The Case for Being Offline Sometimes

Digital detox is a fantasy sold by wellness influencers who are very much online while telling you not to be. The retreat costs thousands, lasts a week, and then you go back to your phone-dependent life exactly as before. It's not a solution. It's a vacation that makes you feel guilty about going home.

I'm not interested in detox. I'm interested in something more practical: strategic disconnection. The ability to be offline when it serves you, without treating it as an escape or a moral achievement.

There's a difference between fleeing the internet and choosing when to use it. The first is reactive. The second is sovereign.

Why This Is Hard

Being offline now has costs it didn't have twenty years ago. You miss messages. You fall behind on work. You lose access to information you genuinely need. Social coordination happens through digital channels, and opting out means opting out of social coordination. The internet isn't an add-on anymore. It's infrastructure.

This is the argument against ever being offline: the cost is too high. And for some people, at some times, that's true. There are jobs where constant availability is the job. There are relationships that exist primarily online. There are emergencies you need to be reachable for.

But the argument contains a hidden assumption: that the benefits of being always-on exceed the costs. Most people have never actually tested this. They've never measured what they gain from constant connectivity against what they lose.

Tell me more about the attention economy

What You Actually Lose

When you're always available to the internet, the internet is always available to you. That sounds good until you realize what it means: your attention is never fully committed to anything.

There's a background process running constantly, checking for notifications, wondering what you're missing, half-expecting an interruption. Even when you're not looking at your phone, part of your mind is on it. This isn't weakness of will. It's a reasonable response to a device designed to interrupt you.

The result is a particular quality of attention: distributed, shallow, always ready to switch. Good for certain tasks. Terrible for others. Deep work, creative insight, genuine presence with another person. These require a different mode, one where the possibility of interruption is actually closed, not just ignored.

You can't get that mode while carrying a phone. The mere presence of the device, even silent, even face-down, divides your attention. Studies have shown this. Having your phone visible on the table makes you measurably worse at thinking. The research is surprisingly robust.

The Practice

Strategic disconnection isn't about rules. It's about boundaries that serve specific purposes.

For me, it looks like this: mornings are offline until I've done at least one hour of writing. Not because mornings are sacred, but because my best creative thinking happens before my mind gets cluttered with inputs. Once I've checked email, once I've seen the news, once I've scrolled anything, the quality changes. The uninterrupted mind generates different thoughts than the interrupted one.

Certain activities are phone-free. Long walks. Dinners with people I care about. Reading books, actual books made of paper, because reading on a device that can notify me isn't really reading.

One day a week, I try to be unreachable for a sustained stretch. Not all day, usually. Four or five hours. Enough to do something that requires extended focus.

This isn't impressive. It's probably less disconnection than most people manage already, without thinking about it. But the point is that it's intentional. I've chosen these boundaries based on what they cost and what they provide. I adjust them when circumstances change.

What You're Protecting

The real argument for strategic disconnection isn't about productivity or wellness. It's about cognitive sovereignty.

When you're always connected, your thoughts are never entirely your own. They're shaped by what comes through the channel. The news story that makes you angry. The post that makes you compare yourself to someone. The notification that pulls you out of whatever you were thinking about. Each of these is a small influence, but they accumulate.

Being offline sometimes protects the ability to think without external prompts. To be bored, which turns out to be important for creativity. To have thoughts that arise from your own concerns rather than what's trending. To maintain a sense of self that isn't constantly being updated by inputs you didn't choose.

This sounds dramatic, but it's really just describing what minds were like before ubiquitous connectivity. Most humans in history had long stretches where nothing new came in, and they had to work with what was already in their heads. We've traded that for infinite access to information and other people's thoughts. The trade has benefits. It also has costs we're only starting to understand. Some call this cognitive sovereignty.

The Privilege Question

I should acknowledge: being able to disconnect is itself a privilege. If your job requires constant availability, if you're a caregiver who needs to be reachable, if your economic situation means missing a message could cost you, the option to go offline isn't really an option.

This is true. And it's also true that the people who can least afford to be constantly available are often the ones required to be. Gig workers, hourly employees, people at the bottom of hierarchies. The ability to be unavailable is distributed unequally, like most things.

That's an argument for changing the structures that require constant availability, not for giving up on the idea. The fact that not everyone can do something doesn't mean it's worthless. It means we should work toward a world where more people can.

Not Anti-Technology

Let me be clear: I'm not a luddite. I use technology constantly. I'm writing this on a computer. I'll publish it on the internet. I genuinely value the connections and capabilities that connectivity provides.

The point isn't that technology is bad. It's that any powerful tool requires judgment about when to use it. A hammer is good for nails, bad for screws, and dangerous when you're trying to think. The internet is similar. Tremendously useful for certain things. Actively harmful for others.

The default, for most people, is always-on. I'm suggesting that default could be chosen rather than accepted. That you might deliberately decide when you want to be connected and when you don't, based on what you're trying to do.

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The test is simple: when was the last time you were genuinely unreachable for four hours? Not sleeping. Not on a plane. Just deliberately offline, doing something that matters to you, with no possibility of interruption.

If you can't remember, that's worth thinking about. Not because being offline is inherently good, but because never being offline might mean you've lost the ability to choose.