Those Who Wander Open Debate #6

Would Life Improve If We Abandoned the Internet and the Rest of the Digital World?

Feb 28, 2025

Greetings fellow wanderers,

In August 2024, I introduced a new feature at Those Who Wander—a Those Who Wander Open Debate. To reiterate, in place of a usual weekly post, I’m posting a monthly debate question, focused on various travel and adventure topics.

The format is simple. I will post a question for debate and pose a prompt about it. Then, there will be a poll and an opportunity to leave a comment to expand on your answer. Please feel free to respond at any length you like. If you have any research you’ve come across on the topic, I would love for you to share it with us here.

I will also repost the stats from the previous month’s poll. Last month, I asked ‘Is cosmopolitanism dying? ‘ with 17% saying ‘Yes’, 33% saying ‘No’, and 50% answering ‘Unsure.’ Thank you to everyone who participated and shared your thoughts!

Available for iOS and Android

Now onto today’s question and prompt:

Would life improve if we abandoned the internet and the rest of the digital world?

“[T]o function in a fast-changing society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individual must turn over his stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. His model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, his responses to change become inappropriate; he becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace.”

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

Imagine there was a nuclear button for the internet. Once pushed, there’s no going back. How many of us would erase the internet if we could? Okay, maybe that’s too overzealous. Perhaps a less extreme version that wouldn’t cause global financial turmoil for everyone else would allow us individually to press it for ourselves. Would we do that? Maybe a 7-day free trial of life offline? What might the following days, months, and years look like for us if we escaped from the digital world entirely? How would we spend our reclaimed time and attention? Would it be better as we emerged from our lethargic cocoons into a fresh new life or would we quickly devolve into a state of sheer boredom, begging our tech overlords to plug us back into the Matrix? Would our relationships improve? Would our mental and physical health steadily increase? Who might we become without being tethered so much to the internet?

The internet undoubtedly has pockets of fantastic places to entertain yourself and acquire knowledge about the world. How nice it is to look up how to repair anything that breaks instead of inundating my dad with silly questions about fixing the toilet or when the furnace filter needs to be replaced. We can instantly order everything we could ever want and need from the palm of our hands. The internet is a remarkable human achievement, and common citizens can now flaunt technology that renders them with god-like capabilities.

There are plenty of undisputed benefits to the Internet, but do they outweigh the cons? What have we traded away for the benefits? Most of us are now highly dependent on the Internet, for it is inextricably linked to so many aspects of modern life. And yet, for some of us there is an increasing appeal to the idea of leading a non-digital life.

A month ago, I watched the film Perfect Days. Since then, I’ve been thinking about it nearly every day. The film is about a man who leads a simple life detached from the digital world and spends his days scrubbing toilets in Tokyo. To most ears, that probably sounds like the most boring plot in the universe but it’s impossible to briefly articulate how beautiful and poetic the film is, so I encourage anyone reading to see it.

The film does a phenomenal job of demonstrating what discovering equanimity in a modern context looks like and how we still retain the agency to choose how we live and how we see the world. It’s left me wondering how I’d cope emulating such a life offline…

I keep returning to this nagging and cynical question: Why do I feel so resentful and annoyed by all this emergent technology and the world we’re ushering in? It feels as though we’re edging toward an eerie cyber-punk dystopia where so much of our lives is dominated by this advanced technology that is dictated by technocrats and billionaire do-gooders who think obsessively tinkering with things all the time and innovating is what leads us magically to progress. I do wish more of us would question the notion of progress more than we do because it isn’t entirely clear what we mean by “progress” anymore and whether or not we’re all on the same page with the direction we’re headed as a society. The futurist Alvin Toffler, writing a half-century ago, coined the term “future shock” to explain when we become unsettled by rapid changes occurring around us against our will. Few seem to realize just how much constant change unsettles the human psyche.

The utopian vision technocrats sold us 30 years ago was one in which the internet would enhance human connection and understanding “like never before.” It promised to bridge our long-assailed vices of tribalism and prejudice because we’d eventually be exposed to enough culture to see the inherent silliness in such retrograde thinking. We’d get wealthier, healthier, and wiser. Our destiny was written in the code and there was bound to be another “era of good feelings” in the new millennium. Some of this has no doubt been true, but we all sense the burden such connectivity unloads onto our conscience. With our eyes glued to screens, brains constantly stimulated, and nerves never at ease, we’re not far from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian vision of Brave New World.

