My Life Offline | Hacker News Reader

My Life Offline

aaronsw.com

206 pointsblasdel52 comments

A few months ago I spent 2 weeks in Costa Rica - a lot of hiking, beaching, surfing, etc. About halfway through I stopped at an internet cafe to transfer some pictures from my camera to a USB stick. While this was happening, I opened firefox... then drew a blank. I could not think of anything to type in the address bar. I could have gone to some regular sites... reddit, globeandmail, news.yc, facebook but they all seemed so foreign, weird and terribly disconnected from real life. I had absolutely no desire to see memes on reddit, news on the globe or what others were up to on facebook.

An important lesson that one can draw from time away (whether it be aaron's month or my 2 weeks) is that you can't let tech/web overwhelm your life. People have a wide range of interests (whether you've discovered that or not) and devoting so much time to 1 thing seems like the easy way out.

This is also why I refuse to believe that online socializing can come even remotely close to the real thing.

"An important lesson that one can draw from time away (whether it be aaron's month or my 2 weeks) is that you can't let tech/web overwhelm your life. People have a wide range of interests (whether you've discovered that or not) and devoting so much time to 1 thing seems like the easy way out."

I really disagree with that, if applied to all people.

I've always been completely obsessive about whatever it was I was interested in. Whether it was planes at age 6-7, ships at 8-9, cars somewhere in there, WW2 naval history at 9-10, computers at 10, Star Trek at 11, Gemstone 3 at 12-13, Magic: The Gathering at 14, MUDs & computers at 14-16, guitar from 16-18, physics at 18, Java at 19, Harry Potter fanfiction from 20-22, programming language design from 23-25, my startup from 25-27, and now Google's internals at 28.

When I was little, my parents would worry about my one-track mind and rather obsessive interests. They had the same concern you do: people have a wide range of interests, and they were worried that I'd shut myself into being a narrow person.

But by the time I graduated college, they realized that even though I had a totally one-track mind, that track changed every couple years, and so I'd had a dozen or so different interests. All pursued with a lot more passion than the person who just picks 2-3 hobbies and sticks with them for life.

I think the real evil is continuous partial attention. Whatever you're doing - whether it's socializing, relationships, reading, hacking, research, etc. - give it your full attention. I try to check news.YC/Reddit/various social networks once a day, before I go into work. Then once I'm there, I concentrate on what I'm doing. Similarly, I try to read a book or hack a program when I get home, something that'll draw all my attention. I don't always succeed, but when I do it feels much more fulfilling than wasting 2-3 hours online refreshing news.YC.

> I think the real evil is continuous partial attention.

Yeah. Agreed, it's my main enemy ATM. I may have to admit defeat and block reddit/news.yc/twitter/facebook on all my computers.

fail? ;-)

Fail for me at least. ;-)

Ever since I was young, my mother and/or Grandparents would take me on a vacation every Summer, where I was completely disconnected from everything going on in the world at wide. I may sneak a few minutes on a borrowed computer every now and then, but it was never anything significant for the 2+ weeks we would be gone. Looking back, even though I would hated being disconnected for so long, they were the best thing for me. Even now, when I get that week or two of vacation I tend to completely disconnect.

I've reached a point now where I am connected to the internet, my hands on a keyboard/mouse at least 10 hours a day, for 90% of the year. And now, I look forward to those weeks off more than I ever did as a kid (and especially as a teenager. I hated being disconnected like that when I was in high school, absolutely despised it). A week hiking in the Rockies, of even just a week bouncing around my extended family's couches, has become something I look forward to months before the actual trip occurs.

I'll never permanently disconnect, and I wouldn't want to, but taking those yearly breaks makes all the difference.

I recently returned from a little over a week at a cottage with no phone, let alone internet. It was by no means low-tech - we mastered the art of the the frozen margarita, one guest's mp3 player played a seemingly endless collection of grime and baile funk through the cottage stereo, and we had at least two laptops on hand (no wifi) - but the cottage wasn't connected to any information/communication networks.

It was absolute bliss.

The common assumption about time is that it passes quickly when you're having fun and drags when you're bored or frustrated. In this case, time passed slowly in a happy drift of relaxation.

It was uncanny: we would spend what felt like several hours jamming with available instruments (two guitars and a flute), only to discover that it was still mid-afternoon - with plenty of time for a leisurely swim off the dock - rather than deep into dinner time.

Over a period of a few days, I read a 900 page book and still managed to find time for dog walks, in-depth conversation, a long bike ride into town, a trip to a local farm, and so on.

What happened when I got back for a second week of day trips around our house is interesting: I just couldn't muster up any enthusiasm for my usual online haunts. Why read reddit when I could dig into the next book? Why update my Twitter profile when I would take a stroll down by the waterfront? Why bother catching up on over 300 emails when my son was eager to hear the next chapter of The Hobbit?

It was a few nagging responsibilities that got me back into the online swing, and as I reconnected, time seemed to speed up again to the usual blur of disconnected images and themes to which I was clearly accustomed before going away. I'm back to doing my usual activities, but like Aaron, I find it all feels strangely hollow - even this comment.

If I don't take some kind of tangible lifestyle decision out of this experience and the slow epiphany that ran through it, I fear it will have been for nothing.

Its rather interesting, but while I agree with the first half, about the trip itself, but when it comes down to it, I live to be online. While there are several things I do online that are superfluous, and tend to slip away after each of my breaks (last year, I stopped doing for-money blogging, the year before I dropped quite most of the games I played) and don't come back.

While there are plenty of things that are fine to slip away, the constant flow of information, that fount of knowledge that the internet is, I really depend on that. The break from it is nice, to get my bearings again, but its just that: a break. Its not a way I would want to live my life, and not one I can see myself ever choosing.

Agreed. I don't think it would be practical or even beneficial for me to turn off. However, I think I need to get better at somehow reducing my exposure to the sheer, full-spectrum flow of stuff - particularly the trivialities - that consumes so much of my time and leaves the rest of my time feeling cramped and rushed.

There's a picture of me as a young child (4 years old) playing with the first Macintosh. From then until now (19 years later), I've been completely plugged in, basically all day every day.

So ... this post was amazing for me. It's like there's a whole world out there. It completely slapped me in the face. I realized I moved into this apartment a year ago and every single wall is stark white - there's not a picture or poster in the whole place, because I never look at the walls. I leave the lights off so I can focus on the computer screen better.

So I'm gonna do it, in September (I have a vacation then). A "31 day trial" of unplug (Though I will keep the fax, because it's so quaint and hilariously inefficient - and apparently my local Pizza Hut takes fax orders!).

But I just have this one question: what, exactly, do "offline" people actually do all day long?

Write, read, walk, explore.. sometimes with other people, if you can believe that!

I'm a very strong believer in a balanced life. I simply don't think it's possible to be happy without it. That being said, when I read all this "The real world rocks; the Internet makes me sad!" stuff, all I see is the context it is written in: from the perspective of a person who spends all of their time online.

When somebody who lives online suddenly finds the real world, of course it is going to be awesome! It's like finding a whole new world you didn't know existed, with pretty girls and ice cream cones and other fun stuff. I love the real world, too. I've visited many countries, met all sorts of people and done all sorts of things. There's still so much more that I want to see and do, and each month I spend piddling around this one piece of the globe makes me a little more anxious.

But that doesn't mean the Internet doesn't have its place -- an incredibly important place, at that. The Internet allows instantaneous, worldwide distribution of knowledge! That's completely unheard of. And fucking incredible. I love the real world as much as the next guy, but I certainly love the Internet, too. There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other.

Man I was with you right up until the last sentence, where you said

"There's a place in life for both of them and one isn't intrinsically better than the other."

But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)

The internet is a great way to learn, communicate, and share information. It's also a great way to waste time, make yourself dumber, and develop a chronic lack of attention span. It should be used as a tool to help you live your life. But the phrase "life online" should never have existed.

But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)

No, one of them has this weird, inconsistent, visual-audio-tactile-olfactory user interface, and the other one is generally standards-compliant and can be accessed with lynx.

It's all subjective, though. What is intrinsically better about the "real world"? It's full of its share of dumb people (just walk outside). Working a 9-5 job filing paper is an awesome way to turn somebody into a lifeless moron. TV will help kill that annoying attention span.

I have no desire to live completely online, but I think people have a tendency to argue that the "real world" is more important since it has a pretty basic thing in common with us: we're both corporeal. But, imagine if you could truly live in The Internet: you'd have instant access to most of the world's collective knowledge and the ability to interact with millions of people simultaneously. That'd be pretty impressive!

I find that my attention span is way less after quitting TV and going only online...now, I can barely watch a 30 minute tv show without grabbing my computer to check stats, and an hour tv show (or a movie, god forbid) are basically totally out of the question.

