Living offline in 2026 from someone who was dragged here kicking and screaming
(sharing a couple of posts from Medium here because this place seems a lot better)
More and more people are looking to spend more of life offline. The trend of doing life in analogue is only growing.
Personally, I got booted offline by my own body last year after a head injury when neurological issues meant I could no longer spend more than an hour and a half tops on screen without severe pain. While this has improved over time, spending a year without access to the usual social media, WhatsApp, email, and the like was a real learning curve.
I went through all of the different phases of giving up an addiction, which shocked me. I was angry and frustrated that I couldn’t access the things I normally would. I was depressed and isolated that I couldn’t speak to people the way that I had before. I couldn’t connect with my online communities at all.
As someone who grew up before the proliferation of social media, I still had some idea of what constituted an offline life. But even then, it took me a long time to figure out what I could do without a screen. There are so many activities that require the use of a screen now that it’s difficult to move away and to start living life offline.
Not to mention the fact that everybody around us is using their phones all of the time. Especially in recent years, it’s become normal to whip out your phone halfway through a conversation when there’s an awkward silence. It’s completely normal now to expect an instant response from someone, no matter what they’re doing, or what time of day it is. Moving away from using screens is to actively go against the grain. It’s against what the companies that are selling this tech are trying to promote and it’s against societal norms.
If you’re looking to reduce your screen time and you want to embrace living life in analogue, you have to understand that it’s going to be difficult.
Screens have become so insidious in our life because tech companies have pushed convenience in return for our time and data. The convenience is the way that it has become so entrenched in our lives that it’s seemingly impossible to remove or reduce. This is intentional.
Tech companies who design phones and social media platforms specifically use psychological hooks to make sure that our online experience is as seamless as possible. They know that every time we get frustrated, we’re less likely to spend time on that platform. And in a world that’s driven by ad revenue, the more time we spend on the platform, the more money it is for that company.
As much as I’d like to say it was as easy as chucking my phone in a drawer and getting a dumb phone, reducing my screen time actually took a complex set of actions to create a new ecosystem that fulfilled the needs that my smartphone had previously made extremely easy. It also took money. In this article I’m focused on ways to reduce your screen time that don’t require a lot of money. There are other actions that you can take if you’re in a fortunate financial position, but for your average person, they won’t be accessible.
If you’re thinking this sounds way too hard, is there any point in doing it? I can assure you that yes, it is worth the grind.
To be clear, I didn’t want to come offline. I was very much an online girly before I was injured. I work remotely, I game, I keep in touch with family overseas. So being online was an integral part of my life. My screen time was high, but it didn’t concern me because so many other people that I knew had similarly high screen time.
The one metric that did make me worry was the number of times I picked up my phone a day and specifically the number of times I checked my email a day. Because in reality, I don’t want to check my email nearly 75 times a day. That’s not something that rationally or logically I want to do, but that is what I was doing.
So, knowing that I had a natural limit to my screen time, I set about deciding how I was going to use it intentionally.
Why do you need to be online?
The first step was for me to understand why I was online and then to come up with ways to fulfil those needs without using a screen. Here are the overarching needs that I discovered.
Dopamine, the big one. Scrolling, watching videos, chatting with people online was a really easy way to get dopamine, as well as gaming. Unfortunately, I couldn’t access any of these after my injury, so I had to really quickly switch to offline hobbies. It took me around three to four months to find hobbies I could do fully offline that also aligned with the physical constraints that I had with my injury.
Those first three months were torture. When you hear the phrase dying of boredom, that is exactly what I was going through. I was angry about the fact that I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do and I was depressed because I just wasn’t getting the hits of dopamine that I was so used to getting from just picking up my smartphone. The withdrawal of easy dopamine is one of the biggest challenges in starting to reduce your screen time and live offline. I’ve given up a few vices in my time and I have to say this one was by far the most difficult.
Communication was the other big need. I was so used to communicating with people on WhatsApp, social media, other platforms, and to have everything stripped back was isolating, especially as I have family overseas.
Getting around suddenly became a lot more difficult when I couldn’t use a smartphone. I couldn’t order an Uber. I couldn’t check Google Maps. So I was back to what I used to do in the early 2000s — get lost all the time.
