Here are five good reasons to turn off the internet and how doing so can help you to be more creative – write more, paint more, spend more time with family, become more fully alive.
There’s a lot of ways the internet chips away at your life energy. Prior to the mid-90′s explosion of the internet as a common utility in your home, there was only three basic ways to transmit information between humans: 1. Person to person 2. Telephone/video – real-time electronic exchange 3. Hard copy – mail, books, papers, binders, letter.
Why does the internet make you feel overwhelmed? Because it is delivering information to you at the speed of light, in a constant stream that would take millions of lifetimes to digest. Here are five reasons you should turn off the internet.
1. You aren’t going to find the answer you’re looking for. Whatever it is you are trying to learn about – losing weight, writing a book, climbing a mountain, starting a meditation practice, learning karate, becoming happier – likely has a few basic components of information that need to be understood. The rest comes with practice. The answer to your question will come over time, with practice. But you have to practice, which means turning off the internet once you get the thirty minutes of basic information you need
2. You are taking in far too much information. You may think piles of information is a good thing – you can learn more that way, make informed decisions, be more up to date. You may even take pride in being an “info-junkie”. However, there is no “end point” to information online – it’s a never-ending treadmill of ever-more-subtly different ideas. Rather than empowering you, on some level this is creating the sense that your research can never be complete. Easy way to decide your research is over? Turn off the internet and do something.
3. Your family and friends are not on the internet. Of course right now you are thinking – yes they are! You email, chat, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, etc all day to keep in touch with your wide network of friends and family. But you aren’t keeping in touch with your friends and family – you are engaging with digitally mediated representations of friends and family. I can remember nearly every time I see my friends; but I’ve never gone to someone and said “man I had the best chat with Paul on gmail just now”. By their nature, online interactive forums will present all your friends and family in the same bland, branded context – I see Uncle Stan, my Dad, and my friend Jamie all in the same blue-and-white box, stripping them of their personality and flavor. Your friends and family are in the human world. Enjoy keeping in touch, but limit your time online and get real with your relationships by … turning off the internet.
4. You are frittering away your life, giving away your creative energy to a world of electrons that will never give back to you. Harsh but true. Unless you are online creating or working on your life’s passion, you’re wasting time, no different than TV or video games. The difference beween fun and entertainment is that fun is something you do, while enertainment is something you watch. Internet time splits the difference in a sly way, making something that is usually passive feel interactive. Are you writing your book / painting / playing with your kid / visiting a friend / enjoying nature online? Or just passing the time? Turn off the internet and just go meditate, or do something – try focusing on one thing or give up and do n0-thing. See point #1.
5. Turning off the internet can save you thousands of dollars. Spending an hour a day wandering the internet dehumanizes you whether you realize it or not. Sitting in a chair, your body motionless save for the occassional mouse click or typing, eyes darting around the screen, turns you into a lump of inactive flesh and hypnotizes your brain into a particular dreamlike state. It’s not good for your eyes either. But even more important, spending that much time looking at a flat version of the world as your own body sags its weight into a chair has the effect of disassociating your sensations from the world, and not in the good and useful Buddhist way.
This leads to disconnection, and (combined with the endless parade of “solutions” you find online) a deeper feeling of dissatisfaction, which in our culture tends to lead to over-consumption of food, clothing, gadgets, drinks, etc. Turn off the internet to get back in touch with yourself and re-connect to the real world in a deep, meaningful way and you might buy a lot less junk and find a pathway toward healing.
BONUS REASON: The internet is helping you create your own obstacles to happiness. A settled mind is necessary to recognize the way we participate in creating our own suffering – you can’t begin to open up spaces of clarity if you’re not settled enough to recognize where you are stuck. The internet and it’s constant stream of info-info-info does a great deal to keep your mind unsettled.
In 1932 if you wanted a distraction, you could turn on one or two radio stations (maybe), look at a book or newspaper, or talk with a friend. That’s pretty much it. 100 years before that, distraction likely meant hanging out with friends or family in person; which frequently involved a creative activity like singing, games playing or sewing, quilting or building something, or hunting something.
The internet makes it possible to be endlessly distracted all by yourself; it breaks up human interaction into chunks that are convenient for computer processing and branded interactive experiences, but that aren’t so good for how we actually communicate. Human communication devoid of nuance or eye-contact expressed with no flavor in a never-ending digital stream of sameness -now that’s what I call living! (barf)
Try a ten minute internet free zone each day. That means no online, no phone, no text message. Leave the smartphone in the office and go for a walk for ten minutes – you might feel surprisingly lonely and disconnected – investigate that.
“If we could first know where we are and wither we are tending we could better judge what to do and how to do it.” – Abe Lincoln
Agreed on all fronts. My number one reason? The Internet and always-connected-lifestyle is destroying our ability to focus. The ability to focus is the ONLY unifying characteristic I’ve found between every high functioning creative individual throughout history, regardless of time period. Everybody has different methods and strategies for working but they all involve the ability to focus. We are losing that — and that’s a scary thought.
Thanks Sam. It’s true, all these distractions just make us crave more distraction. I think you’ll find your upcoming August 30 day meditation challenge enormously helpful in this regard.