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Author Says Going Offline For 24 Hours a Week Has Significantly Improved His Health, Sanity and Happiness (businessinsider.com)
You don't need someone to point out to you that you probably spend too many hours on the internet. Maybe it's your job, maybe it's a growing habit, maybe it's both of them. An anonymous reader shared a link on Business Insider, in which an author named Roy Hessel shares what happened after he started to force himself to go offline for 24 hours every week. (He chose the duration between sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday as the time for disconnect.) From the article:No emails, no calls, no Tweets, no tech, no matter what. For anyone who's struggling with finding time for self and family, I'd like to share what I've learned. For health, sanity, and happiness, I think it can make all the difference. It's not enough to carve out time in your schedule. You need to approach this blackout period with an unwavering belief in its benefit and a commitment to see it through. For me, this means abstaining from work and, in the deepest sense, simply resting. It grounds me and allows me to re-energize and focus on what's really important in my life. The key is to be unapologetic rather than aspirational about unplugging. As soon my family and I get home from our workweek, there's nothing, with the exception of a life and death situation, that would cause me to compromise that time. As far as business and my income is concerned, it can wait.We understand that not everyone wants or afford to go offline for a complete day, but do you also ensure that you are offline for a few hours everyday or every week or every month?
Paul Miller, a reporter at The Verge, went offline in 2012 for a complete year and shared his experience when he got back. You might find it insightful.
Paul Miller, a reporter at The Verge, went offline in 2012 for a complete year and shared his experience when he got back. You might find it insightful.
Got no job. Got no friends. Got no family to speak of.
Online is my only connection to the world. At 45 and single, making new friends is all but impossible. So all I've got left is my life online.
I think it's funny how whenever there's some weather event that knocks out power for an extended period of time, there's a baby-boom nine months later.
this article is sure to have many sane and considered answers.
Blasphemy!
Table-ized A.I.
We have a family cabin with no electricity and no cell coverage. When we would spend a day or two there, we were cut off from all tech. It was propane lamps, outhouse, and a cooking fire / propane stove. Yeah, I had no shower, and was covered in bug spray, but it was FREEDOM.
It did feel good to be fully engaged in activities that were all non-tech. To see nature. To talk without distractions. We did not use our phones in any offline mode BTW, we just turned them off. So fun to hear the river, swat the bugs (OK maybe not that), and feel like I was back in time.
It felt both weird and comforting to see the signal bars reappear on my phone on the drive back to the city.
I'm sure my employer won't mind.
is Roy Hessel an observant Jew?
It seems like this would be obligatory in that case (still a good idea.)
I mean I gotta sleep sometime :)
"He chose the duration between sundown on Friday to sunset on Saturday as the time for disconnect"
and
"For me, this means abstaining from work and, in the deepest sense, simply resting"
Sounds really similar to Sabbath observance with a technology fast thrown in.
Yours,
Steven Wright
Why the fuck would any sane human use both in the same sentence? Are they just trying to fuck with the reader?
Just quit "social" media.
Why are his family and friends trying to interrupt his internet time.
The solution isn't to ditch the Internet. It's to ditch those troublesome meatspace relationships.
Yeah this is a real no brainier.
Sensory fatigue is real. I'd go as far as to say it's an evolutionary adaptation - When you get stuck in a rut you miss opportunities and you become less competitive. Thats why food tastes bland, things become less fun, and you're always seeking new and interesting things.
Get out. Run around. Ride a bike. Go hiking. See play or an opera. Find a quiet field, throw down a blanket, lay down and stare at the clouds.
"You need to approach this blackout period with an unwavering belief in its benefit and a commitment to see it through." -- If you do that, how do you know that the results you experience are not placebo, or biased. If you go into this trying as hard as you can to convince yourself that it will be great and you'll feel better afterward, how do you know that the better you feel isn't just a result of accomplishing your task, and not the subject of the task. I can be convinced, but not by anecdote. Science plz.
A few months ago I powered down my phone. I don't know what spurred me but I left it off for a week (vacation). At first being disconnected was painful. After the first couple of days I felt liberated and did not want to turn it back at the point when I felt I had no choice. I still had email, but the people I know are more modern in the sense they don't really use it socially and never have such that there is a disconnect for them. For me this made personal contact less intrusive and less invasive. People suddenly no longer felt the need to text me every little errant thought and selfies of them not looking at where they are going.
It was nice.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The article doesn't seem to be about offline so much as not working. FTFA:
For me, this means abstaining from work and, in the deepest sense, simply resting
Now this guy owns a business. I can see that it'd be hard to not work. I own a business myself, and when starting, I was dumb enough to take on fixed-price projects. Combined with partly outsourcing to India, you can imagine I worked weekends.
However when I stopped doing those projects and only did on-site (billed per hour) work, I had a real weekend.
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Please tell me you are joking!
My wife and I make a point of spending time each night talking to each other about our days, and playing with our kids with our phones not in use. We need not be slaves to our technology.
But Slashdot IS A TECH site. I would EXPECT that those that post here would use their tech a fair bit...