Learning was another need that my smartphone had fulfilled for me for a really long time. YouTube videos, articles, random questions about whatever thing came to mind in ChatGPT — all of those went out of the window.
Music. I am a big music fan and not being able to instantly access Spotify and play whatever I wanted was a real learning curve. Now that I’ve set up more of an ecosystem around this, I prefer it, but it was extremely difficult to go from being someone who listens to music all day every day to barely being able to use the Spotify interface.
Once I understood the scope of the needs I had and how my smartphone was fulfilling them, then I could start thinking about potential solutions for this. Some of them were things I used to do in the early 2000s, so it was a case of bringing them back. I’m sharing them here because depending on your age, you might not know about these things.
How do you even have fun offline?
I asked myself this question often in the first few months. Every single hobby I had somehow involved a screen, whether it was learning from the screen, actually being on screen or needing to refer to some kind of document on screen. Nothing that I had as a hobby was completely screen free.
I had to think back to the days before social media and ubiquitous smartphones to remember what I had used to do before then. How did I pass the time? I made a list of offline hobbies that require no screen time and a small amount of setup. The ones that could be easily picked up just as easily as picking up a smartphone. If you’re interested, the list is at the bottom of this article.
Keeping in touch with people was a little more tricky. I decided that I wanted to spend more time talking to the people that mattered the most to me, rather than acquaintances or people online that I didn’t know. So I spoke to the people I was closest to, my friends and my family, and told them the way that I needed to communicate from now on.
In the beginning, this was via voice notes. It was much easier than using text. But the problem I kept having is if I used my smartphone to send a voice note, I would inevitably get sucked into some other app on my phone and end up with a lot of pain.
In the end, the best solution for me was to get a dumb phone, which is a phone that has limited capabilities compared to a smartphone. I needed one with WhatsApp because I have family living internationally. The screen is so tiny that there is absolutely no point having any other app on there.
I used a new SIM for my dumb phone and set up call forwarding on my smartphone so I never miss a call. This means that my dumb phone is not clogged up with all of the WhatsApp groups I had before (trying to manage a group chat on a three inch screen is just not possible).
I’ll be honest, it’s quite nice to have a new private number that only the people that I’m close to know. No one in my WhatsApp groups has noticed that I only reply in the evening when I check my smartphone and anybody who has something urgent to tell me has my secret number.
Travelling without a smartphone was daunting to begin with, especially as I had vision problems too, so travelling independently and knowing that I didn’t have Uber at my fingertips was pretty scary. I had to plan in advance where I would go, how I would get there, and I had to start using bus timetables, which I haven’t done since 2009. Just like the old days, the bus timetables still mean absolutely nothing, and buses will come whenever they feel like coming.
Waiting for things and having to plan in advance are two really key themes of living offline and they might take some getting used to. The good news is you will have hours of your day back where you can do this.
Having a reliable taxi company that you trust in your phone book is also a game changer, as is having a script for ordering one if you’ve never done it before. I’ll chuck one of those at the end of this article before as well.
If you’re studying and you’re used to accessing information online through YouTube, then this will be a paradigm shift for you. Going to the library and reading books about your topic can be extremely boring compared to watching an easily understandable YouTube video with someone who explains it in simple language. Studying the old school way can literally make your head hurt. However, the research does show that learning being difficult makes it stick better in the long run [1].
If you’re a registered student at a university, you’ll definitely have access to a library, so make the most of it. If you’re not a student, you can go to the public library, and they have an array of books for you in all sorts of different topics. They also often have talks and workshops on different skills, so it’s worth keeping an eye on the events pages. They’re also totally free.
If you’re not a big reader, then another way to learn outside of the internet is to join classes or go to social groups of people who understand the topic that you’re learning about. I’m currently studying a degree in computer science, so I spend a lot more time in tech social groups than I used to, and it’s been instrumental in my learning.
I’m still figuring out how to access music in the best way. One thing to understand is that before streaming platforms like Spotify, your music collection was limited. You could have tons of music on a hard drive or on your computer. But when you came to music on the go on your music player, iPod, MP3 player, whatever you had, it was limited.
You had to spend time each week deciding, what’s the music that I want to have on the go this week? That’s a mindset shift when you’ve been used to having a streaming platform where you can access any song at any time.
