
This past weekend I made another attempt at Offline Day. I have successfully done it before in March, but life’s not interesting without a struggle. Links of note will be listed under Further Reading.
To start, what is Offline Day? Redditor u/Facepalmed created the Offline Day subreddit in February of 2019. It promotes the practice of taking one day a month (typically the first Friday – Saturday) and completely unplugging from the Internet from sundown to sundown. While the rules are somewhat flexible regarding screen time, the challenge is to stay off the Internet for 24 hours. The goal is to bring awareness to our consumption of the Internet, especially how much time is spent on it across multiple devices.
Here are the struggles I encountered participating in April’s Offline Day:
- One of the fitness studios I’m a member of had a Zoom class the night I started, forcing me to push back the 24 hour start time. Overall the class was not worth it, there were several technical problems and I didn’t particularly enjoy the content that night.
- My family has started a weekly Zoom call that takes place on Sundays, but they wanted to push it up a day, and it was scheduled just before my 24 hours were up.
- The initial results of the second round of blood work I submitted came back, which led to me periodically popping on to check my email to see if the rest came in over the course of the day.
On the plus side, I:
- Cleaned up my room
- Changed my sheets
- Started my Voltron gunpla
- Exercised outside, and with preloaded Peloton classes
- Tried (and modified) two new recipes from Paleo Perfected
- Made chocolate nice cream
- Did a load of laundry and put it away
- Didn’t spend all day on YouTube and Reddit
Contrary as it may seem, I think it’s important now more than ever to take some time away from the Internet. It was a relief to step away from the constant torrent of news surrounding COVID-19. Honestly, I think it’s even harder now to discern fact from fiction, so I would rather just not play for a little while. One day didn’t hurt.
It will be interesting to see how the landscape has changed further for May’s Offline Day.
