I unplugged my router for 12 hours

It's been about a decade

my MP3 player, my best friend on my breaks.

What is the last time you went a day without internet? Because for me, it’s probably been a decade.

Not using the internet altogether seems to be the endgame of a lot of digital minimalist discourse, and redditor no-surfy rhetoric.

But have any of them actually done it?

Today, I woke up, tweeted “I'm turning off my internet for a day. It may lead to interesting results” and unplugged my router for 12 hours. What followed was

A very special day

But I don’t think it was just the lack of internet that made today so special, at least, not directly. I also started reading “enjoy existing”, a rationalist self-help book. It reeks of LessWrong and “SF techbro tries to solve psychology from first principles”.¹ I strongly recommend it. (it’s free, and like, 80 pages!)

A thing that often gets restated during the book² is that merely paying attention to how you feel when doing things, is like, 80% of the work. The data derived from that will basically work out itself, as long as you simply pay attention.

So that’s what I did today, and wow did it help! If mental health is a 1D skill you can make progress on, I definitely did today.

My breaks were exceedingly boring. I found myself just… picking up a random book on the table and reading it. It wasn’t even mine. It was about sex hormones. I read it for like, an hour, because what else was I gonna do?

Did you know that hormone therapy for women in menopause has a broad range of benefits which collectively reduce 10 year mortality risk by 2%? But that in the late 2000s, one study concluded that estrogen + progestin therapy caused a 30% increase in breast cancer, and the outrage that followed caused doctors to underprescribe to the extent that the rate of hormone therapy in postmenopausal women went from 50% to a mere 10%³. Even though this study was for progestins + estrogen⁴, and, you know, was one study. Later research showed that only using estrogen with no progestins actually found a decrease in breast cancer risk. But no headlines about that! Damage done. And now some doctors will tell an 18 year old who had to get her ovaries removed (for an unrelated medical reason) that she should be without a primary sex hormone for her entire life.⁵

So yeah, get on estrogen when you’re older. This advice applies to men too.⁶

I think it’s that. Picking up the random book that’s on the table and reading it. The adult version of reading the shampoo bottles. It’s not the boredom, it’s the implied higher-entropy behavior caused by it. (yes, I got more writing done today, too!)

Reading books has always been one of the biggest victims of my executive dysfunction, even though when I actually do it, it is consistently fulfilling. I was very happy I ended up reading as much as I did.

Unsurprisingly, I also got a lot of actual work done too. Focusing is easier without distractions. Who would’ve thought.

I thought that the main thing I would miss was my twitter timeline and texting friends. But no, I mainly missed Claude. LLMs have become vital to my study process. My ideal productivity setup might be a DNS server that blocks every domain except claude.ai + a system prompt that makes claude annoy me if I veer off-topic. ClauDiNeSs if you will.

Another thing worth mentioning is how calm I felt. Everything felt less urgent. I guess that’s what happens when you replace your Y in “I must finish X! Now! Else I’ll have less time to do Y later!” from “scroll twitter” to “do nothing”.

When I think of a young woman growing dysmorphic about her own body because of an instagram feed barraging her with pictures of skinny, pretty women, the thought “how could you not see this coming, are you stupid?” screams at me. Alas, the fundamental attribution error strikes again. My twitter feed and other parts of my online bubble definitely negatively impact my self image too. And it took this offline day to realize that. Today, I felt more like me.⁷ More so than on other days. The urge to outcompete, to stand out, was more muted. This allowed me to work more slowly.

And slow is smooth, smooth is fast and fast wins the race.

So grab your MP3 player, leave your phone and laptop at home, print out whatever you need to get done and go to the library. Work like it’s 1999. Even if it’s just for a day. I strongly recommend it.

1. not dismissing the field of psychology, just. These people tend to think “like” me

2. is this how books work now? You repeat a fact proportional to how much you want your reader to remember? Respect my time and my intelligence please. It’s annoying! Another win for blogposts!

3. in flanders

4. wow non-bioidentical hormones cause health issues I am shocked shocked shocked shocked (they didn’t have the information we have today but I mean this pattern keeps happening). Slightly related, tons of cis women are still on synthetic estrogen based contraceptives (ethinylestradiol mostly) which has all sorts of nasty side-effects. We have reasons not to change this but imo they are mostly bad. but I’m not a doctor or researcher, and also not a cis woman. So I don’t know the details.

5. real story from the book. She only got on hormones 40 years later. She was kind of pissed off about the whole ordeal. Welcome to the resistance, cis women

6. joke

7. the MP3 player loaded with my music taste might have helped too