A few years ago I found myself in the toilet without my phone and experienced a surge of actual panic. How was I supposed to fill those three minutes? Don’t answer that. I’ve been waging war on my phone addiction ever since, with slow progress. That is, until few months ago, when I pressed the nuclear button. I’d heard the most successful people use dumbphones, or have no phone, and it persuaded me to embrace the unthinkable. Guys, I turned the internet off. And I need to tell you about the world I discovered.
First, specifics. I didn’t want to spend money or end up talking to a football for company. So I just turned off mobile data. I kept wifi enabled, could call and message. But I deleted all apps that former YouTube designer John Zeratsky calls “infinity pools”: any source of constantly replenishing content. All social media. Email. Google too, the scrollable sum of everything. “You can’t look stuff up?” my friends gasped. My phone was incredulous. “Are you sure?” it asked, for the first time ever. And pressing that button did feel like dying. You should never wake a sleepwalker, right?
