Part 1, for those who don’t care for scrolling.

The thing with the Internet is…well, see, it’s not the Internet. It’s me.* The thing with me is that I have discipline, at least some, but I lack willpower. And I lack willpower because I have an overwhelming innate laziness that I need to do battle with every waking moment of every day. I would call my laziness congenital because it feels like the kind of disorder that is congenital, and all the evidence, both concrete and anecdotal, indicates that I was born this way. But calling this congenital would be doing my parents — my farmer parents — a great disservice. While they harvest entire crops of grains — simultaneously managing a flock of sheep, mind you — I spend three months putting off re-potting the fuchsia on my balcony.

This tendency came into play in my decision to go Internet free in two ways. First, there’s a flipside to my laziness. The nice thing about getting old, you see, is that you start to see how all the elements of your personality, even those you hate, can act like something like a prism. You spend your 20s glumly contemplating your flaws, and in an effort to keep them out of sight, exert yourself to smother them, keep them from surfacing. But at some point you realize that all you had to do was hold your flaws up to the light just so, and then you can see how they gleam and spill over with colour. I am about as lazy as you can get while still maintaining the cornerstones of normalcy (barring catastrophe or, I suppose, an incredible windfall, I will always be gainfully employed, for example). But when you hold that up to the light there’s something else: With great laziness comes a keen eye for efficiency. I can’t tolerate the effort required to do something in a way that doesn’t make sense or that can be done better, if doing it better means releasing me sooner from the onerous state of not doing nothing. My relationship with the Internet had reached a point where it was becoming inefficient, and having it around to suck me into not doing shit was having the effect of making that shit way harder once I got around to it. For example, ignoring the vacuuming for a few days results in a thick film of cat hair on the furniture that takes over half an hour to get up instead of five minutes. The same applies to any of the little everyday things that are easy to ignore, and easier to rue ignoring.

Secondly, however, is that despite my drive for efficiency, there’s still the other larger issue of my great propensity to suck despite this, and all the things I need to do in order to work around this basic fact. I recently attended a seminar on working with clients who have a disability — specifically Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, which, in short, is brain damage — and the facilitator articulated a coping strategy that I realized could be applied to anyone. Now I’m not comparing suffering from garden variety laziness to FASD or any other form of brain damage (much as I might sometimes feel brain damaged while staring blankly at the blinking cursor on my monitor at work); that’s not where I’m going with this, so bear with me. The seminar facilitator urged us to think of FASD in the same terms as we would think of any other physical disability: We all know it doesn’t make any sense to become angry with a paraplegic for being unable to walk up a flight of stairs, nor does it make any sense to punish them for failing to do so, or even failing to try. What makes sense is to give them the tools that they need in order to be able to go up the stairs (a mechanical lift maybe), or to set them up in an environment in which they can function without aids (a home without stairs). Now this was exquisitely put for me in two ways. First the unselfish bit: What a sensible and accessible, yet compassionate, way to approach a sometimes baffling disorder. Second (and this is the selfish part), I realized she was articulating precisely and succinctly a coping technique that I have been somewhat blindly and clumsily putting into place over the last number of years as I fumble my way through the project I’ve wearily dubbed It’s Time to Stop Failing As an Adult. And hearing it articulated meant that I could go about refining it.

While being incredibly lazy is incomparable to having a disability, it can be vaguely debilitating in its own right. Simple things like laundry and dishes can seem overwhelming, all the more so if you happen to be doing something pleasant the moment you realize they need to be done. Any success I’ve had in not appearing lazy is the result of acknowledging — even embracing — the all-encompassing effect of my laziness, and the fact that it’s not going to go away. I will not wake up tomorrow as the person who’s raring to go to the gym or who decides to just “get the dishes out of the way” before she relaxes. In other words, there’s no point in trying to shame this out of me (my 20s would have been a different, more stellar, story if shame could cure me); instead I need to create an environment in which someone like me can succeed. (An example of this technique is my little triumph over laundry, which is when I first began to think of simplifying as an effective means of working around my personal shortcomings.)

The Internet is both the best and worst thing that could happen to someone as lazy as I [me?]. It’s this great, interactive, educational, social portal that requires a minimum of output from its users…but somehow that minimum of output seems to spread to the other areas of your life. The Internet is a dangerous time suck for me, and I know I’m not alone in that. That, I suspect, is near universal. (I don’t know exactly where I land on the spectrum of human ability to stop trifling around with stupid shit in order to get things done, but on second thought, I’m starting to suspect I’m closer to the centre than I sometimes I think.) At some point over the last number of years, more days than not I would come home from work and do what could only be described as diddly fuck all. Unless languidly lolling through websites you’re half paying attention to qualifies as doing something. With time, this became alarming enough that I managed to correct the course such that I became much better about closing the laptop and becoming more consistent about getting done what needed to be done. I could have left well enough alone, but there was still one thing missing from the picture: I never managed to get to the things I wanted to do. Of particular note, I never managed to write.

Given enough time, I suppose I would have managed to steer myself out of the tailspin of lost time in order to develop the discipline needed to ignore the pleasing, numbing ease of constant passive amusement that the Internet provides. I did manage to start getting other shit done after all. But is there any real benefit in losing more time when a relatively simple change can help you to get to where you want to be now? And how much more time is worth losing? Why wait to live the life you want to live, be the person you want to be? If you can identify what’s holding you back and you’re ready to change it, then there’s very little argument against it. For all the reasons I’ve mentioned, it’s far more efficient and effective for me to change my environment to suit my needs (or perhaps more accurately, my weaknesses) than to try to change who I am.