Thankfully, curating your music is pretty fun. It’s something that any person who grew up in the 90s will remember doing, but if you’re not sure how the technical side of this works, there are tons of forums that provide useful information on how to do it.
Radio is also a lifesaver. There are thousands upon thousands of internet radio stations and you will find one that caters to your taste. I’ve linked a few below that I prefer, but you can find almost anything in internet radio. This was a bonus I didn’t realize would happen from moving away from streaming platforms that I would discover so much more new music in the last year than I have done probably in the last decade.
This is obviously a lot of work. It takes months to transition to living more offline. The things that have been the most difficult to let go of are things like online banking or using QR codes in public for menus and that kind of thing. If you’ve come up with a solution for this, please let me know.
Was it worth it in the end?
Yes, absolutely. I have a lot more headspace than I had when I started. I feel like my life is more varied and rich for the hobbies I have and I’ve met more people as a result of engaging in those hobbies too.
I’m starting to remember who I am and my opinions rather than having the same talking points that everyone else seems to have when reading online. I don’t constantly feel like I want to buy stuff. I’m happier with my appearance. I’m more active in muy community.
I’m processing the big life things quicker because I’m not spending my processing power on a bunch of random input that I didn’t choose.
My relationships with my friends are deeper because I have the time and energy to connect with them rather than feeling guilty about all the unread messages from acquaintances online.
I have ideas again. I’m planning my life differently. I’m thinking about doing things in person first, rather than fulfilling my social needs with online chat.
I certainly didn’t want to start living a life offline, but I’m very glad that I did.
A roadmap for getting offline
Figure out what you need your smartphone for.
Brainstorm ideas for how you could fulfill those needs in another way.
Choose one of those ideas and try it out.
Rinse and repeat.
Relapse and go back to stage one (happens to the best of us).
One thing to consider is that if your phone is in sight, you will use it. If you imagine giving up smoking and keeping a pack of cigarettes on the table, you can see exactly the kind of pull that it might have. It’s designed to be addictive and very few people can resist that pull.
You’ll also need to have your strongest willpower around other people who will have their phones out constantly and you will find yourself in social situations where you’re the only person not on your phone while everyone else scrolls or checks messages or whatever. Keep reminding yourself of why you’re doing this. Maybe it’s for your health, whether that’s mental or physical. Maybe it’s because you want deeper connections with people in real life. Whatever is driving you, keep coming back to it.
Remember that you will hate this at times. Like any addiction, anger, grief and depression is part of the recovery process. And if you’re struggling, it’s worth tracking your progress over time to understand how living analogue impacts you.
I didn’t even talk about work in this article. That’ll be for another time. If you notice the tone of this article is informal, it’s because I’m speaking it. If you’re looking for a good Speech to text tool, I highly recommend VoiceInk.
Appendix (all the stuff I mentioned I’d add)
Offline hobbies list
Knitting, drawing (not well but for fun), writing, singing, listening to the radio, doing your hair, doing your makeup, exercising or just moving, cooking, journaling, doing crosswords, doing sudoku, jigsaw puzzles.
Got other low-cost ideas? Drop them in the comments.
- Radio stations
Internet radio app (no log in, no ads): https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.transistor/
Arctic Outpost Radio — spinning vinyls from 1902–1958
https://www.aor.am/
Mystery Train radio — eclectic mix of old and new, broadcasting from the Cotswolds
https://mysterytrainradio.com/
SomaFM — a bunch of very niche channels such as spy music, underground 80s and EDM
https://somafm.com/
- Basic script for calling a taxi:
You: “Hi, I’d like to book a taxi please.”
Them: “Sure, where are you calling from?”
You: Say your full address or a landmark
Them: “And where are you going?”
You: Say your destination address or landmark
Them: “What time would you like it?”
You: “As soon as possible, please” OR say a specific time
Them: “Can I take your name and phone number?”
You: Share your name and number
Them: “The taxi will be there in about x minutes. It’ll be a [car colour/type]”
You: “Great, thank you.”
- Research reference
[1] Bjork, R. A., & Bjork, E. L. (2020). Desirable difficulties in theory and practice. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 9(4), 475–479.