
A Life Offline - imgabe
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/offline
======
edw519
Wow, I am a hacker on my computer 60-80 hours per week and my lifestyle is 179
degrees from yours.

I have no land line and a cell phone, but it's not a smart phone. I carry it
to work or out of town, but nowhere else. If I visit someone else, run an
errand, or go out to eat, you'll have to leave me a voicemail. Sorry about
that, but I devote my full attention to the people I'm with.

I have a laptop, but it leaves my desk once or twice a year. If I'm on the
road, I probably have a file folder full of papers and a thumb drive, but no
electronics.

I check email many times per day and I visit hn many times per day, but only
when I'm already at a computer. I never IM, Facebook, Twitter, or text. If you
want to communicate with me: if it's important, call me, if not, email me.
Either way, I'll get to it when it's convenient for me, and I'll respond
fairly quickly.

I went out to dinner with a group including my 22 year old niece. She texted
the entire time (under the table, but we all noticed). How sad, I thought.
What was so important that she ignored the rest of us for an hour?

I almost feel sorry for you, Aaron, but then again, I know better. I'm curious
to see how the next month will affect your lifestyle afterwards. Hopefully,
I'll be able to welcome you back to the real human race (by email, of course.)

~~~
zackattack
It's a generation gap thing. Most people I know will text at the dinner table;
it's socially acceptable among peers.

~~~
abossy
Not all young people are okay with it. "Texting at the dinner table" still
requires a degree of social tact.

~~~
jmtulloss
A good rule of thumb for me is that texting is acceptable for coordinating the
next move in the evening, but texting people completely unrelated to the
current company is not.

------
chime
Everything in moderation, including moderation.

Every now and then I run across a story like this where someone is
overburdened with communication and technology and wants to give it all up for
a fixed time to cleanse themselves from the toxicity of modern life. Then they
come back renewed, with new energy to conquer it all, and tell everyone how
great it is and that everyone should give solitary confinement or meditation a
serious attempt. Then a few months later, they get back into their old
overloaded lifestyle of stress and constant work.

No, you don't need to give it all up for a month or year to find yourself.
This is reaching out to the other extreme because you hope to end up in the
center eventually. How about just slowly moving to the center from where you
are? Get rid of the email+text features from you cellphone. Billions of people
live perfectly fine without it. Keep GPS/web on your phone but only use when
needed. Feel free to check your email whenever you have a few minutes but
don't reply to it immediately. Shape your routine so you get to do what's
important and not just what's urgent.

When not doing something productive or relaxing on the computer, step away. Go
kayaking, hiking, camping, or jogging. Go to the movies, mall, museum,
theater, art show, or a theme park. Get a backyard project, build something in
real life, get your hands dirty. And while you do all of this, make adequate
use of the technology available to you without feeling crushed under it. The
purpose of technology is to solve real-life problems. It is not to replace
real-life with a 24/7 stream of stress. People are good in general. Don't
ignore them for a month because they contact you too much using different
mediums. Spend more time with them in person, even if they annoy you. And use
your knowledge of technology to enrich your and their lives. What good is 15
years of computer knowledge if you renounce it instead of sharing it with
others?

Connectivity is not bad. What is bad is not knowing what form of communication
to give more value to. Figure out your communication medium hierarchy and live
by it. Mine goes:

    
    
        Face-2-Face > Video chat > Phone > Email > Message boards > Social Networks
    

My social goal is to take people from the lower end and move them towards
higher end. So I may get a friend message me through Facebook, then we'll
email, then phone, with the final goal to hang out next time one of us is in
town. Without technology, none of this would be possible. I love technology,
but only enough to enable me to improve my real-life social activities.

~~~
sachmanb
You're onto something, and crash diets/extremes are no good, but there is a
lot of value in giving it all up for periods of time. I wish I had
opportunities to do this more frequently, once a year for a month would be
very nice. I don't mean vacation - I mean disconnect.

There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions
in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too
buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.

I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two
months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a
newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent
most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people
I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of
country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I
just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results
are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle,
things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week
two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all
this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.

You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall
efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my
curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency,
or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.

Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are
good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend,
or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm
guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's
nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without
worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this
year for me, and that's unfortunate.