So what’s changed now that we’re on the other side? We are still at the beginning stages of this little experiment — it’s only been a month or two — so time will tell how many other changes and discoveries there are to come. However, there are, of course, already some discoveries of note. The first day we were without Internet access was striking for a conversation we had: There was a moment after we’d finished breakfast where we realized that, “Since there was nothing else to do, we might as well do the stuff we need to do.” Uh. Wait, what? There was a certain dawning horror that resonated through the room after that, when we realized how normal it had become for us to ignore what really needed to be done in favour of bland amusement. I also think this blog is perhaps the most telling yet unintuitive example of how crippling the Internet can be for me: I may be the only blogger who blogs more as a result of no longer having Internet access.

Finally, what’s also of note is how different my expectations of what this change would bring are from the reality. I thought, for example, that I would need to find a hobby, knitting or some such, to keep me occupied during my down time at home. This is so off the mark it’s laughable. I don’t need a hobby because I don’t have time for one. Not even a little bit. I have yet to find myself out of things to do, the vast majority of which are the mundane, day-to-day crap of adult life. It’s no wonder life often felt slightly out of control before — I was wasting time I simply didn’t have to begin with. You often hear about how overwhelming the constant onslaught of information is for people in the information age, and I think there’s something to that — there is a certain stillness, peace, to my evenings that wasn’t there before. But I also think that’s largely missing the forest for the trees. Taking in all this information and, now in the era of social networking, participating in it takes time that we don’t actually have. The Internet and TV may be relatively new to the scene, but laundry and dishes have been around since about forever, and will go on for about forever too.

Oh, but! Let’s not leave out what has become something of a hobby now, whenever I do find the time: I am writing. For real. There’s time for it, an evening here and there, and there’s the fertile, quiet space for it now too. I’m not afraid to say that this, if anything, is what I hope becomes the discovery that unfolds and blooms because of this latest decision to let go.

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*Obviously, Kieran is on this journey too, and we made this decision together, although I’m writing about this from my own perspective. Some of our reasons overlap (time suck), but he has his own reasons that I won’t do the disservice of trying to put into words for him.

Over the years, as our journey towards simplicity has slowly gathered momentum, I have noticed that each decision to get rid of something has followed a specific,  predictable pattern.

Phase 1

Something surfaces, somehow separates from the backdrop of all the other stuff and habits in your world, and makes itself known to your conscious mind. You realize that the thing in question you either haven’t used in ages, or you do use it but don’t really need to or (perhaps secretly) maybe don’t even want to.

Phase 2

You begin to toy with idea of getting rid of the thing, weighing the pros and cons, contemplating the what ifs (“Maybe I’ll need it later,” is the argument your brain likes to have with itself immediately after noting that you haven’t used the espresso machine in two years.) But the idea of getting rid of it niggles anyway, and you roll it around for a while.

Phase 2a

If the thing in question is a Big Thing that you actually do use but it’s dead weight anyway, you go into a sub-phase before you can move on. In this phase you worry that getting rid of the Big Thing will be wildly inconvenient, or otherwise suck hugely in ways both predictable and unpredictable. The negotiations and discussions in this phase are real — as are the merits and demerits they raise — as opposed to the hamsters in your brain jumping on their squeaky little wheels seemingly just for the hell of it. This isn’t the “Seriously, self. Get a grip. If ever it comes to pass that you need another set of salt and pepper shakers you can just buy some,” tail chasing that inevitably goes on when you’re cleaning out the closets. This is more so some “Uh, we are going to change everything. Are…we ready to do that?” hand wringing that is at least somewhat rooted in legitimacy. (For example, we went through something of a drawn out Phase 2a when deciding to go car free, wherein we discussed everything from how we would negotiate grocery shopping to trips out of town.)

Here is where things branch. If the thing in question is a useless piece of crap (extra salt and pepper shakers) you move onto Phase 3; if it’s not exactly useless but somehow superfluous anyway, you move onto Phase 4.

Phase 3

You drop the piece of crap at the curb (or, preferably, at a charity in need of your donations), and forget it ever existed. The time you spent staring at the salt shaker wondering if you would regret its absence was an absolute waste of time, just as the thing itself was an absolute waste of space. One day maybe you’ll remember this fact so you can bypass the hamster wheel arguments with yourself, but who knows. Maybe it’s somehow innate. We all seem to do it.

Phase 4

You close your eyes and pull the plug: You get rid of the Big Deal Thing and…you wait. You wait for all the shitty inconveniences and regrettable extra miles you have to go to now. And they do come, although not as some unassailable onslaught like you’d imagined during the height of your hand wringing. Instead they trickle in, and they’re manageable, easy to almost mindlessly swat away. What you’re not expecting though is that for every little inconvenience, there are at least two positive changes you couldn’t have predicted, things you’d never give up now that they’ve bloomed in the wake of that which you have left behind. When we went car free, for example, we never could have predicted how much more physically fit we’d become just automatically, really, or just how much money we’d save. (And that’s just the start of the list of happy changes I could list. We’re car-free ten years and counting for a reason, much as I know the people who want to hear about it are few and far between.)

For whatever reason, I didn’t think that getting rid of the Internet would fall into this pattern. The Internet, like a car, is at least arguably useful and necessary. I can’t imagine looking for work without the Internet, for example, not any more. And unlike a car, there is no real alternative to the Internet — there’s no walking or biking or public transit equivalent. What’s more, unlike a car, the Internet is actually generally pretty fun, or at least more consistently so.

And yet. (Part 2 to follow shortly, although — natch — no Internet does make blogging somewhat trickier. See you in a bit.)