Quitting The Internet (for real)
It was forty minutes after I decided to quit. I was agitated, twitching. Three or four times, I reached for it: where I work, it’s always there. I can’t escape it. I was irritable. I didn’t sweat, but I felt uncomfortably warm. It’s only for a week, I told myself. Only for a week.
The extent to which it had invaded my habits and my interactions—even my thoughts—was shocking. Every move without it was different enough to draw conscious awareness of it. Walking across a large room, sitting in a chair, relaxing at home: all different.
What the fuck was I supposed to do without the internet?
OK, it’s more general than that. I’m doing this Artist’s Way course, and one of the things that happens in it is a week of reading deprivation: no books, magazines, bus adverts, newspapers, etc. The obvious modernization was no more internet. Of course, there are things that don’t involve reading, like youtube, but I decided to follow the spirit of the exercise instead of the letter of it. The results so far have been kind of shocking.
After half a day, what rose from the pit of time left by dislodging and removing the internet was amazing. Shoots of ideas: something to write, something to draw, something to organize, something to build out of carefully cut pieces of wood. And later, what followed? Action. I actually went through a huge chunk of laundry, did some preventative maintenance on my room, practised piano, did yoga, meditated, added another 20km or so kilometers to my commute home, pulled out a sketchbook.
It’s now been two solid days where I’m only allowed gmail and its chat thing, as well as blogging and flickr uploading, which are creative outlets. No wikipedia, no best of craigslist, nothing about software development, security or politics. No silly animal pictures, no comics, nothing. I still don’t know what to do with all of the time that’s reappeared without it; the only thing seems to be to act on all of these ideas. So I’m letting myself blog again, and I suppose uploading to flickr will be ok, and one tweet per blog post until I finish. Otherwise, I think I’ll make stuff.
