After 365 days offline, tech journalist and editor Paul Miller returned to the Internet. In an essay for The Verge Miller writes: "I was wrong. One year ago I left the Internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was 'corrupting my soul.'"
Miller expands on his year-long journey, saying he hoped to quit his job, move in with his parents, read books, write more, and "wallow in my spare time." What happened, however, was the opposite.
"By late 2012, I'd learned how to make a new style of wrong choices off the Internet. I abandoned my positive offline habits, and discovered new offline vices. Instead of taking boredom and lack of stimulation and turning them into learning and creativity, I turned toward passive consumption and social retreat," he writes. "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."
It's difficult--though not completely impossible--to imagine a year without email or Facebook. Like Miller, I often wonder how I might navigate life differently, unburdened by the desire to check Twitter. And yet one fact remains certain in Miller's narrative: Perhaps the Internet isn't totally to blame.
Read Miller's full story here.
[via The Verge]
