Paul Miller

Paul Miller Reflects on a Year Without the Internet

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On April 30 of 2012, Paul Miller took a hiatus. From the internet. For one year. 

How did his experiment go? He divulges in this excellent post on The Verge:

At 11:59PM on April 30th, 2012, I unplugged my Ethernet cable, shut off my Wi-Fi, and swapped my smartphone for a dumb one. It felt really good. I felt free.

A couple weeks later, I found myself among 60,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, pouring into New York’s Citi Field to learn from the world’s most respected rabbis about the dangers of the internet. Naturally. Outside the stadium, I was spotted by a man brandishing one of my own articles about leaving the internet. He was ecstatic to meet me. I had chosen to avoid the internet for many of the same reasons his religion expressed caution about the modern world.

This is a profound observation:

As my head uncluttered, my attention span expanded. In my first month or two, 10 pages of The Odyssey was a slog. Now I can read 100 pages in a sitting, or, if the prose is easy and I’m really enthralled, a few hundred.

I used to be able to read two hundred pages in one day. Now, I consider myself lucky if I can get fifty pages done in one sitting without itching to grab my phone or computer.

But reading on, we learned that Paul’s experience without the Internet markedly changed after the first months of freedom:

So the moral choices aren’t very different without the internet. The practical things like maps and offline shopping aren’t hard to get used to. People are still glad to point you in the right direction. But without the internet, it’s certainly harder to find people. It’s harder to make a phone call than to send an email. It’s easier to text, or SnapChat, or FaceTime, than drop by someone’s house. Not that these obstacles can’t be overcome. I did overcome them at first, but it didn’t last.

It’s hard to say exactly what changed. I guess those first months felt so good because I felt the absence of the pressures of the internet. My freedom felt tangible. But when I stopped seeing my life in the context of “I don’t use the internet,” the offline existence became mundane, and the worst sides of myself began to emerge.

…

My plan was to leave the internet and therefore find the “real” Paul and get in touch with the “real” world, but the real Paul and the real world are already inextricably linked to the internet. Not to say that my life wasn’t different without the internet, just that it wasn’t real life.

I’ve linked to Paul Miller’s past posts. The archive is here.

Paul Miller’s Internet-Free Year

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Paul Miller, a technology reporter, is currently on a quest to go without the Internet for a year. He occasionally reports on his progress in The Verge. In this post, he recounts his life without the Internet after three months:

The first two weeks were a zen-like blur. I’ve never felt so calm and happy in my life. Never. And then I started actually getting stuff done. I bought copies of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Aeschylus. I was writing at an amazing pace. For the first time ever I seemed to be outpacing my editors.

Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.

Three months later, I don’t miss the internet at all. It doesn’t factor into my daily life. I don’t say to myself, “ugh, I wish I could just use the internet to do that.” It’s more like it doesn’t exist for me. I still say “ugh, I have to do that” — it’s just not the internet’s fault.

If you don’t read the whole post, this is the key takeaway:

I know I’m not the first person to recognize this, but much of the charm in “taking a break from the internet” is that you end up viewing the real world through the prism of “I’m taking a break from the internet right now,” and then you get back on the internet to tell everybody about what a good time you had. A face-to-face coffee date is very different than Facebook flirting, and a really great use of time, but it’s easiest to see the novelty and value of it when you have a Facebook to compare it to. “Disconnecting” and “disconnected” are two very different things, as I’m discovering.

So: it’s good to take a break, but your motivation to take such a break will vary from everyone else’s.