Yesterday I decided to take 24 hours off from the Internet (and the phone).
The fact that this was a significant event that I am now blogging about pretty much says it all.
I’m an Internet addict. I check email, IRC, Twitter, Facebook and Hacker News throughout the day. A lot of my friends do too.
So yesterday on a whim I decided to try a one-day pause and see what would happen.
After just a few minutes, it felt like a vacation.
Stephanie and I were in the Alps over Christmas, so we were, in fact, on vacation. But this was something else — being out of touch was a mental vacation. It felt exciting and remote. What a great feeling! Which I immediately felt like sharing on Twitter. Doh!
I have to admit that I didn’t pick a particularly difficult day to go Internet-free. We were skiing in beautiful mountains. But still, several times I had to suppress the urge to pull out my phone and see what was going on.
It was a little bit hard, but it was mostly great. Relieved of the moment-to-moment choice of being here or on the Internet, I never had to worry about whether I was making the right decision. When we got home, I enjoyed doing my laundry and cleaning the kitchen. What else was I going to do?
Aaron Swartz’s much more interesting and better-written post about taking a month offline came to mind. One lovely detail I remember from that is that he spent a lot more time grooming, cleaning his nails.
The general idea that time offline is good for your mental health is not new or controversial. In fact, it’s amazing how uncontroversial it is, even among the Internet elite. Larry Lessig’s much-admired habit of taking a month offline every year is an extreme example, but I don’t know anyone in the software world who doesn’t admire or even envy a week or weekend spent offline. It’s universally recognized as a healthy thing to do.
We work so hard to build these always-on webs of interconnectivity, and then we sigh with relief when we manage to disengage from them.
The last time I was Internet-free for longer than 24 hours was in 2005 when I stayed in a Buddhist monastery in California for a week. That was a life-changing event for me. But not something you can do all the time.
Now I’m wondering about including a regular “Internet Sabbath” in my life. Maybe one day a week. Or on weekends, no Internet until evening.
Posted on 28 December 2009
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I tried this once, for a whole week. The start is easy but the middle part gets increasingly tougher. The end of course is the hardest part. Its more of a “Oh just two more hours and I can blog about it!” thing.
(Curious to know, are you still a vegetarian?)
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I’m thinking about trying for a longer stretch myself. If I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m still vegetarian. I did start eating fish occasionally this summer, when Stephanie and I were in French Polynesia for our honeymoon. Some of the islands we visited had harsh coral soil and couldn’t grow any vegetables or fruit. So if you didn’t eat fish you were pretty much stuck with coconuts. I caved and ate some fish. Last week I had a piece of salmon. It’s a once-in-a-while thing, still.
Sometimes I wish I could eat meat, because it’s such an easy way to get protein, and it smells so good, but I still find it disgusting. When people ask me why I’m vegetarian, that’s what I tell them: meat grosses me out. Why don’t you eat insects?
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As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, taking two full weeks offline for a vacation was amazing…that was Nov 2008, and we replicated it largely on vacation this summer, but only for a week or so. It is a remarkable experience. I read more. Books, that is. Total number of words consumed was probably a lot less. I read recently that we take in some 100,000+ words per day, all told — web, email, radio, tv, conversations, etc. If you aren’t consuming those words from other sources, that’s a novel per day. And that’s what I averaged when I was offline and on vacation in France.
Maybe it’s just a matter of how much our brains can actually consume and process. If we’re offline, we have the capacity to consume information from other sources, perhaps? Either way, I find it incredibly relaxing. The internet — irc, im, twitter, facebook, email, web, rss feeds, all the rest — is simply exhausting much of the time. Our attention is so stretched and we’re switching context so often. I’m amazed we manage to pull it off, especially on a daily basis.
I tried going offline for weekends, but it just doesn’t work. I figure a two week internet-free period every year is sufficient — and it really feels like a vacation then. Possibly different for people who don’t work in the tech industry.
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I do it sometimes for a few days. Go hiking in the mountains in a place where there is no internet and phone
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Congratulations! I do this fairly often when traveling or snowboarding for a weekend. Though I’ll say it’s much easier because I don’t have an internet phone.
It’s amazing how much time we “waste” doing online stuff that adds little to our lives. I try to limit it so that I experience more of the real, physical world… and meet people in person… but that’s hard when I’m trying to publicize a book online
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Once in a while I do get an offline day, some times intentionally, some time by accident. But the hardest part, for me, is to make it a habit.
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I found it pretty easy to go for a week with no internet while on a cruise despite being pretty addicted to the internet. Something about laying by the pool and scuba diving managed to distract me… (skiing would probably be the same)
However, we had no electricity for 14 days due to hurricane Ike a while back.. that was torture.. no way to check maps for areas of Houston with repairs, no way to update friends on the latest propane gourmet… I actually felt relieved to go back to work just to surf the net.
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Why do people find it so hard to be out of touch? I spent a couple of months recently travelling South America – roughly half the places I stayed at had provided free internet, and that was more than enough for me to keep in touch with friends and family, without having to stop off at internet cafes a couple of times a day…
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I think it’s simple addiction.
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So glad to see you had a positive experience with this too.
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It would be very hard to go without, internet, phone, tv and cell phone for a week.
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