Ask HN: Have you ever gone without a computer or phone for an extended period?
I'm wondering if anybody in the community has ever attempted this and would like to share their experience.
A handful of questions to seed the conversation (but please don't feel obliged to answer them all): - What did you give up? How long was this for? Was this intentional or due to external circumstances? - What were your motivations for giving the technology up? - Was your overall experience positive or negative? In what ways? - Did you notice any changes in your happiness, focus or stress levels? - Is an "all-or-nothing" approach as such unrealistic? Would a strategy of using tech "in moderation" be more suitable? - Do you have any advice for how someone could regain focus, avoid distractions and generally use technology in a more mindful manner?
If you happen to know of any interesting blog posts/articles/previous discussions on the topic, please share.
Thanks in advance for your insights!
193 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadIt was very insightful for me to do an introspection of how I interact with techonology and broadly with consumerism and change some aspects of it to focus on what is really meaningful to me.
[0] http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf [1] audiobook: https://youtu.be/n5ITyifcYy8
The "thought leader" thing was supposed to be a joke.
Yes, I got your point but it could be misinterpreted. Plenty of people are quite unaware of where these ideas actually come from, and who deserves credit for them.
It's the same stupid arguments that people use to justify population control due to "overpopulation". There's a school of thought called anti-civilization that's a tad similar with some divergences that offers far more interesting critiques of industry. Once you get through that, post-civilization thought is also rather interesting.
But really, Anarcho-primitivism is essentially fascist dribble disguised as environmentalism and social justice.
Why shouldn't it be taken seriously when it's the only variety of anarchism that's actually self-consistent? You can't run a large, mass society on anarchist principles, because social organization on a large scale will always require some way of formally resolving disputes, and that pretty much implies that conventional politics and "rule" by some over others will be a thing.
I mean, in my mind that's right up there with negative utilitarianism's benevolent world-exploder in terms of clever ideas that aren't good ideas.
Just looking over the introduction, certainly some strong beliefs there, but it does resonate to some degree. It does feel like this rejection of all-encompassing technological progress in favour of simpler human living is present in a number of modern movements. Things like minimalism, mindfulness and paleo diets spring to mind. But then again, maybe these are all manufactured and part of that same technological/industrial/consumerist wave.
It often feels like I switch on my phone or computer and they are instantly steering my attention towards things which I did not intend and which my simple human mind is too weak to fight against. In an ideal world there'd perhaps exist an OS or browser which has been designed with human weaknesses in mind, something to help one direct their attention to what they initially wanted, and to put walls up where one's attention is likely to spill out into mindless consumption. But it does seem like the world is currently structured in a way that technology is incentivized to give us an overwhelming kind of freedom, both in the sense that one is free to easily give in to personal weaknesses, and also in the sense that corporations are free to prey on these weaknesses.
Of course they are. "Rebel", "counter-cultural", "subversive" anti-consumerism is the silliest and most conformist variety of consumerism. :-P
However, it’s pretty hard to escape how globalized disposable culture has stripped many people of tradition, useful sustainable skills, community, health in the food we can consume, and has catastrophically destroyed important and once seemingly inexhaustible natural resources. Corporate abstractions have moved our ability to feed ourselves and build in our local community in favor of branded single use items that once could enrich a wider community to a lesser degree sustainably. Now, due to a confused worship of disruptive extraction we juice a small group of folks into astronomical opulence. Forcing all of us into a minute to minute tax for just existing.
This isn’t just a problem for the poor. The rich are rudderless too. Their children also die deaths of despair due to lack of context and removal from diverse experiences. They spend their whole lives in preparatory intensive training to be the best and miss experiences that create resilience when the world doesn’t open every door. I’m not saying anyone needs to cry for the rich Harvard alum, but the gap means their bubble can only do one thing. Pop.
We have yet to see the full extent of our current supply chain disruption, but I think the Instagram star vegan van dweller trust fund hobo and the kid who just graduated high school in a dying coal mining town will be thinking about minimalism for reasons the same and different. Lack of essential medicines and variety of good shit to eat and drink spark the mind on how you might do more without depending on near literal magic to teleport essentials to you at a rate that our world obviously can’t support any longer.
Certainly very enlightening.
[1] https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/
Technopolis by Neil Postman is an in depth analysis of the way technology shapes society. It’s an easy and looks at technology in the broader sense and how the tool shapes the user.
It is in the same ballpark
https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=9780922915989&i=stripbooks&link...
People, by nature, have one dimensional views about a world that is in actuality multi-dimensional and highly complex.
Humans evolved this way in order to navigate the complexity of the world as quick decisions and judgements aid more in survival than best decisions made at the expense of haste.
