A life without internet

I'm ready to give it all up. Almost. Someday. I promise.

I’ve been spending the last few days at home in Joplin, Mo., and it’s been a nice break away from the big city. It’s also given me a chance to hang out with mom and with my brother and his wife and their extremely cute and energetic kids (ages 4, 6, 14). It’s been nice! It’s also been a chance to unplug, but only sort of. Mostly this trip has been an opportunity to think about what it means to unplug — which is a very different thing than actually doing it.

Earlier this year my brother ditched his iPhone and got a Light Phone II — a new-age “mindfullness” device that offers everything you could ever want from a phone that pretends like it was made in the George W. Bush years. It’s a phone with no internet. It makes phone calls and it texts. I think it also has a clock/alarm and it might play mp3s? The phone has a kindle-like LCD screen instead of the usual smartphone display, so it can’t do graphics. It is incapable of scrolling through a “feed” of anything. My brother hated it at first and found it massively inconvenient, but now he thinks it’s great.¹ That is, to the extent he thinks about it all, which he really doesn’t. That’s really the point. It’s a phone because you need a phone, but you’re not supposed to think or care about it.

The Light Phone II. It’s a phone.

And in general, this makes a lot of sense. Because my brother more or less hates all technology that was invented after about 2010. He’s on zero social media. There are no smart devices or doorbells or smart speakers in his house. The only available music he has is on vinyl records or CDs. He and his wife have a TV, but it’s not hooked up to cable or any streaming service — it only plays DVDs. (their mantra is “Physical Media Only! No scrolling!”). They have laptop computers to do computer stuff, and he says they’re probably going to get a family desktop pc soon. By 2022 standards, their household is practically Mennonite.

They come by this honestly, of course. My brother and his wife are both high school teachers, and my brother in particular feels like his job is made all but impossible by students’ addiction to smartphones. This book did a lot to shape his thoughts on the subject. The kids he teaches do not know what it means to put their phone away and focus in a deep, concentrated way on what they’re reading or thinking about. Teenagers are obsessed with what their friends are doing at all times in any world, but a world with smartphones is one in which kids are never, ever truly present. So yeah.. my brother is a bit of a crank, and he really hates phones and phone-centered thinking, so this is his way of saying good riddance to all that.

Out here, nobody cares about your status updates.

And here’s the thing. The choices my brother and his wife have made in this area make so much sense to me. Like.. I’m not raising small children, but if I was, I would want them to have a childhood that’s as free of the internet as possible. They’re children, and they only really know what’s put in front of them. If what’s in front of them is a screen — an iPad or a phone with TikTok or YouTube or whatever — that’s what they will see and value. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself, but a childhood should be so much richer and more interesting than whatever’s on the internet. Let them come to the internet when they’re old enough to think of it as a tool rather than just the medium through which life is experienced. Obviously, that’s in part my own prejudice at play — my own childhood was completely offline. I’m nostalgic for the analog life that existed before everything became a hyperlink to something else.² But I don’t know how it’s possible to raise kids who will be intentional about their internet use if they’re having the internet shoved into their brains from the time they’re able to walk. And that’s leaving aside any question about how it will prey on their insecurities and anxieties in their teenage years. The smartphone internet has barely been around for a decade — and it’s changed everything! I don’t think we yet know what it means to have a child’s brain develop in such a way as to always be ready to look something up, or look at a screen to avoid a split second of boredom or indecision. The internet is a great thing, but you have to be able to put it down and walk away. And the internet never lets you decide to do that because it will always be there. It will ALWAYS give you a million more options for how to waste your time, hit refresh, find more algorithmically-tailored content that will keep you watching or scrolling or searching until you’re cross-eyed and start to feel a little sick. I’m not saying anything we don’t all know here — the phenomenon is an obvious one. This feeling is universal. What my brother’s choices are causing me to reflect on is — maybe it doesn’t have to be?

Anyway. As a parent, my brother has a strong incentive to live as much of an off-line life as possible — both in order to be a good role model for his kids, and to be sure that he’s not missing parenthood because he’s too busy scrolling.³ And he insists that his girls are actually happier without the endless stream of internet choices all around them — they play better, and are more creative and more engaged, precisely because there aren’t a million shows or cartoons somewhere on a TV or iPad that all need to be scrolled through and considered. None of this is really applicable to me for where I am in life, but .. I think about it a lot.

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As for myself: Am I too much online? Almost definitely. So what should I do about it? This is where I struggle. I’ve written before about how I quit Facebook. That was honestly pretty easy to do, because Facebook stinks and there was no point in keeping it up. But I spend way too much time on Twitter, and I struggle with forcing myself to disconnect. Twitter is enjoyable! I get news updates, funny little interesting moments from my friends, links to stuff I want to read, oddball memes and thirst traps — it’s all there in one endless scroll, and it saves me from feeling like I’m alone in the middle of the workday. But it’s also so mindless and toxic.⁴ As a society, Twitter is surely, undeniably making us dumber. I use it without thinking, without any purpose at all, and, much as there might be engineers in Silicon Valley working on this, there’s no quality filter. Tweets are good, or garbage, or cynically negative or dunk-y or outrage-y or ignorant or clichéd or uninformed or pointless or whatever, but they’re certainly not worthy of the amount of time I devote to them. Twitter is just there and that’s really the only argument in its favor — look at it, because it’s here, and you’re bored.