------
randallsquared
_It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like
I was human again._

I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I
felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used
to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like _all
the time_ before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and
bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s
(when I got a dialup connection).

~~~
sp332
Wow, just reading that brought back a lot of painful memories. I used to hone
my skill at carefully tearing seeds out of seed-pods while leaving the pods
intact, out of sheer boredom.

~~~
randallsquared
Me, too. :( Or carefully arranging things that didn't need arrangement.

------
staunch
I think being in a city you're still pretty far from disconnected. I go
camping for a week in the deep wilderness with no electronics. Feels amazing.

~~~
abstractbill
Yes. My wife and I went camping in the Mojave desert a couple of years ago,
where we were isolated enough that we actually had to worry about having
enough petrol to get to the next gas station some times. I can thoroughly
recommend it. Although I do love startup life, I'm very much looking forward
to having the freedom to do this again one day.

~~~
mrtron
I do the same - but canoe into Algonquin Park.

You can't bring much when you have to be able to portage all your gear and
don't want to make 2 trips. It is really great getting away from it all and
enjoying the slow life without SMS and RSS.

------
sfphotoarts
"I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest
of you humans."

That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of
telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological
advancement in that direction.

Isolation is about as non-human as it gets. What this person sounds like is
that they need some major therapy, not isolation from the real world.

There's nothing wrong with paper and books, but they should be understood as
the exact same concepts, in their time as email and the internet today.

~~~
DLWormwood
> That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of
> telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological
> advancement in that direction.

The whole notion of humans being "social animals" is a recent invention. (Even
the notion of humans being just "animals" is about as young.) For most of
human history, there has been an underlying impulse for humans to distance
themselves from each other for periods of time. (Monasticism, colonization,
and rural farming were the majority lifestyles until recently.) The only
reason the contemplative lifestyle is being looked down upon nowadays is that
we've simply run out of enough land to give everyone enough room to be so at
the same time. Until we develop some means of overcoming the space distance
barrier, we're stuck with each other.

~~~
soldarnal
I'm curious about what you mean by "recent". Aristotle considered man by
nature a "political animal". Genesis states that "It is not good for man to be
alone." To whom do you credit the idea that man is a "social animal"?

~~~
rincewind
Aristotle has thought of himself as a "political" being, but he perceived the
world and the meaning of "political" in a very different way from me and you.

~~~
soldarnal
I agree with you, but I think Aristotle's conception of man as a political
animal all the more perceives contradiction in the quote, "I want to be human
again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans."
Whereas we perhaps are inclined to see socializing as something good in its
own right, Aristotle taught that the community of the city/polis has a higher
aim: to fulfill the higher goal of man, to make men nobler, to make them more
human.

For Aristotle, to be more virtuous was to be more human. Many virtues -
patience, forgiveness, generosity, thankfulness, love, courage - are either
best achieved, or only achieved, in community. Hence he reasoned that a full
humanity requires a community, that therefore "man is a political animal".

------
pistoriusp
I've read all the posts here and I can't seem to get away from the feeling
that it's all a bit "overly complicated?"

I just don't see the point of categorising myself as a person who has, for
example, a hierarchy for ranking social interactions or as a person who checks
mail many times a day and doesn't go to the store with a mobile.

Why is this important? Is it? I just can't see the importance.

But maybe that's just me... When I was growing up I realised that I didn't
know, or even care, for "how I wanted my eggs." It just didn't seem to matter
in the grand scheme of things.

