I have done this before, cold turkey for weeks at a time. (Out of necessity, not willpower: I was sequestered in the South American jungle.) I thought it was a really healthy and beneficial experience. I rediscovered what it meant to read books, actively entertain myself, and have lengthy conversations with people. It's not possible to carry on this way in my everyday life, but those habits have persisted even as I plugged back in. I mainly use the internet for research and writing e-mail now. Five-hour YouTube binges are (mostly) a thing of the past.
To anyone who has misgivings about the toll that being online 10+ hours a day takes on them, I encourage you to step back, take a look in the mirror, and really ponder your online habits. Compulsive internet usage has all the hallmarks of clinical addiction, but strangely almost nobody acknowledges it as such. Like any addiction, beating it will improve your life.
The longest I was without internet was for about 10 days. I didn't miss it at all. I was visiting my relatives in Serbia.
The thing is, I had all these activities laid out for me there, like visiting people, going on a food market, building etc., so I think it would be harder to stay offline while being at home. It's even worse when I think that most of my hobbies and work are computer related (web dev, fl studio via midi keys, writing...). I guess it's better to focus on more important things than just staying up to date.
Well i too am making slow progress, I had my FB account disabled for a year now, i just check it once a month and then disable it quickly because I quickly remember how boring it is. My tumblr and twitter account password have been changed to obscure passwords, so that I cant login that easily (have to use password recovery). It's been a month now since i've logged in... And I've erased every single feed from my google reader and Now i'm using just plain ol' bookmarks so I check up only on a few of the important sites.
I've also done a jetpack plugin for myself to see how many times i've visited a particular site that day. The count shows up in each firefox tab.Because it's easy to go in circles without knowing it...
I second all of this. As a general rule, if you don't know how you could live without something, it's probably a good idea to find out. You get a much better idea of how much you need it vs. how much you're just using it to kill time and distract yourself. You might even find that not having it makes you miserable, but at least you then know how miserable.
Well, that's funny, I also worked in the amazon for several months at a time, away from the internet (in eastern ecuador). I can't say I missed it -- no, I couldn't browse the web, but I also didn't have to deal with email and cell phone calls about stupid stuff. In that sense it was quite liberating.
It gave me a new perspective on my online life, and how much time I used to waste on stupidity like Facebook, for instance.
I found the opposite effect - extreme loneliness and depression. My IRC friends were really only the close community I had. I found phone or face-to-face communication difficult, and unnatural; perhaps the internet is for introverts?
To anyone who has misgivings about the toll that being online 10+ hours a day takes on them, I encourage you to step back, take a look in the mirror, and really ponder your online habits. Compulsive internet usage has all the hallmarks of clinical addiction, but strangely almost nobody acknowledges it as such. Like any addiction, beating it will improve your life.