You couldn't kiss any of those people, though.

That's by far the best comment in this whole thread.

Interaction online is purely cerebral, even the more kinky versions of it. The ultimate in platonic contemplation, just you, your computer and your internet connection.

It makes you wonder what the long term effects of the www are.

Speak for yourself, but the internet has made me smarter in many ways, not dumber. This has been my choice, sure. I can tell you however that I would never have read half of the interesting and intellectually stimulating thoughts and ideas without the internet.

Indeed. I think the internet is worth a std deviation. Before I was 25 or so, I spent the vast majority of my time bored, and the dozens-to-hundreds of questions I idly wondered about each day were largely unanswered and unanswerable, in aggregate. The world has changed, and while I can handle a few days or a week offline, I don't want to, if I can help it; the internet is where the answers are.

That's sort of true - but I've noticed a much more troubling phenomenon. My questions are increasingly tending to be those that are answerable by the internet. I used to regularly wonder who I really am and why I'm here - now, I've given up on all that and primarily look up interesting stuff on Wolfram Mathworld.

The internet can still help with the "who I am" and "why I'm here" questions. There are so many readily available viewpoints out on the internet that I can use to help shape my worldview. Certainly many more than the predominantly white, Christian home state.

"But one of the thems is life itself, so I would argue that yes, it is intrinsically better ;)"

All of this is life itself. No experience you can have is more like life than any other.

Thanks for the balanced response. I saw in his article a few symptoms in my own thoughts and feelings and was thinking that maybe I just haven't been self-examining enough or that I'm keeping myself too busy to notice that I'm not feeling fulfilled.

You helped me to remember that I spend time online as a tool to accomplish specific tasks, not obsessively as a substitute for real world socialization and activity. Thanks!

I wonder if the novelty of a "life offline" would wear off if Aaron were to do it for longer than a month... I'm around the same age as Aaron, with a similar personality, but try to balance a pretty active social/family life with my online life (I have a daughter, go to the gym, sometimes even go out dancing), and have to say that decisively, I've find the news.YC community more intellectually stimulating than the vast majority of my "offline life" community.

Maybe I'm too involved in the wrong offline social circles, but I'm just a lot more fullfilled with the speed and variety of ideas I get online than I do offline anyday.

I didn't spend the month with my "offline life" community. I agree, they're far less intellectually stimulating than the people I find online. I spent the month reading books, which I found even _more_ intellectually stimulating than the people I find online.

I wonder how much of that is novelty, though. I spent all my elementary and teenage years reading books, and still read anywhere from 50-150/year (more on the 50 side now that I'm working at Google, but in college I hit 150 one year). As a result, when I walk into a library I've found I've already read most of the books that seem interesting to me. A lot of my interests are narrow enough that the Internet's the only place to go for more information on the topic.

I hit the same wall the library. If you want a new injection of novel intellectual thought, I highly recommend the blog Unqualified Reservations ( http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ ). Read the entire archive, plus all the books he recommends. That should keep you intellectually stimulated for two to three years at least.

Sounds like you need to find bigger libraries. I read 50-150 books a year and my to-read list keeps growing longer.

Ah, I was getting your story mixed up with that post about hiking and dancing - good point. Books > news.YC a lot of the time :)

Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's my age. Mabye I'm not self-reflexive enough. Maybe I never give it enough of an actual, honest try. Maybe my life is more balanced than I think. But I've _never_ been able to identify with articles like this.

I often don't have enough hours in the day to even get what I want done. I _love_ software. I'd rather be coding than doing most other things. I code for my startup 10-12 hours a day, then go home and work on my OS. Or learning Haskell. Or thinking about writing a compiler. Or the "living imageboard" idea I've been tossing around. Or whatever. And I've been doing this for years. Through school, I was coding projects all day, rather than doing it in my startup. I've been coding over 2/3rds of my life at this point, and I don't really want to stop.

Now, I do have other interests, and I persue other things. It's entirely possible that I just feel like I'm on the computer as much as these authors say they are, and I'm really not. I usually have a female companion. I love mountain biking. I paint Warhammer armies. I'm involved in the local hackerspace. I'm just a busy dude. But I still need (close to) unlimited texting for Twitter. I still was all about Facebook when it first came out. I still have almost 300 feeds in my reader (which I only tend to skim, admittedly.) And yet I never feel like this.