Last year was the 30^th anniversary of the World Wide Web. I don’t recall much celebration. Do you? How did we miss that? The Internet is supposedly on par with the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions in terms of historical significance and yet where were the ticker-tape parades? Deep down, we all probably know the answer to this. An op-ed in The Gazette by Jake Pitre summarized it well,

“In 1994, when the first web browser debuted, tech evangelists were effusive with dreams of the technological future as a place of free information, expression and opportunity. However, as we know, the internet quickly became more privatized, more extractive and less wondrous.”

The promises of the internet now seem to have been a farce in hindsight, or at least another story of things being too good to be true. How did so many of us succumb to such mass delusion? If you’re familiar with the classic work by Charles Mackey, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds published in 1841, you know we’re overdue for a sequel, and our modern times can now fill volumes of the popular delusions of the 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

When we consider how unhealthy our online habits are, the behaviors they elicit, and the strong reactions we are having in the world as we frenetically try to make sense of all the information pouring into our brains, we can’t help but wonder if the internet and the endless tech gadgetry Silicon Valley keeps pumping out is what’s driving all of us mad. Is much of this stuff genuinely helping to improve our lives or is it just making a few people even richer?

There is a well-known anecdote that the writer Kurt Vonnegut shared once about his famed friend and fellow author Joseph Heller,

“JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!”

Perhaps the moment we all realize we, too, have enough will be the day our lives truly transform and improve.

I return to my question: Why do I feel so resentful and annoyed by all this emergent technology and the world we’re ushering in? Perhaps I’m already an old curmudgeon at 35, which must be entertained as a highly probable possibility. However, part of it has to do with the constant vanity and stupidity we encounter in our system daily (see media clips below). It’s the increasing loss of control we have with ever-newer technology–the overabundance, the overstimulation, and the endless apps, updates, accounts, and passwords to manage. Memes, reels, and AI-captioned text flit by too quickly and never seem to quite make syntactical sense for those of us fond of human language.

Everything flashes across our screens so quickly as to give us whiplash. Everyone wants you to use their brilliant new app, create an account, and be inundated with emails into oblivion. It isn’t all that surprising anymore why so many of us feel disoriented and disillusioned with the state of the world. Nor is it a wonder we have so many of us acting neurotically and on so many medications given the frenzied environment we now inhabit. It is incredibly unnatural for the human mind to process so much so often.

If you are what you eat, does this logic also apply to the internet and the information we regularly consume? Our technology is the personality of its makers and consumers–a feedback loop and perpetual motion machine snowballing us into unwelcoming mental states. The internet is the product of people who perhaps needed more time in the woods growing up.

As creators and consumers of this technology, we are losing the thread of what it is like to slow down and tune in to the natural world. It is perhaps the theft of our time and attention that disturbs me the most about this technology because I see how it steers our behaviors, often turning us into worse versions of ourselves and compromising the relationships we’d otherwise be better constructing with one another. We all need greater exposure to moments of serenity and equanimity, not more efficiency and expediency.

As I wrote in The Case for Slow Travel and Slow Reading in a Fast-Paced Society,

“Our society places a premium on efficiency. Whether it’s coffee in the morning to get us going, Amazon packages arriving at our door in a single day, or getting to work “on time,” we value expediency a lot in our society. We even now demand this of our information. Until recently, news cycles were not 24/7 but we have rapidly transitioned into an information and knowledge economy that requires constant processing. Efficiency and expediency have obvious benefits, but seldom do we ask whether efficiency is an intrinsic good. What might we be trading off for its sake? Is technology truly liberating us or are there unforeseen restraints being placed on us? And how do we better slow down in our world? Do we even have a choice in the matter?”

What power do we have to reclaim some semblance of the life we want to live? Do we not have a right to slow down? Can we imagine a world where we see a sharp decline in people using the internet and “getting back to basics” as they say? Do we even have the ability to get off of this speeding bullet of a train if we want to? And if we did, would things genuinely become better or is that too a romantic delusion? Would we be okay with becoming less informed and losing access to our entertainment and all the internet provides if it meant obtaining a lasting sense of equanimity?

Perhaps this isn’t a zero-sum game. Maybe there is a healthy middle ground to straddle—one where we find a limit to the time and attention we give to the Internet and all these technologies and a balance to life both online and offline.

What are your thoughts? Would life improve if we abandoned the internet and the rest of the digital world?

Expand on your answer in the comments: