Short Reflection on being Offline for 24 hours<br>12 Jul 2026<br>Short Reflection on being Offline for 24 hours
There are, I think two reactions to the title of this post. One is to scoff at<br>how short a time 24 hours really is; something barely worth mentioning. But<br>another, perhaps less voiced reaction is to think "wow, I can't remember when<br>I last did that..."
When I last did this it was involuntary - I was living in a shack in the<br>mountains and a sheep had chewed through the cable connecting me to the<br>satellite dish, which was in turn connecting me to the web. And so I spent a<br>couple of weekends net-less (with weekdays at a co-working space so I could<br>keep in contact with my client). But I can remember kind of enjoying it,<br>reading things I claimed I would get round to reading but never did, and<br>thinking more deeply. "Maybe I should make it a regular thing" I thought,<br>"just to reset things and get a new perspective...".
That was some six years ago, and the most I'd managed since then is maybe an<br>hour of self-imposed internet exile. But things have been building recently.<br>Having a three your old who - while she does enjoy a cheeky music video or<br>three - is nevertheless content to do things like read, draw, and play with<br>blocks through her day made me reflect. How much was she seeing her father<br>doom scrolling with the excuse of "I just need a break"? Why couldn't I be<br>more like her, and how long until she was more like me? I took note of the<br>contemporary moral panic around kids and smart phones, and I deemed it<br>pointless if society at large was addicted; the generation who had chided us<br>millenials for "always TXTing" on our monochrome nokias were now grey,<br>wisened, and often more addicted to contemporary devices than we ever were.<br>But unlike the generations before or after, I at least had partial immunity<br>from remembering old youtube with it's amateur video content and primitive<br>skinner box mechanisms; of having some natural resistance to the more modern<br>and extreme developments of shorts and AI thumbnails. What hope does a child<br>have of resisting contemporary, weapons-grade slop addiction?
And so I've spent the last 24 hours cut off from the internet as an<br>experiment. Completely self imposed - just disconnected my devices and set an<br>alarm. Once again I read more, once again I thought more deeply, and once<br>again I liked it. My alarm will be ringing soon and I will be lying if I said<br>I wasn't excited to re-connect. And nor am I trying to say that the internet<br>itself as some wholly negative thing - after all, that's where the things I<br>read come from; the best written material the world has to offer, saved to my<br>machine. And yet despite the incredible upside of the internet, I can't help<br>wonder if my continued resistance against its dark side might require more<br>drastic action. I'd already quit facebook, reddit, lobsters, HN<br>(ok...provisionally) bluesky, several discords, and most recently I'd been off<br>youtube entirely for days. But there's always a hook back in. "I can't quit X"<br>I tell myself, "I've met so many great people... oh what's that, tech drama?<br>Well they surely need to hear my opinion..."
My time online draws near. The ever-full needle of stranger's opinions hovers<br>tantalisingly over my swabbed, tensed arm. Still, I like to think I've taken<br>the first step.