There’s a point at which too much freedom becomes slavery. An excess of options leaves the mind paralyzed and distracted, unable to focus on what really matters. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of technology, with its sleek, frictionless environment, tempting us with its myriad delights 24/7, just a tap of the finger away.
One would think the internet would offer humanity greater freedom than we’ve ever known. But that isn’t the case. Unlimited access to news, information, videos, articles, games, social media, and movies—an infinite mental playground— grows irresistible to the point that we can become shackled to it.
The internet—carefully engineered to deliver constant dopamine hits—can become as addictive as a drug. Like a digital genie, it gives you whatever you wish for. You get sucked in against your will. Time evaporates. The mind scatters and numbs. The important matter of living gets neglected. Real life unfolds unnoticed while you remain entrapped by the soothing blue glow of the screen, your life passing you by.
Resuming Real Life
If it isn’t strictly limited, technology makes us less free to live a meaningful life. This truth has come home to me in a particularly forceful way over the past month, during which I underwent an internet detox. To be clear, this wasn’t a complete internet shut-off: I continued to use email and do necessary tasks. I’ve also taken some break days. So my internet fast hasn’t been total, and I haven’t stuck to it perfectly. But I almost entirely cut out news, videos, shopping, web surfing, and any other unnecessary internet activities.
I knew I needed to take a break and would benefit from a detox. What I didn’t know was how desperately I needed the break and how profoundly I would benefit. I didn’t realize how much technology had overtaken my life, slowly strangling it like a vine entwining a tree, until I took a break.
I first noticed how the flow of time reminded me of childhood. In childhood, time passes at a different pace than it does in adulthood. With fewer responsibilities, the days move more slowly. Children live more easily in the here and now. As a child, I spent long stretches watching an anthill or a stream, getting fascinated by the smallest things, and letting my mind fasten fully on whatever lay right in front of me.
Since reaching adulthood, I don’t have time for that kind of leisure—or so I thought. But almost as soon as I switched off the internet I noticed time slowing down and opening up. The clock ticked at a noticeably different rhythm. Without the internet vacuuming up my extra minutes, I found I had much more time than I thought—time to just be with my family, or read, or think, or sit outside in the sun while my daughter played on our swingset.
Similarly, in childhood one doesn’t spend much time thinking about the news or distant faraway events. Life unfolds in the child’s immediate environment. During my detox, without access to social media or news sites, I found that my attention naturally gravitated to my own life, sphere of influence, and responsibilities. I had less anxiety about things I couldn’t control, and felt more peaceful about immediate things in my life. Of course, adults need to sometimes think about the news and world events. But on my detox I realized that, at least in my case, the internet made me mentally absent from what concerned me most. In the process, I frittered away precious energy on stuff I couldn’t affect anyway.
There were other changes in the way my mind worked, too. Without the constant pinging and bleeping notifications and the obsessive need to find something new online, I achieve greater mindfulness and attentiveness. Algorithms didn’t dictate my thoughts and preoccupations. They were my own.
“From push notifications and reminders to ratings and rewards programs, technology has the power to nudge you to think and act in specific ways at specific times,” journalist Lydia Belanger has observed. “Addictive design keeps you hooked, algorithms filter the ideas and options you’re exposed to.”
Until I trimmed these influences from my life, I wasn’t aware how true Belanger’s words really were. So much mental space had been seized by the latest online chatter, the latest talking points, and the latest crisis. Now, I was free to think about what I wanted to think about—instead of my daily allotment of outrage and fear handed to me by the algorithmic gods.
I began to reclaim my attention span. The staccato online environment encourages choppy thinking. With constant headlines, links, and ads blinking at you everywhere, the internet makes the mind zip from subject to subject. Holding a steady course becomes almost impossible. The brevity of TikTok videos encapsulates an overall online trend: toward shorter, flashier, content, shaped by our need for instantaneous gratification.
But with all this tuned out, my mind seemed to revert to an older way of thinking, what Nicholas Carr—author of “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains”—called “linear thinking.” It was a type of thought I remembered from my childhood and teenage years, before I became such a heavy internet user. It’s the type of thinking that was probably universal before the internet age. Linear thinking involves following a single train of thought over a long period, from beginning to end, with concentration and commitment. As my internet detox went on, I found I could read a book for long periods—up to 2 or 3 hours at a stretch— something I hadn’t done in years. Both the time and the attention span were available for me to do this, and I experienced it as a kind of relief—like reuniting with an old friend.
Reading a long book is just one real-world activity that I suddenly found I had the space, time, and mental energy for. As Cal Newport wrote in “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World,” “Increasingly, [technologies] dictate how we behave and how we feel, and somehow coerce us to use them more than we think is healthy, often at the expense of other activities we find more valuable.” During my detox, I turned to the activities I valued more than doomscrolling, things like working on my homestead, going for walks, playing basketball, reading, and praying.
The difference between online and offline activities is often the difference between thinking about living, and actually living. I don’t want to reach my death only to realize I spent most of my life under the spell of the screens, living life secondhand, through the fabricated mediation of the internet. I want to get my hands dirty and feel the wind on my face and meet real people, face-to-face. The occasional (or maybe frequent) internet detox makes this way of life more possible.
Avenue of Avoidance
I think the internet works a little like a mental band-aid. If something bothers us—anything from a little spot of boredom to a hard emotion to a serious trauma—we often turn to technology for a distraction, for a way to alleviate the unpleasantness and soothe the pain. But, of course, it’s a false remedy. It prevents us from facing up to real mental or emotional problems, and actually makes the problem worse. This is the uncomfortable truth we don’t like to talk about.
Somewhat to my surprise, a few weeks into my internet detox, I found myself battling sadness related to changes in my life that I hadn’t fully processed. The interior silence created by the internet detox allowed me to hear certain quiet voices of grief. This has been part of an important growing process. Had I not set aside the distractions of the internet, I may never have experienced it. I might have stayed in the swirling eddies of distraction, the Charybdis of perpetual online entertainment that keeps us from encountering reality.
Parts of reality are painful. That’s why we seek out technological numbing. But it’s a necessary pain. Only by accepting it will we grow and heal. One of the greatest freedoms I’ve found through setting aside my laptop has been the freedom to work through problems, rather than just ignoring them.
The real world—which isn’t frictionless and isn’t a conveyor belt of dopamine—has so much more to offer than the pseudo-experience of a life lived largely online. Yes, it’s hard, but for the same reason rocks and trees are hard—because they are real.
An internet detox allowed me to plant my foot more firmly in reality. For that I’m profoundly grateful.