It takes a lot of effort and luck to exit our biases and see that even a murderer, child molester, pedophile, rapist, racist, dictator etc. have multiple dimensions.
Not condoning crimes, but honestly I can relate to how someone like Dennis Rodman can chill with Kim Jong Il or even Hitler if he was still alive, but I'm not sure how people in general will react to what I just said and how far above their own biases they can pull themselves.
I guess we'll see with the karma, I used some extreme vocabulary in the sentences above. I think if the OP used the word "Unabomber" instead of "Kaczynski" people would be less forgiving as my initial reaction to his post was positive simply because I didn't recall who "Kaczynski" was...
Candor is a fundamental quality for any CIA associate you should be upfront and open about what you want and expect.
Recognition of the potential for positive contribution by any and all people, some volunteer this willingly, some must be managed into such a contribution or placed in a context that creates positive results from seemingly negative actions.
A person who is truly honest and open will fail to be a spy as he will reveal the true nature of his intentions way too easily. To succeed against foreign opposition you must be deceptive. To be deceptive means you cannot have candor. If the CIA requires candor as a fundamental quality of any associate then that means they require associates to have qualities that set them up for total failure.
Instead the unstated but obvious conclusion that can support two seemingly contrasting requirements to be a successful agent is this:
What the CIA truly values are people who are good at deceiving the organization itself into thinking they are honest and have candor.
Honestly, I don't think anything I said in this post is true.
Thus I did unplug during that period for several month-long trips to Asia but the baseline level of connectivity/online information/ubiquity/social media/etc. was much less than in the 2000s (especially the latter part of the decade).
I think you're also going to get colonies of non-tech people. (The Amish are among the best farmers in the world and have large families. They are the meek who will inherit the world, eh?) There may arise small towns and enclaves that are retro-tech as a way of life.
Now with the world's trivia (far from all the valuable or deep knowledge, even decades in to this experiment, but by god, we've got the trivia covered) available with maybe ten seconds of effort, it's so hard to resist looking up every little unimportant thing. "Who was that actor in that one thing?" Ugh, why do I care? Why would anyone care? ... but yes I'm going to check.
Do you think if you were to do the same trip today (let's assume no covid nonsense) you would use the same balance of technology, or do you think that things have become much more integrated over the last decade?
I ended up losing my camera charger too, so I had to sketch everything I saw in my journal. I got pretty good at it, and realized how much more methodical, thoughtful, and slow sketching is, compared to photography. It was an enlightening experience. I bet you treasure your journal a lot. I certainly do.
I had internet access throughout the whole trip, so I'd say it depends on where you're backpacking.
But more generally, I'm often out of the service area when I'm backpacking here in the US, so no internet for a week or more. I suppose by backpacking I strictly mean multi-day wilderness camping on remote trails, and not well-established treks between huts or campgrounds.
You seem especially triggered by focus issues. What's taking your focus away?
Is it any specific website (I'm looking at you, <social network>). How can you make it less convenient to use that website? Maybe log out every time, or block the dns, or flat out cancel your account.
Is it phone notifications, always pulling you away from the moment you're living? Disable or ignore them. It's pretty hard at first. The key for me was deciding when to direct my attention to my phone. I often put it in airplane mode and throw it in the backpack. Not having it in your pocket beeping all the time helps forget about it.
I quit facebook (and all other social networks, actually) about two years ago. I've been happier ever since. No longer comparing my (not so) hard life to that of others posting vacation pictures. Admittedly, I have recently re-created an account for work purposes. I made sure to unfollow every friend, so nothing is popping up in my feed. Nothing to look at, so I'm not spending time on facebook. It's still useful for one-to-one or group communications, but exposing one's life on it should be considered an offense...
Realistically, it's 2020. You can't get away from some tech, and probably shouldn't. Some parts of my sports actually do _require_ me to have a whatsapp account (damn you whatsapp for not respecting "do not disturb" mode!).
Also if you work in tech, well, no need to elaborate here...
Make it less convenient to waste time. Convenience is key. And turn off notifications/phones when you are busy on something else. Give your full attention to people you are talking to (and if they are on their phone, well it's their loss), other beings you are interacting with, the wind in the trees, or that movie you're watching. Whatever, but do one thing at a time.
For me personally, HN is definitely a focus-stealer (I think I have at least 100 HN tabs open currently, that I really should just go and close). It's a tricky one, because I get a lot of value from it, but I guess that value is diminishing if I'm checking up on things every hour or so. I imagine those who've gone full cold-turkey on HN aren't here to comment, but I'll assume they've found benefit from that. Might have to start DNS blocking this one for a while and see what happens.