------
mhp
Self inflicted (essentially) solitary confinement:
[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/30/090330fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all)

~~~
swolchok
The rest of us saw that post too.

------
nraynaud
I'm addicted to tech too, and I'm planning to going to Germany by bike
(1400km) in a few weeks, I think the bowl of real life will be good. And I'm
seriously thinking in abandoning the development too. Actually I'm unemployed
and I already refused interesting offers in development, the next step is
finding another career, away from office and computer.

------
mmc
More than a (month of) life offline, this sounds like a life just off.

If pressure and constant stimulation has you down, how exactly is ignoring
your friends and the outside world going to help, I wonder?

------
Mintz
I personally can't fathom giving up all the technological advances that we as
a race are using to better ourselves and our lives. Isolating yourself can
only help so much, but permanently shifting your lifestyle so that it's more
comfortable will work better in the long run.

------
ruby_roo
Good for Aaron!

I don't understand the more critical comments here. He's obviously doing what
he feels he needs to do to stay sane. Why so many judgmental statements? I
think _some_ of this may come from folks feeling a little guilty about their
own technology addiction. Or maybe they're just feeling a little superior now
that they've 'outlasted' Aaron Swartz. I donno. It's just weird that people
would suddenly become so concerned with someone else's techno-fast, as if he's
mentally off because he wants a break from it all.

Not all of us can be moderate about everything all the time. Some of us need
to take extreme and immediate action to break out of a downward spiral or
perform some other life-affirming action. Sometimes we need friends to push us
to do this. Seems perfectly healthy to me. And I don't understand the
comparison people are making to crash diets here, as if living off the grid is
somehow equivalent to cutting off the flow of essential nutrients. Come on.

------
Tichy
Sounds like holidays.

------
frodwith
I have wondered lately if living in the weird information landscape of modern
communication isn't sucking the joy out of my life to some degree. I think
next time I am unemployed, I'm going to take a few months and similarly pull
the plug, just to see what it feels like.

------
kyro
I often wonder about whether the constant connectivity with ubiquitous Twitter
use and all is really a good thing, and whether we should just go out and play
soccer and breathe the fresh air all day. I definitely find myself caught up
in the craze at times, reading/commenting on HN included, and feel as if I'm
missing out on a whole world of more rewarding experiences outside. Not to say
I'm an antisocial person, I consider myself somewhat the opposite, but a lot
of my life has definitely been used up in computer/internet time.

Let's do an experiment and take HN offline for one month. It'd be interesting
to see what happens.

~~~
sfphotoarts
let's not impose our will on others, ok? You just not visit HN for a month and
leave the rest of us that can handle the online world just fine...

~~~
kyro
My suggestion to take HN offline for a month should be taken the same way as
when one says to his group of friends "hey, let's see what would happen if we
went a week without pants."

~~~
Angostura
6 days in, everything's fine thank you.

------
adamsmith
I would disconnect the laptop and Internet and keep a dumb phone.

In my mind social is the opposite of computers and isolation, so trying to
remove both is going to push in the wrong direction.

------
dimitar
>I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest
of you humans.

Communication technology exists to help satisfy the innate human desire and
<em>need</em> to communicate. So it isn't reasonable to become anti-social to
be human "again". Moderation and maybe a more sophisticated approach (letters
maybe, I liked that in the article) is what we need.

------
keefe
heresy! All life outside of coding may be found in WoW... lol plus a few side
trips up to haight... seriously though, I feel as a human I am an
intellectual, emotional, physical being and it is essential to maintain
development of all those aspects. Only a balanced life can lead to highly
productive working hours.

------
andresmh
I recently experienced something similar after losing my smartphone I switched
to a dumb one. I found myself not living just fine with my regular phone and
not really needing any of the fancy features. It feels strange for a techie to
go low-tech, but it's also liberating.

------
zandorg
I got the point where I was checking Reddit every 5 minutes. I changed my
ways: Now I'm reading a book a week, and Hacker News supplies all my news. As
for email, I hardly get replies to anything these days, so screw 'em.

------
metatronscube
How does this guy make his living? Just wondering...

I would simply call this a holiday, so why is this so ground breaking? I'm not
trying to stir anything up by saying this..I just don't get why this is such a
revelation.

------
webology
Interesting idea but most of us have jobs which require us to be on a computer
and taking a month off isn't practical. Moderation maybe?

------
erlanger
It must be one hell of a luxury to be able to make a decision like this one.

~~~
jon_dahl
Even a temporary sabbatical from technology? I don't think that's a luxury at
all. If we wanted to, most of us could schedule our lives so that we got a
month (or more) away every so often - away from work, from home, from
technology, or whatever.

~~~
abstractbill
_most of us could schedule our lives so that we got a month (or more) away
every so often_

One of the recent polls here suggests something like two thirds of us are
working on startups either full-time or part-time. Startups don't generally
allow for taking a month off (a month is often enough time for the competition
to catch up if you stop working).

~~~
yason
Anyone who's not an entrepreneur will have at least vacation. Then you can get
totally offline if you want to, as you don't even have to use the
computer/internet at work.

Although I prefer just taking a few days off the computer at a time myself.
Like a weekend, or not hacking anything in the evenings for a week or so. For
me, the problem isn't being online per se but the balance of being online AND
offline.

When I'm offline, it will eventually energize me to get back online for a
while. And when I'm online, it will do SO good to cut off the lines for a few
days when I find myself only being online.

