Shane Hankins is an advocator for The National Day of Unplugging and the COO of Reboot. Unplugged is a project by Reboot that emphasizes the importance of taking time away from our phones and removing the toxicity of social media. This project is an outgrowth of the Sabbath Manifesto which is a interpretation of their ancestors’ traditions of spending one day a week by being in nature, unwind, connect with family, and relaxing. After talking about Unplugging in a Convocation at Chapel Feb. 20, Hankins shared his opinions about unplugging, his love of music and his overall outlook on life with student journalists in The Garage at Bethel.

By Entertainment Staff

The most important thing about unplugging to me is about reconnecting with relationships and people.

If you use a saw every day and you never sharpen it, it goes dull. So if you never take time for yourself and you’re always working—that’s not a sustainable thing.

Don’t look at your phone in bed. Read a book. Read a real book.

Be a little more humble. And number two, be a little more kinder to yourself.

I care more about the conversation I’m having with you than about that virtual connection with that person. So it’s recognizing there’s kind of like a hierarchy of relationships and a hierarchy of social interaction.

I love indie rock and punk rock and the weird kind of music. It used to be hard to find that stuff. If you found some obscure garage rock band from the 60s, that was a big deal. You would go to the record store and talk to people and form relationships. Now all of those bands are on my Spotify discovering recommendations list, and I don’t appreciate them like I did when I had to work to find them.

Jamaican music is the best, especially the pre- Bob Marley reggae

You should be using technology; technology should not be using you.

You had these relationships with people and knowledge was social because it had to be done in person.

So nuns are pretty cool actually if you get the right ones in my experience.

The National Day of Unplugging is relevant to everyone. If the goal in the long run is to be a happy person, a productive person, and the type of person who wants to create change in the world, you do need to set aside space for yourself to unplug and to do things that make you happy. It’s not selfish.

You have to do a lot of prep work to be able to unplug so knowing that I was going on the trip I had to make sure all my work was done. It does take work ahead of time to give yourself space to unplug.

We live in a culture that values action over inaction.

Culture exists to give experiences meaning.

Knowledge is so easy to find – finding information is so easy but figuring out what to do with it has either stayed the same in regards of level of difficulty or has got even more difficult because there’s so much information and so many opinions that it makes it difficult to figure out how you want to act in the world.  

My phone is on silent, because I’m happy to be with you.

–Edited by Bri Shaw