I did the friend unfollow trick on Facebook a few years back now, and definitely noticed the happiness benefits straight away, but still often catch myself clicking through random profiles when I do have to travel there.
To your point on convenience, I'm often frustrated by how easy it is to type 'yc' or 'fa' into the search bar in a moment of weakness, and then go down the rabbit-hole of distraction for hours. Obviously, a responsive search bar is an immensely useful feature for a web browser to have but this convenience does often make it easier to do something that is not in one's overall interest.
I was too stressed out at one point and what worked for me was just making myself unavailable for certain periods of the day and handling emails, voice messages, phone calls, etc. in batch mode at scheduled periods of the day.
The details of how exactly you go about doing this will depend on your situation, but it’s quite doable.
In terms of communications, I think the biggest problem is other people's expectations. "Why do you have a cell phone if I can't call you?" They ask. People want to be able to demand your time almost instantly and they have no patience for other methods. If your timeframe for being contacted is a day or two, they just won't contact you.
So, if you do it, be prepared to be the one that needs to contact them. You're the odd person out. Nobody will follow your (to them) weird rules. It can be lonely if you aren't proactive.
Apart from that, I find that social media (especially HN these days, unfortunately) is just depressing. Someone has a bad day. They go on to whatever platform and release their stress by being crappy to someone else. People are depressed, they get some catharsis by unloading their depression on others.
I have to limit my time on HN. Strangely, I hang out on Reddit these days, but only on /r/cheesemaking, which is full of wonderful and cheerful people. For me, this is the key. It's not technology, it's people. The technology brings a lot of disparate people together and often pits you against them for the viewing entertainment of the crowd. Best not to go there, but it's not really technology itself.
In terms of stress levels for communications, I think setting limits for yourself is good. I'm actually very comfortable with being contacted with work. If you send me 100 emails an hour, I'm totally fine with it. Bury me on Slack, and it's OK. I have work habits that allow me to jump back and forth between my work and communication (took me 30 years to get good at it, mind you...) But others sink and I often see it. Communicate your limits and stick to it. If you only check your email once an hour, tell people and just do it. It will (usually) be fine, but you have to be consistent about it.
Again, IMHO, it's not about technology. It's about people. Choose to hang around people you enjoy and who give you energy. Draw defined boundaries for interactions that you can't handle and be consistent. This will give you the best benefit, I think.
I noticed how much the screen alters perception. It's a bizarre 2d world. Completely unreal. We evolved to live in our bodies interacting with objects, but instead we end up glued to pathetic little screens, addicted to "information".
I don't deny our new super powers, but you have to take a break to let the perceptual system reset (eyes, feeling, smell, intuition). This is what is getting amputated. We don't realize it because we are stuffing our visual channel with information.
Much of this gives the impression we are powerful, but it's just overloading the circuitry. It's like primitive humans getting sudden access to salt sugar and fat and just gorging themselves.
At the time, I had a Palm Tungsten and a foldup portable keyboard and would every day or so write a blog post on it. I'd send it out by putting its card (SD?) onto a USB adapter, dragging that to a slooooow Internet cafe where I'd hope I could connect to my Movable Type (Gatsby before there was reasonable JavaScript). If it didn't connect, no bigs.
It might have been the peak happiness of my relationship with the Internet. Just enough.
I got my invite to Facebook a year later.
The town was already overpopulated for its size, but these days I hear it's really extreme. I talked to somebody who was born and grew up there. He said that now there are so many hotels and concrete developments all over the hills. It's just a mess.
I remember at the time there was a bend in the road where you'd face the beautiful Himalaya across the valley, but if you looked down the near embankment you'd see where all the bajillions of plastic water bottles were disposed of for a town that didn't (yet?) have a plan for them. Only tourists such as myself drank them.
Buying notebooks to write in, and books to read, and a radio to listen to, helped.
That said, I would need some way to at least make sure my family is ok, when I'm away from them.
Download every documentation you might need;
Delete every offline-capable time-waster from all your devices;
Remove your phone's SIM card (don't worry, you'll still be able to make emergency calls if such a need arises);
Unplug your internet router (and store it away somewhere inconvenient).
If you have to sync for any reason, go to a expensive coffee shop or the like that has WiFi and do your business there. You'll soon stop going so frequently because it'll hurt on the pocket.
Did you get what you wanted out of the experience?
It's really thrown into contrast the temptation of quickly flicking on a mobile phone or work laptop to check something. There's a mental geographic context as well — I have to go to a specific place to do a specific task, and it can't follow me round the house. It also makes the work / life boundary a little bit clearer.