If being online is adversely affecting your health, sanity, and happiness, you probably suffer from chronic road rage as well. Stop getting overwrought by things beyond your ability to control or influence, and give up your impulse to correct every mistake and your tendency to be outraged by opinions you don't share.
Oh, and oblig. xkcd.
Look, if you are the type of social media obsessed fool that constantly checks your phone every minute of every day, then YES, 24 hours of no electricity will keep you sane. It also means that 6 days after you do it (the day before you next free day), you will be a bit insane.
Or you could simply engage in moderate, sane levels of e-use throughout the week and never get to that point.
You could for example merely kill the privacy stealing Facebook, keeping your twitter, phone, text, internet search, and probably get the same effect.
Or perhaps just use facebook/twitter once a week rather than every single hour of the day.
When lunatics moderate their behavior, they appear sane. Better to be moderate through the entire week, rather than go hog wild 6 days and abandon it the 7th.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
They feel compelled to share their experience online. This is starting to sound like people who like to point out they don't own a TV. (And yes I know that's a satire site. It's funny because it hints at the true motivation of people who claim they like to buck the trend.)
Lots of people go offline for an extended period of time. Hikers, campers, sailors, hunters, etc. They just don't make a big deal about it (online) as the folks who do it so they can brag about it online. That's the key difference, not whether or not you choose to go offline for a while. Are you doing it to participate in an activity you can enjoy without having to be online? Or are you doing it so you can brag about it online (e.g. post selfies you took while touring Yellowstone)? That's the point musicians are trying to make at concerts when they tell people to put away their phones. It's not that phones or the Internet is evil and you need to take time away from them. It's that you have this wonderful event going on right in front of you in real life, and you're missing it because you're too busy staring at your phone. You're trying to record the experience so you can "re-live" it later, but in doing so you're missing out on the actual experience, which defeats the whole purpose.
That's the important thing - that you prioritize your enjoyment of that real-world experience while it's happening over your ability to re-live it later or share the experience online. Not how many hours or days you can go while offline.
Underrated post
Observant jews cannot use electricity on most holidays and especially on the Sabbath.... from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
It's incredible what disconnecting from the electronic world does to one....too much of anything is not good for you.
And I mean that most respectfully., No business on the sabbath, no computers, no phones, just a day apart.
I can't believe there's a person so pathetic that they think that sitting on the computer in your house every waking moment is healthy. Seek help now.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I prefer the other approach - what doesn't kill you can only make you stronger.
If I go offline for 24 hours, I will no longer receive slashdot vanity bonus points for daily login.
Nah, can't do that.
psh, I take more time off the internet in my sleep!
If I unplugged for a year, I wouldnt have a job to come back to and wouldnt be current enough in the field to get one. Freakin entitled rich people.
I get offline only when I have sex with some random girl met online. And yes, I'm a software developer with an active sexual life!
If places of businesses still took applications in person. You HAVE to HAVE the internet, it's a utility.
Usually in the middle of the night.
I am a sysadmin. I am required by contract to carry phone and laptop around. I can't find unix sysadmin positions which do not require near-constant online presence 24x7. I hate being on call, all these night calls and e-mails written, but I just can't find a work which does not require that anymore.
When I'm asleep...
Being online has enriched my life in countless ways. I don't find it stressful. I have plenty of time with my family, some spent online, and a lot spent in person. We are all happy, healthy, well-adjusted, and most of us get lots of benefits from being online. I met my wife online!
I don't see what the problem is.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
> Going Offline For 24 Hours a Week Has Significantly Improved His Health, Sanity and Happiness
Utterly and absolutely True. A "balance day" (or the way I call it: an "analogical" day) has magical powers everybody should be compelled to make use of with regularity.
I hate to sound like a bigot, but the concept of "week" with a day devoted to rest and no work but generally participating to some social congragation exists for a reason and has worked fine for almost 2000 years... while the general lack of proper rest time to devote to human interaction (think industrial revolution, think IT jobs) has been wreaking havoc all over.
Sorry, I decided it was better for my health to ignore this article.
Apparently that's from Bukaroo Bonzai (which maybe I need to force myself to watch all the way through some day). However, despite the rather dubious source, it's an amazing observation. Doing something to change your life is fantastic, but the most important thing to remember is that the thing won't fix who you are in an of itself. Going off the internet for a day, or a week, or a year will not make you a better person. It will not fix anything in your life. At best it can help you get perspective on what might be going wrong.
I found the article by Paul Miller to be excellent in that respect. He went to a new world, without the internet, hoping to find a different him. Instead he found the same person that was always there. No matter where you go, there you are.
Which is not to say that one should give up trying to be a better person -- trying to become closer to what you respect. It's just that the journey is not about rules, or single choices; it's about all of the choices you make all day, every day. The journey is also long, so when you make mistakes, recognise the mistake, but cut yourself some slack and keep moving forward. Making mistakes is how you find out how to do it better.
I came online to post about how I should be spending time offline.
woh! a friend request!