Turn the Wi-Fi Off

I got the Internet as a birthday present on my 8th birthday, and pretty much disappeared from normal society for the next few years. The Internet was (and is) fascinating — I could learn anything, interact with people I’d never met with, and, notably, do adult things without anyone doubting me because I was young.

But as I got older, the Internet, and therefore my mind, just got busier. Eventually it was not only random articles and a few chatrooms, but dozens of apps and sites that are programmed to give us a dopamine hit. Being online to me feels like walking around in a casino trying not to gamble. As somone with a severe gambling addiction.

When I was younger, I don’t think I concentrated on one thing for more than 20 minutes, and outside of school I didn’t have to. So I just convinced myself that school was archaic, skipped as much class as I could, and ended up a mental butterfly.

Except for when I wanted to get stuff done. I probably started learning to program 100 times, but I would get distracted. Even though I loved computers more than anything else, I couldn’t do much to create with them. I had only read a half dozen books all the way through when I graduated from High School, despite reading at a college reading level before I was out of elementary school and having started hundreds of them.

Then, all of the sudden, I went on a Mormon mission in eastern Ukraine. Two years with 30 minutes of Internet a week (at an Internet club 45 mins away from my apartment). My entire life was structured in a way I never would have structured it in order to get me to concentrate on the things I considered most important for that period of time.

Suddenly, my mind slowed down — in an almost literal sense. I had only finished a couple of books in my entire life before the mission, and on the mission I could easily read the Old Testament for hours on end, paying attention to intricacies of text I never would have realized before.

It felt like I had superpowers.

Then, two years later, I got home. I jumped on Facebook, and jumped right back into my old habits. My family said I was gone for weeks. Not gone in the sense that I wasn’t learning anything — I would pick up tidbits here and there, but I never got deep enough into anything to make any of that learning useful. It terrified me.

Then I found my solution.

Turn the wifi off.

The vast majority of the Internet is built to keep us addicted. Email and chat notifications pop up constantly, Twitter keeps on moving, you’re probably missing on Facebook. The only way I get stuff done is to just turn it all off.

Sometimes you just need to slow it all down and think.

Turn the wifi off.