It's a little inconvenient, but the whole point is to underline the trade-off of that convenience. A week in and I'm tangibly feeling the benefit.
To the original point, I'm parted from my computer for hours rather than days, but it still helps.
At such a retreat, you should expect to give up technology and live according to Buddhist precepts for 10 days, and one of the major claims of meditation is that it will help you unlearn bad habits related to focus and distractions, which can be carried back to the world with you once you complete the retreat.
But in terms of ditching those things after getting used to them, it's only happened when my family went on overseas trips.
A problem for me is that the computer is not just a connection with the outside world, but has become a medium for thinking. Take away my Jupyter, and you've removed half of my brain.
But I've never used social media, so I have less to give up when I walk away from a screen. Unless this counts as social media, which it probably does in a sense.
So, a week without..
I did have access to computers for schoolwork via the computer lab, and used those to handle personal tasks as well. But it needed to be a conscious decision to head into campus and use them. A public library could serve in a similar function.
One negative thing that I vividly remember from those days was having to rely on paper maps and getting horribly lost at times. I don’t miss that at all.
Overall it was probably the biggest period of personal growth in my life. That probably had more to do with the fact that I was experiencing life in a new culture for the first time, but having no screen to retreat to probably motivated me to get out and meet more people.
I too am considering a future that is far less digital than my current lifestyle.
In 2006 I was bike touring the US for 5 months. I got limited internet at libraries and hostels along the way. Pay phones were still a viable way to reach people; I did not carry a phone of my own.
In 2010 I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. Pay phones were no longer a viable way to reach anybody. I got my dumbphone (I valued battery life over internet) mailed to me at Fontana Dam, NC. I got limited internet at libraries and hostels.
In both cases, I didn't miss the internet and all it provides while I was traveling. I have found that it's really easy to fall right back into the same habits when I returned. I wish I could say that either time made a lasting change in my internetting habits, but I haven't managed it.
In my case, the change was driven by the activity and environment. If you do this in your environment, I'd be curious to hear whether you can parlay the cold-turkey approach into a lasting change.
The first couple of weeks were a little interesting but after a while you realise that if it was important then you'd hear about it eventually.
Ah, simpler times.
[1]https://penguin-news.com/index.php/headlines/all-headlines
It was the happiest time of my life.
I don't think it is because I did amazing things but because small nagging feelings went away. For example, I don't need to know about the latest protests on the other side of the world. I certainly doesn't need to wake up to violent images and be shown how much the world sucks, because it steals my focus of what I should be focusing on, _myself_ and my carpe diem day (sound narcissistic I know).
I'm not a social person, but boy was it a game changer.
That said... it's very, very easy to get back into old habits and mentality. After 8 months after I returned to work I was probably the same old semi-depressed but joking me but with a little bit more hope. Also very expensive.
But for your question. I don't think there is anything wrong with computers or mobiles, it's when you get internet-access 24/7 instead of one hour per week that things start to get dicey. So I'd try to just limit that instead if possible. It forces you prioritise the things you _actually_ need from those that you don't.
For about a year, I used the Firefox developer phone with Boot 2 Gecko. It was kind of usable as a phone, but it really made me not use basically any apps apart from some lighter web use. It was surprisingly OK, for me, but sometimes a hassle.
Ever since, I have mostly gone without logging in to my social media accounts. Still am a HN junkie, though.
Lately, I have gone without a personal computer for uite some time; the last nine months or so, instead using my phone exclusively. Originally, I was hoping to be able to use Linux on DeX (with a bluetooth keyboard and a pretty decent 15" USB-C screen from Asus). It worked surprisingly well, but it was not 100% there so unfortunately, I can't quite recommend it. The point is moot, anyway, since Samsung cancelled the beta and removed the Linux on DeX functionality. I do use Termux, which is OK for a lot of things, and tried to use Andronix and similar offerings, but it's just too cumbersome. It's a bummer, because I'm pretty sure the hardware would be OK for the type of usage I need.
Another issue with the setup is that the screen charges over USB-C, so will quickly drain the phone battery. I use a qi wireless charger, which kind of works, but is kind of finicky. I still haven't found an adapter which takes USB PD and "feeds" it into the USB-C cable, ideally charging the phone and powering the screen at the same time. If anyone can give me pointers to that, I would be very grateful.
The downside is that I have zero photos of this time and only fragments in a diary. These days I would have several thousand selfies in front of the major monuments of Europe, like everyone else. The correct number is probably somewhere between those two.
I had basically no news either. Occasionally we would spot a headline in Le Monde or the SdZ. But it was the late 90s, so hardly anything was happening anyway. I think that would be my main reason to isolate from the internet today.