child is born, don’t beat yourself up when you discover that the dad you are is not exactly the dad you want to be. Instead, identify the things you don’t like, and fix them. One minuscule, frustrating, gratifying step at a time.

The best article I read all week is Eric Puchner’s The Cooler Me. Puchner wondered what his life would have been like if he had made different choices, so he set off to find his doppelgänger to see what he’s missing out on. The results are funny and poignant, and it’s just such a well-written article. If you’re a parent, I think you will particularly enjoy it.

It’s very long, and hard to quote from, but here are just a couple of paragraphs as a teaser:

For some reason, I told [my doppelgänger] Kyle about how I’d asked my daughter recently what she wanted to be for Halloween, and she’d said “a confused chicken.” This apparently meant dressing up like a chicken but pretending not to know what she was. I couldn’t help thinking she’d hit upon a deep ontological truth: the idea that who you were would be obvious to everyone else but yourself.

And shortly thereafter:

There’s a reason we drift toward attachment, I think, as we get older - attachment to people, to work, to things. As death moves closer, we try our hardest to dig in. We pound in the stakes so that our tents don’t blow away. Still, it makes sense to me that the perceptions we once had of ourselves would be hard to cast off. We miss our youth, our freedom — which is not the same thing as wanting it back. We may think it is, but it’s not. We’re all confused chickens.

But please, do yourself a favor and carve out some time this weekend to read the whole thing.

John Barber writes about the problems with reading on tablets in Books vs. screens: Which should your kids be reading?:

The hyperlinked, text-messaging screen shapes the mind quite differently than the book, according to Wolf. “It pulls attention with such rapidity it doesn’t allow the kind of deep, focused attention that reading a book 10 years ago invited,” she says. “It invites constant change of attention, it invites multitasking. It invites, in other words, a kind of triage of attention.”

Such a skill is certainly necessary in the 21st century, she adds. “But it does not have a place in the deepest kind of immersive thought.”

I’ve definitely noticed this in myself. I get fidgety after reading a few pages on my Kindle, wondering what I’m missing elsewhere on the web. I find myself struggling to embrace boredom. It’s not a good trend.

Related: it’s a good thing I just bought this.

I completely agree with Gabe Weatherhead’s views on apps made for kids in The Value Of App Reviews:

My number one reason to give a bad rating and review is when an app made for kids has both up-sell and review requests plastered all over the screen. They are trying to prey on small children tapping anything that pops on the screen. If you make a kids app, do not put links to your other apps in the game. Put them in the preferences. Put them in the app description. Hell, put them in some kind of app documentation. But when they are in the game, you are telling me that you’re shady and unscrupulous and I can’t trust your app.

This is a dark pattern, and I simply delete the app if I come across this kind of design. For some better patterns to follow when designing apps for kids, see Luke Wroblewski’s Touch-based App Design for Toddlers.