David J. Siegel, on the goods to be enjoyed in pulling back, in both long and short spurts, from the frenzy of modern public life:

Respite is a natural adaptive response to a world that is too much with us, as the Romantic poet William Wordsworth put it, a world that might be improved by less (not fewer) of us in it. When people are exhausted, disengagement provides temporary relief from persistent feelings of overwork and a blessed release from our enervating entanglements. What society cannot countenance, it seems, is prolonged disengagement, which tends to be conflated with civic apathy or indifference.

Seldom do we reckon with the costs of civic engagement or even frame that as a problem unto itself. Yet staying abreast of current events under the guise of doing our civic duty produces not just an informed (and occasionally misinformed or disinformed) citizenry but can also result in documented instances of information fatigue syndrome. In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found a high likelihood that extreme weather events, which increasingly dominate the international news cycles (as they properly should), have an adverse effect on mental health. The social media from which many of us reflexively gather our news and perspectives increasingly command our attention, virtually eroding opportunities for independent thought. In short, there is much to be anxious about, and moments of Thoreauvian withdrawal, in which we remove ourselves from the grid, might allow for some measure of self-preservation and sanity. […]

It is often only in the interludes that we come to realise just how much our busy lives are an active conspiracy against the very things that supposedly give our existence a deeper sense of meaning and purpose. Little interruptions of the usual can be an invitation to pause and reflect, a rare opportunity for the deep noticing and heightened awareness that ritual and routine often obscure.

An underappreciated interpretation of the disengagement phenomenon is that it is what we do – or where we go – to indulge what the literary critic A D Nuttall in Dead from the Waist Down (2003) called ‘the invisible life, the life of the mind’. That language is vanishing from our culture, where the patter and patterns of the corporation increasingly take root; observable outcomes, measurable impact and performative productivity are what count (and are counted), as everyone knows by now. Nevertheless, and much to the chagrin of those who envisage a world where human effort is always and clearly in the service of public priorities, there is no getting around the fact that much of intellectual labour is, at base, a private affair, one that is substantially located in the act (and in times and spaces) of withdrawal.

Withdrawal has an almost universally negative connotation in public life, where it is treated as the ultimate transgression and disdained as retreat or defeat – the very opposite of engagement. However, to withdraw is also, crucially, to repair – both to go to a place and to mend. From this perspective, withdrawal is not merely a defeatist tack; rather, it is, or can be, direct action for a restoration of intellectual life – the kind that is free to ask (to fully engage with) impertinent questions – in settings that have practically banished it, made it inaccessible, or are attempting to monitor and monetise it according to terms not of our choosing.