I grew up on a farm. When I was younger, my computing resources were quite limited, so I did that. I played outside. I was in the boy scouts. But I've never really held the opinion that the "real world" is more important or of inherently better quality than the virtual one. I feel terrible when I _don't_ have my phone. Or when I can't check my email. Or when I haven't caught up on my reading for a few days.

I'm not sure. Maybe I'll feel differently in the future. Only time will tell, I guess.

As someone who is shocked by the group think that's hit news.YC lately, thank you for such an insightful post.

Thanks. I try not to post unless I actually have something to say.

I wonder if the age of "first online" has an impact. I'm 30 now. I got into local BBSes in high school (mostly with other high schoolers, so there was still a strong real-life social component), and only got on the internet in a big way in college.

I don't recognize myself in very much of what Aaron wrote. Oh, a little with the distraction thing, but at least for me it's just the easy availability of distractions. TV, video games, even books can still do that to me too.

I also wonder is just how much people are different. I sometimes describe myself as asocial; not antisocial, asocial, in that I need very little social contact to survive or be happy, and I top out pretty fast.

(BTW, I'm not fishing for pity and you might get the wrong impression from "asocial"; I'm happily married, have a kid with another coming up, and so on. I need more than 0 and I know that, it's just I have lower needs than most people seem to.)

Guess I don't really have a point, except: This sort of thing should be taken seriously. The internet is a truly new social phenomenon, and while I believe the positive outweighs the negatives (at least for most people), the negatives are real, and we should figure out, both personally and collectively, how to ameliorate the very-real negatives.

(andreyf's post highlights one thing I get from the internet: I am interested in tech and politics, but I vastly prefer online discussion, with its tools, over real-life discussion of those topics. It also keeps my wife and friends happy since they have little interest. On the other hand, I don't smear wife-and-friends all over the Internet; I eschew Facebook, and still haven't mentioned my soon-to-be-1-year-old son on my blog yet. I also wonder if perhaps this sort of strong partition is a good idea.)

Your comment about being asocial reminds me of a well known essay that was posted on HN a few months ago, "Caring for Your Introvert."

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200303/rauch

For myself, I definitely fall into the introvert category - I get fatigued fairly quickly after fairly common social interactions.

The problem is I think for a lot of us, our default mode of "chilling out" is spending time online browsing sites, checking email, reading the latest news. All of those activities provide the illusion of taking a break from the "real world" but I don't think they provide the respite we believe.

It's really easy to get agitated online about some silly flame war, techcrunch linkbait, or some offhand comment someone made about your project on twitter.

So I can see how a life offline, or the compromise of spending less time online, can certainly be beneficial.

I must have missed that one. Yeah, that's me. I coined "asocial" because "introverted" picked up a lot of wrong connotations (I'm not socially awkward, misanthropic, etc.), but that is definitely it.

"Online, I feel like my brain wants to run off in a million different directions, even when I try to point it forward."

I've experienced this while in conversation, I'm thinking of 10 other solutions or options or something.

One month??? I went to South East Asia for the entire summer a year go. This was not hitting all the major cities, this was going through the jungles and back roads and woods. Where you slept in nets and used candles and flash lights.

A month to a few months is nothing. Espeically if you have things planned out to do. Try living somewhere isolated and completely without technology for a year or longer, because to be honest, when you start getting into a day to day routine that's when you miss technology, because there are periods where you got shit to do but sit and scratch all the mosquito bites.

I just kept saying "yup! yup!" after each sentence. I've achieved such states during my vacations to India where I would go 2-3 days without touching the computer and I'd absolutely hate it when something came up that required me going online.

I am currently experiencing a super light version of what Aaron did by blocking all of the sites that I automatically type in my browser every few minutes without even realizing. In the past week, I've felt my anxiety drop incredibly. I've followed that up with slowing down my body movements(ie. drinking a glass of water in slow motion).

I have a couple of friends that achieved breakout success in things they struggled with all their lives by leaving the computer/tv for a month.

Also have a friend that did something where you just sit naked in a room for few days. You have enough supply of food/water. He came out visibly transformed at the end of it.

A week of karate camp does this for me. Just one week, but it is intensely focused on my body and my immediate physical surroundings. I think what makes it so... refreshing? is that it is a new and different obsession. (It's been new and different every year for 7 years, now.)

I come back from my week at karate camp and don't know what to do with myself. During the summer I live at my computer, but after a week-long break, I can't think of anything I want to do.

