A Wild Idea

What would my life be like without the internet?

I am thinking of doing something crazy. Well, it’s not really all that crazy. But the fact that it seems crazy to me makes me think that I must do it. I’m thinking of going off the internet for 30 days. I can’t help but feel that there is a version of life waiting for me that is so much richer and more present than this one, that there is a version of my brain that isn’t always one tap away from searching the answer to my question, or checking to see if anyone anywhere has tried to contact me. I’m not saying that the internet is the root of all evil or that if I get off of it for a month it’ll magically transform my life. But I think there is some fundamental dependency I have on it that has slowly and subtly made me feel less free and less myself. To be honest, the thought of being offline for a month makes me twitchy. There’s this fear I have that I will miss something, that I’ll be in total isolation, that somehow things will all go very wrong as a result of my absence. And what will I do instead?? That worries me less. It actually makes me a bit giddy to think about. All that time! And less options meaning… more options. Less decision paralysis. Less all-the-world’s-information-at my-fingertips. Maybe I will ask people what they know, maybe I will look up answers in books. I’ll write more, read more words on pages rather than on screens, really work deeply on the things I’m working on, and be unaware of what everyone else is doing.

“Wouldn’t that sustained exposure to a souped-up cognitive collage (the internet) not begin to affect the attention span, the ability if not willingness to sit with one text for extended periods, butting up against its cruxes, trying to excavate meaning from the original rhythms and syntax?” From The Gutenberg Elegies, Sven Birkerts. Parenthetical is mine.

What do I want to get from it? Like, when I come back, what do I think will be different? I’m hoping that it’s a long enough period that it’ll reset my mindset around the internet in general. I’ve grown up with it, it’s always been there, and especially in the last ten years it has become as ubiquitous as air. But I would like to see it as a small part of a very big life, a thing that I can (at certain times and for certain reasons) open up and look at, not something that is threaded through literally every corner of my days.

For anyone who is interested in the specifics of my little challenge, here they are:

The zero contact list:

• Youtube

• Substack

• Instagram

• Pinterest

(these are all the socialmedia-esque ones I use)

The minimal contact list:

• google/searching in the internet browser.

  I say minimal because, while I intend not to do this at all for the next 30 days, if it’s time sensitive or truly necessary I’ll do it. I want this whole thing to be about changing my mind, not rigidly following a set of rules.

The exceptions:

I’ll be keeping spotify for music but I’ll only be listening to stuff I’ve pre-downloaded, along with CDs and the radio. I did a little experiment yesterday and, while I was listening to a playlist on spotify, I didn’t let myself skip any songs. Even songs that I disliked I sat through and sometimes they grew on me. I hadn’t realized just how instant-gratification even my music listening had become! Music streaming allows us to listen to anything our hearts desire at any moment, and if we experience even the slightest discomfort of a song we don’t love, we can skip it. I can’t help but feel that this is very unhealthy for my mind. It zaps me of patience, curiosity, and open-mindedness. So while I won’t make a rule about it, I do think I will lean into listening to full albums and try not to skip songs.

I will also be using my audiobook app, and staying in touch with my Patreon community.

The obvious ones:

And of course I’ll keep using the internet for things like banking or checking my email, though it occurs to me that it will be very hard to receive Substack articles in my inbox and not read them! Yet I feel that it’s an important part of the experiment— I need to disprove the idea that the world will end if I’m not looped into my online life, and substack articles, as beautiful as they are, reside in my online life.

So that’s the last you’ll hear from me for about 30 days and I pinky promise not to come back and claim to be more enlightened than you. Without the internet, I wouldn’t have found a place like this to share my thoughts with strangers and make friends and connections in the process, and for that reason I must clarify that I am not anti-internet.

So much love for your kindness and support of my writing and everything that I have the gift of being able to share with you on here.