So, I'm Quitting the Internet for 30 Days

That's it. I had enough.

Happy Halloween! 🎃

I’ve decided to quit the Internet for a whole month. My brain is constantly being hijacked by random online crap, and it’s starting to affect me personally.

I can’t focus or do shit without having YouTube on in the background, and the first thing I do in the morning–and the last thing before going to sleep–is waste hours on Reddit.

Cutting off the Internet for a whole month may sound like a drastic remedy, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

How It Started

I’m a 90s kid.
My family adopted the Internet relatively early compared to my peers.
I started investing most of my time on newsgroups and Internet forums.

I was immediately hooked.

From then on, the Internet just became a part of me–or better, I became one with the Internet, ending up spending most of my waking time online.

It was all fine and dandy. The Internet was arguably a better place back then, but still, I didn’t realize the damage slowly seeping in until much later.

How It’s Going

It was fine when the Internet was confined to a PC in the corner of the room. But now it’s in our pockets, and it’s required to do basically anything a functional adult needs to do.

I realized I was getting cooked when I noticed this pattern: I’d lose hours scrolling, close the tab, and immediately realize I hadn’t learned or enjoyed a single thing.

Just endless, braindead content.

Social media used to be extremely fascinating. Platforms like Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr let you curate a feed of niche, interesting hobbies. But now, algorithmic feeds have killed that joy. Instead of what I want to see, I get inflammatory garbage designed to keep me engaged.

It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Even news sites, which used to be my window to the world, are now just ad delivery machines fueled by clickbait and AI slop. It feels like 90% of the Internet is now just noise designed to exploit our attention for profit.

It’s exhausting, pointless, yet extremely hard to quit.

Let’s Take Control Back

I keep losing time and focus to random stuff online.

I can’t even just exist in silence anymore without my brain screaming “open something, ANYTHING.”

Being bored used to be normal. Now it feels illegal.

The Internet is frantic. It’s a pinball machine, and my brain is the ball. I’ve reached a point where I can’t even start working without some random YouTube vid playing in the background. I need to rewire my brain to function on command, not just when it’s being spoon-fed dopamine.

It’s too easy to get lost in the infinite scroll. There’s always another video, another tab, another reaction. You never reach the bottom, so you never feel done.

Since I work on my PC, I can’t just unplug. I need a nuclear option that keeps me offline while I work:

No Internet at all.

Rules

Unfortunately, as much as I would love to go offline completely, you can’t really live without the Internet these days.
I will still have to work at my day job and that involves being connected to the Internet the whole time, so
I’ve decided on some rules to follow:

Forbidden

• All social media is strictly forbidden
• Online news/RSS is also strictly forbidden
• Google Search -> I can’t block sites easily, so I’m switching to DuckDuckGo, where I can just ban the crap I don’t want to see
• No online media. I’m sticking to offline content only: single-player games, my local music library, and even physical CDs (remember those?)
• No ChatGPT/other random LLMs, not even local/offline. Let’s use this occasion to stop outsourcing thinking to a machine for a month

Allowed

• IMs, mail, WhatsApp, LINE, etc. – so friends and family don’t worry while I’m offline
• Payment apps
• Train app (Suica)
• Urgent/time-sensitive stuff that needs urgent handling
• Buy something only available online
• Digital tickets for events/concerts, etc.
• Essential apps install/updates
• Day job essentials like GitHub, Azure, etc. (tools for the job only)
• If someone shows me something online, I can check it out but won’t touch the Internet myself

Wish me good luck

There is too much crap online that’s being streamed directly into my brain.

This must not continue.

I want to rediscover the joy of doing things just for the sake of doing them.
I really need to slow down life in general.
I feel like I’m not appreciating the little things anymore.
I want to go back to that sense of wonder and discovery I had in my childhood.

One month offline. By the time I get back online in December, I hope to have tamed my brain enough to enjoy only the good stuff.
Or at least know what it feels like to have it back, so I can catch myself if I start slipping again.

Stop FOMO/anxiety: it’s not about following society’s standard of productivity, or trying to fill every second to live up to it. It’s just doing things for the sheer joy of doing them instead of scrolling online content I end up regretting wasting time on.

Let’s see if I can get out of the boiling water before it’s too late. 👏