In 2012, magazine editor and journalist Michael Harris was experiencing a digital overload. Frustrated with spending most of his day staring at glowing computer screens and responding to pings, he decided to leave his job and focus on something he felt had more meaning.

Harris's debut The End of Absence is a timely look at what it's like to be a part of the last generation who will remember life before the Internet. In his own words, Harris describes the process of writing his first book.

"The biggest thing I learned while writing this book was how the future that we're living in is really part of a very long historical progress, that the end of absence is not about Twitter in 2014 but about the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. It's about the invention of the telegraph and of television. It's this massive human project of creating communication technologies that allow us to lasso larger parts of the world. As much as we think of the Internet as a brand new problem, it's really just the latest step in a much vaster human problem — which is our terror of solitude, our terror of absence, which probably has roots in the most primal parts of us."

"It's very rare for me to write without having books on my desk. I'll have maybe 10 books which I've been reading in the course of leading up to writing. I find the act of writing is an act of channeling all those other thinkers and trying to synthesize their ideas into something, and then running that synthesis through the mesh of my personal experience. That sounds very complex, but it's actually a pretty relaxing experience. Having them on the desk they become objective correlatives for all of the ideas that those books represent. It might not even be the ideas in the book. It could just be the ideas that were swimming in my head at the time that I read that book. They become touchstones for different strata of my own intellectual history."

"A particular chapter of the book was based on attention span, and I wanted to train my brain back to where it was before it had become so addicted to digital distractions. So I decided to read War and Peace in two weeks. That meant reading about a hundred pages a day, which is not that crazy. I would go on these long walks through my neighbourhood and I really found, by the end of those two weeks, that I was able to fall into a kind of reverie — partly because of Tolstoy's writing, but also because I had spent all this time thinking about absence and solitude but hadn't really been giving myself that moment. And in this case I had."

"There were two or three moments in the last haul when I decided that it wasn't working, that the book was a failure, that I was a failure. I think the last 10 percent of writing the book was really a kind of hope against hope that it wasn't a failure. Each of the chapters was printed out for maybe a week at a time at the end and then chopped up into different parts. They would lie around as a kind of collage on the floor of our living room. We had to tiptoe around it. It was really the end of a year and a half of thinking about these ideas that were all so much bigger than my little brain could handle. It felt like I was trying to put a leash on a bull… I would agree with the idea that works of art are never finished, they are only given up on. At some point you say 'I've done everything that I can do,' and that was the only way I could deal with it. I had to feel exhausted. That was the only way I could feel all right with myself. If I was exhausted by the end of it then I knew I had run as hard as I could."