What I really don't get is how I can be so easily addicted to either state - constant flow of information, or no flow of information.

I guess it's a matter of self-obsession versus world-obsession. This year especially, I came back from karate camp thinking I could become a recluse, doing nothing but physical training and soul searching for the rest of my life. I wouldn't even mind if my soul searching returned zero relevant results, because no results would be meaningful (for once).

At this point (in my thought process), it seems like it's a matter of obsessions. I don't think I could live successfully in a state of balance between these two polar ideas - I would hate it. Maybe it ties into the human need to be the best at whatever is occurring at any particular moment, which expects specialization, and thereby obsession.

That still doesn't explain why it's so refreshing to change obsessions occasionally. (But I know I'd get bored being at karate camp year round, too.)

Oh well.

This article raises the question of how to balance one's life as a technologist or someone immersed in technology. I thought I'd share one tip of something I do. I only own a prepaid cell phone, and I keep it off most of the time unless I'm expecting a phone call. This allows me to have it for emergencies and to sync up when meeting people at bars and whatnot on weekends. But I can avoid the downsides of being constantly interrupted or getting involved in the obsessive culture many people seem to have with their cell phones (constantly texting or talking when they're on the bus or in lines).

I use computers and the internet most hours of most days, and I have plenty of offline activities and social groups I am involved in. If taking a weekend day off away from your email to go hiking is something you know you'll be "punished" for when you return (in terms of email load or friends'/employers' expectations), then it may be time to work out a plan to reduce your online commitments.

I hate being disconnected. it gets under my skin until I'm itching to code, game or read a blog, Do something to bring me back to a familiar constant.

But take me away for a week? I come back and end up deleting all my bookmarks, dis enthused about news.yc and cleaning out my inbox of all non personals. And I'm totally happy to go back to my original and probably greatest love, Literature, preferably in some shady, but warm green place.

Over the following weeks I always manage to reconnect myself, a youtube or blog link... There's always something, and I find myself once again forgetting how nice it can be.

My life online made me find people with the same interests as me, no matter how rare. Chances of finding another person interested in say, synthesizers or ocaml letting 'fleshspace' serendipity do the work are negligible.

One other thing: Having an active social life can be costly, both online and offline. It's just that offline more people actually do it.

The equivalent of following hundreds of people on twitter and facebook in 'fleshspace' is to live in a house with guests (and flatmates) changing constantly. There are other situations in which one is forced to be hypersocial (maybe working at a bar? but that doesn't lead to intimacy), but this one I know first-hand. As anyone who has done the house thing can attest, it can be draining. You spread your attention to others very thin. And even so, the chances of meeting people you really like are not very high.

>A friend asked me if I knew I was privileged to be able to take such a break.

This is probably the issue for most. Without spending a lot of time online every day, I'm not sure that I'd be valuable enough to earn enough money to do all the pleasant things commenters here have written about (cottages, exotic travel, etc.)

I just spent a week offline. I had a good time on vacation, but no net connection was sheer torture. Reducing usage to the essentials is one thing, but going cold turkey was not to my liking.

I'm at a point where I notice how much time waste on the internet but I don't yet have the discipline to resist distractions. Other than turning the router off every second day. But I grew up without the internet. It makes me sad to read about someone who couldn't even imagine his life without internet distractions.

Suddenly the idea of one laptop per child seems much less attractive.

I love and depend on the web for learning and for communication, but my most useful creative times are away from the keyboard, either mulling over ideas while walking, or scribbling notes on paper. You've got to learn what works for you and make sure you can step back from the always-on addiction.

A comment I left on Aaron's site as well.

I found the link to Pomodoro technique on some website. I was really glad I saw it. Google for ‘pomodoro technique’ if you are interested. If you liked Aaron’s post, you’ll definitely like this technique.

"My offline that I have to rush back online to tell you about." Why not try something totally different like living off the land for more than a month? That is incredibly difficult and will really change your perspective.

Been there, done that - for 3 months. It was an eye opener for sure.

I think a lot of people are detached from the reality of the world. Getting back to basics reinforces that fact.

The last paragraph oddly jumped out at me. Why do so many people confuse arrogance with confidence? Or more precisely, why do so few arrogant people fail to see the benefits of confidence without arrogance?

It's usually self-deprecation when someone claims arrogance. They'd directly claim confidence, you see, but then they'd be written off as arrogant.

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