Note: the following piece of writing is fictitious. It is purely a guess of your emotions if you were to go without the internet for ten days. People who claim this piece is somehow related to the authors real life from January the 15th to the 25th of 2021 will receive a $500,000 fine (NZD). The author will use this money to buy half of a small house in Auckland. 

Day 0

You wake from a good dream. Or at least, what felt like a good dream. Now you’re lying in bed at 11am, haunted by the contents. Your life was great in that world, now you’re back here feeling sad. You pick up your phone and begin your morning routine. This routine never makes you feel good. You open the same four apps and scroll until you’re disgusted with yourself. Today you feel different, you’re in a bad mood from your bad good dream, and these apps aren’t helping. The news is only of death. The entertainment isn’t. And when you open Instagram, anxiety welcomes itself into your heart. You feel overwhelming dread, and the feeling sticks all day. Even though you’ve never seen a post that has positively impacted your life, you can’t seem to escape Mr Zuckerberg’s grubby fingers. 

You decide it is time for a break from the internet. 

You leave for a 10 day family holiday tomorrow. You hope once it’s over you’ll spend less time on the internet in bed, and more time on better things, like the internet on the couch. You leave at 10am tomorrow, this is when you will cut off. You’re already anxious at the thought.

Day 1

Your alarm wakes you at 8:30am. It’s your earliest hour in months. With ill-adjusted eyes, you move through your morning routine in about seven to seven and a half minutes. This hurts your eyes, and you feel sick. But you push through because you leave in an hour and a half. 

After two hours on the road, you get out for a break. The first thing you see is a massive “Free Wi-Fi” sign, right by your door. It’s just sitting there, waiting for you. You specifically. You instinctively reach for your phone, but then you think, “yeah, nah.” It is a hard “yeah, nah,” for your brain, but you make it. 

While you drive, you think about death. You see so many crosses, and you worry about how easy it seems, how quickly life can end on the road. From the back seat, you keep an eye on the traffic. There is nothing you can do to prevent a crash. 

You stop for an Ice Block. Something tells you to not get the Raspberry Pineapple Calippo, but it is the only option in the ice block variety, so you go for it. You stand there in the 31-degree heat, Raspberry Pineapple Calippo in hand, feeling like a million dollars. You imagine this must be what it feels like to be a property investor. Pure bliss, not a worry in the world. 

All of your fear fades away, and you’re not even thinking about your phone. 

However, a few bites later, you remember why you were hesitant about the Raspberry Pineapple Calippo. Because while your first few bites were good, it was likely because of the heat. You realise the texture is bad, the flavour is bad, and it has left you feeling like a gluttonous, lazy piece of [REDACTED], who has bitten off more than deserved and should be paying more tax. 

That night, you watch Shrek with your family. The internet is temporary, but Shrek never dies. 

Day 2

Today you live like a cat. After waking from a great sleep, you go on a nice walk down to the lake. You enjoy it, but you walk fast. Your brain seems to be in a constant search for completion. As if making it to the end of the walk is what is good for you. But all fast walking does is force you to wait longer for your family. You don’t speed when you drive, because you know you’ll eventually make it to your end goal. Why don’t you have a speed limit for other parts of your life?

Back to living like a cat, you spend a significant amount of time sitting and looking into nothing. You’re very close to what you normally do, but without the phone, you are essentially meditating. You don’t close your eyes, but may as well be asleep. You probably look really funny. Later, after catching Scarlet in The Observatory with the poison, you sit on a comfortable chair and watch the clouds. Your posture isn’t great, but it doesn’t matter. The clouds are crazy, you watch as they morph and shift. There is one that looks like a patriotic eagle. Ironically, this cloud also morphs and shifts. 

You have felt free today, and have barely thought of your phone. Even though you haven’t done much, you feel at peace. You reckon this no internet thing isn’t actually very hard, and you’re looking forward to getting some writing done over the next week. Although, you do regret attempting to write this piece in second person. You struggle with your tenses enough already and are not looking forward to editing later on. 

Day 3 

Again, you sleep without a bad dream. You’ve enjoyed being able to get real sleep instead of being transported to a nightmare alternate reality designed for your maximum displeasure. Since you’ve been avoiding the tragedy of the world, and the ‘greatness’ of other people’s lives, your brain has been given time to rest. Peace during the day and night. 

You walk again today. The loop track: an hour and a half total. One or two drops of rain fall as you begin, but it’s nice. You follow the twists and turns of the beautiful native bush, getting lost in your beautiful country. Forty-five minutes into the walk, you get lost in your beautiful country. The rain is starting to get a tad heavy, so you turn and walk back the way you came. You brought your notebook with all of your writing and you don’t want it to be ruined by the damp, so you put it in your hood pocket, underneath your purple jacket. It is really raining, slowly increasing in strength, and now absolutely pissing down on you. You’re drenched, but it isn’t annoying. You’re lovin’ it. You laugh at the rain, it’s freeing. You arrive at the beginning, soaked right through to your skin. Luckily, your notebook is fine. You think it would be pretty good dramatic entertainment if it was ruined, but you don’t want to lie in your writing. 

Later, you are abducted by aliens. Haha. 

Day 4 

You look at the floor for an awfully long time. You don’t know how something so mundane can be so peaceful. You find it hard to explain through writing how sitting and staring at the carpet for an hour shows you are mentally healthy. Actually, you’ve started to have a lot of self-doubt about your daily writing. You doubt the worth and quality of your work, which is why you haven’t posted any writing for over half a year. Even then, you only posted that one piece because your lecturer liked it. You get excited by your writing. But, when you really get stuck in, a crushing weight of self-doubt hits you like an ill-prepared lawn bowler returning from a wrist injury.

