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Little steps: Leaving the Internet at Home

Erah Mar's profile picture

Posted by Erah Mar

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One thing that I've done to combat the invasiveness of modern technology is creating a home computer station and removing the more troubling apps off my phone. I have a laptop that doesn't have a battery pack so it has essentially become my desktop PC. By making it inconvenient to access things like FB and Instagram, it makes it less likely that I will throughout the week.

It's not a perfect fix, but it keeps me from doomscrolling all day. I still have the Little Internet in my pocket, but now I use it to find customer answers while I'm at work instead of being locked in and constantly craving the low level dopamine of the algorithm. I'm certainly not completely free, and I can't quite make the move to a dumb phone yet, but this is a small move that works for me.

What are some of the things you've done in your life that lets you start breaking away? I'd love to hear them!


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Rover's profile picture

Reply by Rover

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I love this! I miss when the Internet was a place you visited for a tiny bit and then "left" for the day.

It's harder for me to "break away" because of work, but on my off-days I have a different profile on my phone that only has calls, text, camera, gps and music. My other "work" profile has things like slack, email, etc. (I still need to convince my business partners to stop texting me work-related stuff @_@ )

Firefox extensions like Leechblock was my first step to stop the doomscrolling. Blocking certain things like the "all" and "popular" pages on Reddit did WONDERS. Same with Instagram, even after deleting the app I still found myself on the website. While it was a better experience (especially with an ad-blocker) it was still a waste of time that I just had to get rid of.


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Erah Mar's profile picture

Reply by Erah Mar

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@Rover

Awesome! I'm glad you've found things that are working for you! I never knew that some phones let you have multiple users like a computer, that's cool. I hope you can find a way to get out of those work texts, tho. That would be a nice disconnect.

I've been thinking about getting some extensions for my browser that block or limit websites on my phone, because I'm still  dopamine seeking a lot. I love Tumblr, but it's a big time-sink.

It's been nice to leave FB and Insta at home, honestly. I log in once a week and after a few weeks, I've realized that it's full of fun but unimportant stuff, and it's a lot easier to log off.


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