The Mind and Dropping Off The Internet

Words: 2379

I've been pretty active on Gemini for the past 2.5 to 3 years, but for the last month and a half I haven't been around quite as much. Unlike what I've seen here before, it wasn't because I was bored of Gemini, or didn't like it anymore; it was that I noticed I was on my phone too much and so I bought a "dumb phone" i.e., a flip phone with limited features. Initially I intended on performing a digital detox of sorts, but because I found that certain parts of my life improved - with overall enjoyment of life being one of them - I decided to keep it going.

My life without the Internet

Scope of the detox

For the one-month challenge I set out for myself, I resolved that I would still keep my wifi-only Android on me in the case that I needed it for something while out. At home, I would limit its use while on the home wifi. Most times it has sat on a countertop, on my nightstand, or in my pocket. My employer doesn't allow cellphone use at work, so I discovered that upon coming home and reconnecting to the home wifi, I'd not missed much at all, and I caught up on all smartphone related items in 15 minutes or less.

As for not using the internet, I chose a phone that still had navigation and voice-to-text (to ease using T9 texting again). I of course had to use the internet at work, but I do next to nothing personal on my work computer so I don't count this as avoidable addictive internet use. My wife is not part of the detox, so I do use the benefits of her having a phone, but it's in her hands not mine. I also don't consider my streaming television services as "the internet" despite the way they are delivered.

The phone itself is android based, running something like "BasicOS" which has no app store. You get what you get, and that's it outside of updates.

Now onto the details.

Mental Exhaustion

First and foremost I've found that my mental exhaustion has decreased over the last couple of months. Since I'm a knowledge worker, my job is mentally demanding, so when I was "checking out" on my phone I really wasn't giving my mind a break at all - I was continuing to engage it, even if in simple things like thinking about Spellbinding words. In fact, I've avoided playing this game right before bed because - despite my exhaustion - it would wake up my mind, causing problems falling asleep and resulting in unrestful (mental) sleep.

As another example of exhaustion, I used to listen to audiobooks and podcasts while in my car, but I abandoned this practice multiple times over the years because I was filling my only mentally restful moments with more mental engagement, and it was exhausing me.

Identifying the addiction

After detoxing, I realized that my mind was addicted to a constant, albeit mostly passive, input stream of information. Every potential moment of boredom caused my mind to drift to to my phone, resulting in my tapping my pocket to find my phone, and going to grab it, just mindlessly. I had no idea what I was going to look at on my phone, but I was drawn to it to find something. I don't have mainstream social media, but anything on the internet can be habit forming, including Gemini. I found I was refreshing BBS, Station, and going to play Gemini games, even when I'd checked all these things not five or ten minutes prior. This was a form of avoidance of what was going on around me (for whatever reason), a fear of missing something, and an addiction to constant - but shallow - mental stimulation.

I was afraid of having no stimuli.

The closest comparison I can make is to imagine one of your busiest days, and when you get home your mind refuses to stop finding things to do or think about, so you dive into your phone or computer.

Noticing the habits

After I switched to my dumb phone, I started to notice the habits I had. On more occasions than I'd like to admit, I would reach into my pocket to find my phone, presumably to check on something or other, and upon feeling my flip phone, would realize what I was mindlessly doing: I was about to check out, and I had no idea why I was going to use my phone. I also had a bad habit of checking my phone at stop lights...like all of them. I would try to find a few Spellbinding words in the 60 to 90 seconds I had there, or see if someone had posted something on Signal. No one had, and I found maybe 2 words at stop lights for Spellbinding.

Other habits/downtimes:









Breaking normal conversation (and thought) patterns, i.e., mentally living on the internet

It is said that humans can't multitask, and jumping from topic to topic is highly inefficient and mentally taxing for us. It seems odd then, that we have this object that connects us to a highly disjointed array of thought-inducing items called the internet. With rare exception, phones and the internet rarely enable one to engage in uninterrupted, deep learning of a useful topic. Podcasts and audiobooks may be the exception here, but nearly everything else is a constant back and forth of surface grazing of information. We've gotten so used to having information fed to us that we'll spend an inordinate amount of time looking for it instead of thinking what the answer is. A great example of this is when my wife and I are watching a movie and we can't think of an actor's name. We purposefully don't grab our phones for a while but inevitably there's the pull of "we can just find the answer" at the back of our minds. Granted, before phones we may have never thought of it, but, so what if we couldn't find out their name?

