Life without the Internet

More insights from The Verge's Paul Miller as his year without the internet continues.

The goal for me, in this year and beyond, is to do things consciously and purposefully — submitting my time to my personal goals and values, instead of the next clickiest link. Someone on Reddit warned me that I’d be bored if I left the internet, and they were right. I get bored all the time. In my internet days, I’d rarely be aware of boredom — I might chalk it up to my favorite websites being “boring,” or just satiate it with the endless spectacle of Tumblr or YouTube, and either way I’d keep clicking.


But now I sit on my couch, and the boredom weighs heavy, and then I decide what to do. In the meatspace, my next activity doesn’t come to me in the form of a push notification. I have to reach for a book, or my bike, or a guitar. I might sound like a college student from 1992, but I don’t mind.

Read the whole thing