I had an internet-free day yesterday. In many ways, it was lovely. I regained a sense of calmness. Since I know that I can't just "check" something online (which can send me down a dopamine-fueled rabbit-hole), the itch goes away. And the world doesn't end.
However, it's frustratingly difficult to do this. Basically, I just want to reproduce a day of only maybe 25 years ago, where you had a phone, address book, physical calendar, the yellow pages to look up phone numbers, maps, and paper books. And you managed to get through the day, and even thrive, without the constant dopamine hit and distraction of being online.
But there are so many companies out there, making a profit out of our desire for convenience, and our evolution-fueled longing for newness and novelty. And almost everything requires the internet.
At the beginning of the day, doing mundane things like weeding, sweeping, etc. - it felt like deprivation to do these chores without listening to podcasts. It feels like I'm missing a treat. But I've come to believe that disconnecting regularly is critical, for ideas, for calmness, to live as a reasonable human as opposed to a consumer.
The addictiveness of the internet is unfortunately NOT like the addictiveness of cigarettes or alcohol, where it's possible to just STOP cold turkey. You don't NEED either cigarettes or alcohol.
But the internet is like FOOD. Food is different from cigarettes or alcohol in that you must have it. With food, to limit consumption and maintain a healthy weight, you need to come up with rules, a plan, what's okay and what's not okay. And that can be very challenging. The vast majority of people are overweight or obese.
I have a pretty good strategy for food. Even before my carnivore days, I was successful at maintaining a healthy weight. Basically, I ate zero processed food, cooked at home, did restaurants occasionally but no appetizers, bread, or desserts. And I weighed myself very regularly. And that worked.
I'm trying to do something similar with the internet. It's hard to resist, because I must have certain aspects of it. In today's age, almost everyone needs the internet, for all kinds of reasons.
The strategies for cutting back are still being worked out. There's all kinds of productivity apps with which you can limit your time on certain websites. I've tried a bunch of them and am not impressed.
My rules for the digital detox yesterday were - no internet on my main laptop. I did use my laptop to write down some notes, and edit some things. On my phone, I only used phone and text and a mapping app. All the other devices (another laptop, a device to listen to podcasts on) were put away high up in the closet. My old kindle for book reading is fine since I never connect it to the internet.
I did a longish hike to a new area with family, some cooking, lots of sewing, and called family on the phone. It's amazing, how when you do NOT have access to a whole world of addictive information at your fingertips, you become much more aware of your surroundings. You start noticing things.
Here's some of the things I do, that makes a regular digital detox much easier:
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I'm completely off Google docs. Previously I used them very extensively. That means I have everything I need on my laptop, no internet access needed. I just use mostly text files, and Libre Office Calc/Writer sometimes, and it all works just fine. I can actually do productive things, even though I'm not online. That wasn't true before I got all my info local.
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I always carry a tiny notebook and pencil in my pocket, to jot things down. It cuts down on stress and lets me relax, because I know I'm not going to forget something important. Often I'm writing down things I want to do when I get online again.
What will I do differently next time?
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Figure out a better way of turning off the internet on my laptop. I had just cut off network access to the laptop the previous night, but I think it must reset at midnight or something, because it was on in the morning. So I had to fiddle around with it to cut it off. Next time I'll try to turn off the network at the bios level the night before. Or maybe I can do something with the hosts file.
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Instead of just doing a full day digital detox, I'd like to add a half-day, very regularly - like a couple times a week. It feels like so many days go by when I'm spending MOST of my waking ours in front of a screen of some sort, even when I'm NOT working.
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Figure out how to use my Graphene phone for this. As I transition to it, I will try to use some of it's functionality (profiles, etc) to make my digital detox easier to "enforce". Right now, as I'm still on my old phone, I'm using a tool called Slim Launcher, which is okay but very easy to bypass.
How about you good folks? Anyone tried a digital detox recently?