Since having a dumbphone, I feel like I'm back to having normal thought patterns again. I've written this before, but I'll say it again here: cellphones make your mind go down thought paths it normally wouldn't have before, and multiple ones at that...potentially all at the same time. Imagine what you'd think about if you didn't have texts in your pocket making you think about this thing or that - what so and so wants for dinner, or how cute someone's kid looks, or literally whatever. What would have that time been instead? I argue it's a thought pattern that's more rooted on what's happening in the real world than anything else. Boredom is good. Instrospective thoughts (even easy ones of "how was my day?") are good. Uninterrupted conversations with your family are good (usually, right?).

Smartphones and the internet force the mind to think outwards all the time, to be in a place that's not really real, that's not here. I argue that this outward thinking and constant engagement of the mind of external thoughts makes one lose theirself, or, if growing up in this environment, to not really understand yourself and how you think. In short, I think the internet and cellphones prevent the development and awareness of self, and even make people afraid of it.

Not only that, but regular conversations are tough now. My wife is constantly on her phone. She's to the point where she has text messages dictated to her by her bluetooth earbud everywhere she goes - at work, while driving, and at the dinner table. To say this interrupts normal trains of thought is a gross understatement, and a point that really gets on my nerves is when I say something and have a 3-5 second delay of a response, or no response at all. the result, up until my detox, was just to join her - if I couldn't have a normal conversation, I'll just check out on my phone too. This isn't to say we don't talk, however, we've been together since before smartphones (just dumbphones) and I've watched the progression, and it's an addiction. The ever-presence (in her ear!) of the internet and other people's thoughts and opinions are everywhere we go now, interrupting the normal flow of what would be going on in our family dynamic. It's not all bad, but, at the end of the day it is a constant redirection of thoughts affecting our daily lives and decisions.

Active vs. Passive Thinking

It took a few weeks, but what I slowly noticed is that I was increasingly at ease with not staring at my phone at every down moment of time, and what happened was that I started letting my mind wander to things that it really needed to figure out. Similar to how people need to "sleep on it" to figure something out, I believe the mind needs "wakeful" rest periods to both actively and passively digest important congnitive issues. Actively, in that you're letting your mind wander to a situation or interaction that was difficult or should require more thought. This could be something as small as a passing comment or something as grand as reconsidering your life's calling. In either situation you are working it out, hopefully in a distraction-free and peaceful location. This can't effectively be done in a busy lunch room at work. I think your mind also passively digests this information because there is no one talking to you and changing how you may think about a situation (for better or worse). I believe this is important because your mind can go down its natural paths to abstracting this information and storing it in your mind.

Conversely, when you're constantly staring at your phone, watching the television, engaging in conversation, or listening to music, etc., you may be thiniking about these items in the back of your mind, or maybe even in the forefront, but it is my opinion that quiet solitude is the only way to really work out what's going on in your life and to really "wrap your head around" it in such a way that you are comfortable with your decision. I'll use my own life as an example. I have a very busy life as a father of two smaller children. I get up early, work a mentally and sometimes emotionally demanding job, return home to get my children from school, make dinner, head to sports, get them ready for bed, and then attempt to clean up the messes in our home before heading to bed to do it all over again. On its own it's a mentally and emotionally challenging life, but what I was doing, was also checking out on my phone in any moment of down time. Stupidly, I thought this was "taking a break" but it really isn't - you have blue lights going into your eyes, waking you up, and even though the information is being streamed to my brain, I still have thought processes sparking up, attempting to store information in my already tired and oversaturated brain. It was really a bad combination, and my mental health directly suffered. One, because I wasn't getting restful sleep, and two, it was compounded in that my mind never really rested, during the day, or really at night because of the evening's mental stimulation. I feel like I wasn't properly abstracting information, processing it, and storing it because my mind was just so tired all the time.

Overall / Conclusion

What I found was that I was overstimulating my brain by jumping from task to task, having little-to-no introspective cognition. Completing tasks doesn't a person make - you're a robot. Critical introspective and existential thought is what - in my opinion - makes you a whole person with both mental and emotional faculties in working order.

I believe it's potentially easier to "be who you are" in your 20s, but then once you get settled into your life, your responsibilites can attempt to limit that. If there's anything that I've learned, it's that self-care is the one thing you don't want to skip out on, because it's the investment in yourself to "be who you are" in the midst of life's responsibilities.

I hope to keep this "new" old life going for as long as I can, because as the self-proclaimed world's worst computer nerd, I'm finding my time away from the internet wholesome and centering. If you made it this far, I hope you find internet reduction a worthy cause to persue - you may just (re)discover more of who you are.

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2024-10-11

Tags: dumbphones, digital detox, mental health, solitude, instropsection, self-care

Gritty

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