I got on a lot of planes this spring.

I want to tell you what I was actually doing, because at first I didn't see it myself. I told myself I was traveling to meet readers, to gather feedback, to close the loop on a fellowship and a book and a degree. All true. But somewhere over a few thousand miles it landed: every single thing I did this year was the same move, made over and over.

Leaving the screen to get back in the room.

The fellowship with Harvard's Center for Digital Thriving ended May 31st — and what it gave me wasn't a line on a page, it was a year of sitting in actual rooms with people who study how children navigate their screens. The dissertation I'm now defending is hundreds of pages arguing, in the end, one thing: that the self gets flattened by every system built to hold it, and the cure is to be met as more than the flattened version. The book coming this August is a how-to for the same return. And all that travel — the hugs that used to be usernames — was me refusing to let this work stay where it started, behind glass.

I didn't plan it as one gesture. I noticed it as one. And I think that's worth handing to you, because I suspect your year has a thread like this too — some single quiet move you've been making in a dozen disguises, that you won't see until you stop and look back along the line.

Here's what I've come to believe: the screen is a doorway, not a room. It's extraordinary for finding each other. It was never meant to be where we live. Everything good that happened to me this year happened after I walked through the door — and the screen's only real job was to tell me which door.

So that's the gift I keep trying to give and receive: letting the space breathe. Letting the boredom breathe. Letting the I-don't-know-ness breathe — because those silences are where the room actually is, and the feed is built to never let them happen.

Start your day and end your day with humans. Preferably one or two.

I'll see you in the room.

Michael Davis is a Doctor of Science Candidate in Cyberpsychology at Capitol Technology University, a Harvard Center for Digital Thriving Forever Research Fellow, and the founder of MindfulBytes.io. His forthcoming book CTRL+ALT+HAPPINESS: How Teaching Presence Helps Us Raise Emotionally Connected and Resilient Humans in a Digital World drops later this year.

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