Let’s all share our twitter thoughts.

Besides Twitter, my other smartphone crutch, Instagram, is no better.⁵ Again, I'm stating the obvious here, but by damn, this app really sucks, and I still keep using it. My friends are all on it. I'm posting stories, and they're posting stories (some of them fun and clever and cute!), and my bored monkey brain really wants to see the stories. The messaging part of the app is a mess, and I forever have a pile of unread messages and little ❤️/😂/😍 responses to things that I don't quite know what to do with. But aside from that, it's endless ads and influencer reels in a timeline that cares not at all if i actually see my friends' posts as long as I keep seeing the ads and reels. It's all very TikTok-influenced.

// I did have a paragraph here about TikTok but I cut it out because honestly, I don’t use TikTok, and I don’t have anything to say about it. I get that more and more, it’s the time-wasting app of choice for people young and old, but.. I’m sitting it out. Like.. yes, I see people scrolling TikTok, and it looks like the phone app version of flipping through cable television because you’re bored. But whatever. That’s all I know to say about TikTok.

Mostly I just want to be able to concentrate again and not feel the constant low-key anxiety / restlessness that comes from online life. I mean restlessness in the sense of, “I’m bored, give me something to look at, why aren’t there any more fun tweets to read since the last time I checked an hour ago or 30 seconds ago.” But I also mean restless in the sense of “I’m doing a fun thing, I want to post about it. Does this post look right? Should I wait to post until I can take another, better picture at x thing?” It’s this constant nervous dialogue with myself and it doesn’t matter and I should let it go. Online life feels more engaged than real life, but it isn’t. Texting or emailing to check in with friends is fun and important, but posting passively and waiting to see if your friends like it or comment or think you said something clever (or, and this is the most sought-after outcome — secretly think you’re cool and envy you for something you said or did online) — that’s much, much worse. It all feeds the worst impulses and the worst insecurities and I just .. so often anymore, I just want out.

poorly drawn lines @PDLComics

everything

Anyway. I like my physical media collection, and maybe I should spend more time curating it. Maybe I could join my brother and forever pretend I’m living in the year 2005 or so. I should try to slow down, read more books, watch more movies straight through without pausing out of boredom to just look at my phone (cue the New Years resolution talk starting in a couple months).

But I don’t think I’m ready to give it all up and get a Light Phone. It seems like too extreme a solution, if I could just get a handle on my phone habits myself. Buy I’m just so tired of always checking! I’m tired of the nervous tic — reach into my pocket, there’s my phone. Standing awkwardly for a moment, not sure what to do — phone. Walk by my phone on the table, wake it up, see if there are any alerts. Reach a momentary pause while writing this very post — pick up my phone and scroll for a few seconds. Hit a point of interest in a random conversation with someone (“Did this song come out in 2010 or like 2012?” “What was the name of that movie he was in with Laura Dern?”) — stop talking, reach for the phone. It’s constant. The phone stands ~between~ me and just about everything I want to do, except maybe running or working out. I want to be free of it. Occasionally I manage to break free for a few hours, but .. I need to do better.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about here in Joplin these past few days. I might radically scale back my phone usage. I might pull back from social media in a big way and annoyingly insist that my life is now Better and More Focused. Or I might not. I don’t know. I haven’t cracked this code yet. So in the meantime, I’ll keep writing out my little thoughts on Substack. And posting on LetterBox. And BeReal. But Instagram still sucks.

1. He is playing his part in our long family tradition of shunning technology. My 92-year-old aunt stopped her technological advance with the kitchen toaster. She lives on her own in New York, and has no microwave, no answering machine, no cell phone, no internet of any kind. Give her a pack of cigarettes and she’s basically Fran Lebowitz.

2. See, for example, some nostalgia-laden I Miss the 90s / 90s Movies Were Great post that I’m probably going to write here before too long.

3. But let’s not ignore the obvious place of privilege he occupies that lets him do this. My brother lives in a small town of 50,000 people. He never needs to Uber anywhere. He’s not on dating apps trying to meet people. He never has to look up an address on Google Maps or re-load a Ventra card with the mobile app. He does not go to restaurants that insist you scan a QR code. He has no daily Wordle streak or fitness tracker or airline app or mobile banking app or any of it. He recognizes that it would be nice to have a decent camera to take pictures of the kids, so he’s going to get a digital camera for that. “What else is there?” he insists. Nothing. The answer is nothing.

4. Twitter is also dying, as recent news items suggest. Maybe Elon will be the nail in the coffin that really kills it. But like.. what a horrible thing to wish for in something you ostensibly like? “I use Twitter all the time. I can’t get enough of it and I hope it crashes and burns so I don’t use it anymore.”

5. I know there are a ton of articles out there saying that Instagram has peaked / is now in decline / is getting ever more desperate to serve advertisers rather than users. I think that’s probably all true, but like .. it’s not really causing us to stop using it, is it? I wonder about Vero. Does anyone use Vero? What if we all switched to Vero? Obviously this is a solution that solves absolutely nothing, but as long as I’m going to be another garbage brain on the internet, it would be nice if I had more friends on an ad-free, algorithm-free site that wasn’t as awful as Instagram.