A Month Without Home Internet
Home is where the WiFi connects automatically.
I’m ambling around one of my favorite Indy boutiques when I see these words etched on artificially aged wood. At another time, this declaration would have seemed laughably applicable, but it now gives me pause for a different reason. For the last month, I’ve chosen to live without home internet in hopes of regaining some freedom, time, and peace of mind, but mostly just to see if I could do it. All this is to say that my home, at least of late, has been a place where the only connection is that of the human variety. And in case you’re wondering, yes, I’ve thought about making a sign which reads this, and yes, I’d also happily trade my internet connection for more human connection, but let’s take a step back and start at the beginning.
When I first encountered the idea of living without home internet, I couldn’t get it out of my head, something which tends to occur when I’m on the precipice of something really, really good. I think I sat with it for about a week before calling my internet provider and asking to be put on a two month seasonal hold. I figured two months was short enough a period of time to knuckle through the experience, should it become unenjoyable, and long enough to test the long-term feasibility of living without home internet. In my discernment, I asked myself two questions: What was the worst that could come of this decision? Two months of inconvenience with no early exit. What was the best that could come of this experience? I find that I don’t “need” something I’ve always believed I needed. I stop paying $70 a month for unnecessary distraction. I spend less time in front of a screen and more time living life. Fast forward a month and while there have been definite growings pains and trying lessons learned, I’m happy to say that more good than I ever anticipated has come out of this Thoreauvian holiday.
Working at a SaaS company in a technical role, I spend most of my day in front of a screen. Access to internet allows me to work, communicate with my team as a fully remote employee, and most importantly, learn on the fly in situations in which my knowledge doesn’t suffice. Outside of work, I use the internet to communicate with friends and family, access current events, consume content, and much more. I say this to illustrate that while the internet can be incredibly distracting, it also provides a ton of value, and learning to manage the inconvenience of not having home internet this month has been at times frustrating. For example, I realized right after pulling the plug that no internet meant I could no longer work from home, a perk of my job I was sad to see go. By the third day of the challenge, I got tired of listening only to music stored on my phone and had to buy songs from the iTunes store, which is essentially the Amish way of listening to music nowadays. On the fifth day, I found that without Friends reruns playing in the background, my apartment felt terribly empty. By the end of the first week, I had to pack a change of clothes to supplement a lack of weather updates. The second week, I spent three hours at my local coffee shop, using the free WiFi to catch up on the latest episode of Survivor. The third week, I forgot to set an alarm for a coffee meeting, and with no calendar notification to remind me, missed it entirely. All this is to say that this month has not been without pangs of withdrawal and glaring awareness of my dependency on the internet. I’ve never been so thankful for the ways in which internet improves my quality of life and so active in my discernment of the ways in which it can take away.
Beyond the growing pains, this experience has been so incredibly affirming of how I can create the life I desire and one which reflects my priorities and values. We tend to say that we don’t have enough time, but speaking for myself, I used to spend hours of time on a daily basis on the internet that could otherwise have been directed toward the things for which I never felt I had enough time. Direct benefits of living WiFi-free include reducing the noise in my life, learning to use internet with intentionality, and asking myself what other parts of my life could benefit from further examination. These days, when I wake up in the morning, there’s no barrage of notifications on my phone to greet me. I’ve learned to acknowledge that there is very little so pressing that it cannot wait until I’ve made my way to the office, settled in at my desk, and made the conscious decision to reconnect. Living without internet has also indirectly led to regaining substantial amounts of time to read, write, paint, scheme, run, and spend time with loved ones. One of my goals for this period was to leverage my dearth of home internet and simultaneous wealth of unstructured time to created more content than I consumed. For me, this content was largely comprised of writing — thoughts which grew into prompts, which grew into works in progress, which were then refined to be reflections of self. In the last month, I’ve written more than I have in the entirety of this year, and I’m unconvinced this written content would have surfaced without the sometimes disconcerting silence of an internet-free environment.
This month has been a lesson in delayed gratification, intentional deprivation, and in some particularly joyful instances, freedom from perceived needs. Creating an environment of deprivation allows us to experience so clearly and sometimes so painfully our dependence on external objects to fill our lives. Though this experiment was by no means perfect, the few times I did find myself dipping into cellular data to access internet, it was with a clear and defined purpose. We’re talking about pulling up Google Maps to search a route, hitting “Start”, and immediately turning off data, because you actually don’t need to have internet connection to navigate after that point. With a limited data plan, I didn’t have the luxury of meandering about the internet. Arguably, I never did have that luxury, but it’s remarkable how much more compelling it is to hold yourself accountable to the cost of paying overage fees on your data plan than to the cost of losing 15 minutes, or the equivalent of 1% of your day. We can earn money back, but I wonder how many unrecoverable fifteen minute blocks do we lose to indiscriminate internet usage. While I’m not advocating that we all get rid of in-home internet, I’m all about taking a step away from the constant access to internet to which we’re all accustomed. You might find yourself freed from a dependence of which you weren’t even aware. You might find yourself asking what else there is in your life that you haven’t thought to question. You might even find yourself philosophizing about home decor. And as for me, I’m starting to see this first month as less of a halfway point and more of a beginning.