While you have doubt about this writing, you are feeling good about your other project. You’re looking forward to the day you’ll share it with people. You are happy with your productivity over the past few days but are not sure how it happened. Just kidding, it’s because you haven’t had the internet for four days. You briefly think about the eventual return to Wi-Fi. The thought brings back the anxiety that you haven’t felt for four or so days.

You open a bag of Copper Kettle Chips: Sea Salt. There is so much salt. Even more than the snack packs you get with your favourite friends. One day you will die of some kind of salt-based heart disease. 

Day 5

Today combines something you love and something you hate: sitting in silence and driving. You’re doing the same thing you’ve done for the past few days, but being in the car takes away all relaxation. You find it strange, if anything sitting in silence in the car should feel positive, you’re travelling to a new destination. Maybe you’re just afraid of moving forward. 

You stop at a Kmart. As you walk around, you pass someone who looks a little out of it. You’re not sure if they are on crack, or just going through puberty. 

You drive around twists and turns you have known your whole life. This is a place you’ve visited almost every year since you were a child. However, you’re not sure if it’s the same place anymore. The small check-in hut has quadrupled in size, now slick and modern. The campsite has expanded its sites without expanding their land. So random tents and caravans cram in all around you. You feel as though you are no longer in a nice family campground, you’re in a money machine. You walk along the short, hidden track that leads to the dairy and main beach. The dairy, once a quaint little building, has transformed into a large, faceless concrete monolith. You grab a $2 mixture because you can only fight one addiction at a time. The bag seems so much smaller than the mixtures you had as a child. They used to overflow, now you can wrap your hand around it. Have you grown? Or has this place just shrunk? Who knows what you mean by that? 

Day 6

You eat a creme egg at 11:11am. This does not make you feel great, so you eat a green fruit burst. You get a text from one of your closest friends saying “hey I miss you.” If there is one great thing about the internet, it is staying connected with the people you truly care about. You are looking forward to doing that again. 

You have started to narrate parts of your life in second person. It is a good opportunity for you to reflect on your life, and aspects of yourself that may need improvement. For example: “you eat a creme egg at 11:11am.” As you write this you feel a huge sense of pride.

You watch as a couple attempt to take one of those ‘frozen in the jump position’ photos. They attempt it many times, and each time their jump becomes less and less impressive, to the point where they look dejected at one of the most beautiful places on earth. You wonder how they have the self-esteem to attempt the photo over and over in front of so many people.

You have reached the page in your notebook that you killed a bug with. Skip this page. 

Day 7

You mentioned earlier in the week that you haven’t been having bad dreams. What you forgot to do was measure your sleep with the fancy watch that the government kindly brought you through ‘living costs’ last year. It says last night you got seven hours of actual sleep. This is over an hour longer than you usually get. But, despite greater rest, you feel tired. So tired. You’re not exactly sure why, especially since you’ve done nothing since November. You have felt a bit of burnout with your writing. So you stop for today and have pre-written tomorrow’s entry. 

Day 8

You wear your new bucket hat and it makes you feel good and cool. 

Day 9

You see someone you know. Well, someone you knew. They’re on the other side of the road, you make the briefest of eye contact. You walk away and a cloud covers you. It follows, dropping regret into your head for the rest of the day. It is a strange and overwhelming feeling. You know them from a while back, you had great conversations, and you felt like this was a person you could be friends with. You don’t have heaps of friends, which is fine, but the thought of a new, genuine one excites you. 

You think about what might have happened if they recognised you, pointed at you, and said, “it’s you!” You imagine the conversation and the way it perfectly wraps up with a promise to catch up soon. You think so much about these alternate, fake conversations that they become more real than your actual memories of them. Instead, you are standing here on the path, after seeing this person for half a second, and you feel sad. You feel sad? What?

You wrote earlier about how you don’t have many friends. But you know that is a lie, right? You have more close, genuine friends than you need. There are even some that you haven’t seen for over a month. Why don’t you hang out with them instead of overcharging your batteries at home? And why are you spending so much energy and emotion on this one friend you never made? 

It just doesn’t make any sense. Why did seeing them upset you? I mean, you only met twice, and you can’t even remember their name. 

Day 10

Today is your last full day. You feel like this whole experiment was not very hard. You have found that removing something from your life that didn’t bring you much joy has been positive. You’ve been fully present here, and you’ve seen many people who are not. You’ve had fun watching people try to prove they are present. They’ve sat around looking miserable, before bringing out their phones for a certificate of proof, and then returned to miserable. You’re not sure how culture made it here. 

Despite the success of your experiment, the realisation that you’re about to return creates anxiety again. Have you missed an important message? Will they think you’re lying when you say you’ve been away? You know that in reality, there won’t be anything important, because those messages don’t actually come very often, if at all. Your life is not a movie. And if it was, the only people who would enjoy it are the reviewers at Canne.

Tomorrow will be weird for you. You’ll get home, turn on the Wi-Fi, and your phone will go crazy for a bit. Clear that out, do what you need to do, message who you need to message, watch what you need to watch. Then once you are done, just pull back a bit. Okay? You know it isn’t good for you. 

Day 11

You stop at the big “Free Wi-Fi” sign to prove you were there. It’s smaller than you remember.