Back to Humanity helps people live well in the modern world. This month, I’m documenting my experience of quitting the internet. Subscribe if you want to follow along👇🏽
One week ago, I quit the internet (except for work). Since I was already restricting my technology usage, I went into this experiment assuming that it was going to be too extreme. I saw myself as the loon who goes from 5Ks to marathons to 320-mile triathlons: Such a radical move has to come with some drawbacks, right? Saying goodbye to the services that we choose over our children, the services that constitute the all-important progress that we seek, must be some sort of regression, right?
No. Zero. Zilch.1
On the contrary, quitting the internet has made shallow, fragmented days more enriching and immersive. The result has been so positive that it’s hard to imagine ever going fully back, and impossible to imagine that this isn’t the future for a meaningful percentage of the population: Just as we’ve seen the return of film photography and vinyl, we’ll see an even more widespread, emphatic exit from all aspects of the digital world.
Immersion
There’s this idea that the content we consume tends towards more immersive mediums; Ben Thompson puts it well:
Facebook, for example, started with text but exploded with the addition of photos. Instagram started with photos and expanded into video. Gaming was the first to make this progression, and is well into the 3D era. The next step is full immersion — virtual reality — and while the format has yet to penetrate the mainstream this progression in mediums is perhaps the most obvious reason to be bullish about the possibility.
However, this definition of immersion is flawed—we should measure how immersive something is by the degree to which we lose ourselves in it. Immersion is when you miss your stop and end up in the Bronx because 1984 melted away space and time, not when you anxiously flit between images of Jay Alvarrez lookalikes skydiving off of helicopters and forty-five-second loops of Joe Biden falling off of a bike.
It follows that the paragon of immersion is flow, and the maximally immersive medium is one that reliably produces a flow state:
A flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time.
Given that we’re happiest when we are in flow, our goal should be to reach it through healthy means as often as we can. For this to happen, we need both an object to experience and minds that are capable of focusing deeply; the more developed our minds, the less intense the stimulus can be. For example, monks often reach this state of mind by simply focusing on their breath while most of us are dependent on a more powerful object—such as running or programming—to get there.
Not only does modern technology not trigger a flow state, it makes it harder for us to reach them by reducing our attention spans, hooking us to dopamine, and increasing our anxiety. Through this lens, many of the services that we use are exceptionally wicked.
Experience
Most people struggle to have flow state experiences regularly: most jobs are built around distractions—constant email checks, quick calls, thousands of slack messages—that make it difficult for workers to find a deep focus during the day. When we are not working, the infinite stimuli that rest on our fingertips encourage us to choose less immersive activities over enriching ones. Thus, we mostly achieve flow states in activities that are removed from our daily lives, such as hiking or skiing.
Quitting the internet won’t change the type of work that you do, but it will make your mind calmer, which will aid your ability to do deep work; that said, it will make you far more likely to choose forms of entertainment that give you daily, immersive experiences.
Over the last week, I’ve been defaulting to long reading sessions instead of Twitter checks, and the results have been extraordinary: I finally finished Anna Karenina, after unsuccessfully battling with it for months, and am nearing the end of Tender is the Night. More shocking than the quantity of reading that I’m doing is the quality of it: before my reading was an enhanced form of skimming because my mind was more restless; now, it’s quite easy for me to fall into the language and navigate books’ various layers.
Socially, my conversations have also transformed into experiences: On Sunday, I went to the beach with a close friend of mine and because we ditched our phones, there was a gravity that developed with every silence, pause, and gesture; if either of us had taken an iPhone out, the whole thing would have fallen apart.
After one week, it’s more clear to me why Aaron Paul hasn’t owned a computer in ten years and refuses to use a smartphone: technological downgrades shape days into long, continuous experiences instead of a series of scattered fragments. It’s in these experiences that I’m learning more about the art of living.
I’ll be back next week with another update :)
Ok, fine—life sucks without Uber—that’s it.