Is my future offline?

Sunday, January 12, 2025

As I’m sure many of you have noticed, I have recently been on something of a cleanse. Ejecting things from my life which I feel are no longer relevant. Trying my best to live intentionally and considering what adds value to my life, and what are things which I use as crouches for someone I used to be. Towards the end of this year, I am hoping to be in a financial position where I can buy a camper van and have little weekend excursions with my dog. I one day hope to retire into a mobile home of some kind and visit Europe, assuming there is a way to have my dog come with me, that is.

This pipe-dream about a small space, mobile future has been leaking into the decisions I make day to day. While I am a fair way away from having to think about the practical things, I have something of a clear thought pattern. I have likely mentioned it here before:

If something won’t work as part of my van life, it’s going to have to go eventually, so why bring it into life, or keep it in my life now?

This gets condensed into far fewer words, the following is the more common: “Good for van?”

This idea about spending the next year(s) preparing for the future I want has been really good for me. It has created some complications, some clarity and some questions. I have enjoyed purging things from my physical space, reducing my power consumption on a day to day basis, and it has even resulted in me having something of a capsule wardrobe selection.

A side effect of this has been that I have been preoccupied with the internet, as a source of interaction. When I get to go on those road trips I am pretty sure I can power my laptop and iPad without any issues, but, whats the point in having a powered up laptop is there is nothing to use it for? 

A down side of spending time in a an is the excellent change of being without internet access. This isn’t something which worries me, but it is something I think about.

My writing won’t be effected as Scrivener is an entirely offline application. I have local backups of a lot of video media and my kindle contains my entire digital book library (I download everything I buy.) My Miyoo Mini has many retro games I can play, and I have my theology books in print. And, for those very odd occasions that access to an LLM would be useful, I have offline options for that too.

I recently purchased a Digital Audio Player (DAP (an MP3 player)) and filled it with songs which can’t be taken away from me by a timed out connection. I have to write an entire post about that, at some point, as I think, it is quite an interesting topic. (It’s a Surfans F28.)

All in all without constant internet access, I’ll be fine. I have enough squirrelled away for basically any road trip I could find myself on. 

This got me to thinking though. I am confident that I don’t ‘need’ the internet for anything major, but I have never considered turning off my WiFi. 

The reason for this, is in part, because my preparation for some time offline is rooted in some real goals. I don’t want to have to consider internet when I am out adventuring in a van, but I do want to read things, watch things and play things. I am not prepping for an imagined scenario or end of the world event. 

However… When I think about my offline time, it does not fill me with dread. It used to. A few years ago the idea of being offline would make me twitch. During lockdown, the internet was a lifeline, but now, I am not sure I wouldn’t miss it the way I once would have done.

I still want to talk to my friends, I would still need to get my Kindle online every so often to get new books. Sooner or later the backed up media I have would go stale. But, an intermittent connection would likely not worry me too much. I could stay in touch with my friends via Email (I already communicate regularly with one friend via email.)

But still, I never turn off my WiFi.

With this in mind, I have considered that perhaps I will spend one day a week without internet. on Thursdays I make a point of not socialising online, I jokingly refer to it as ‘my day off.’ 

I have a plan, that on Thursdays, going forward, I will turn off my internet connection. Save for two short burst. I will check my bank and email when I wake up, and around nine in the evening I will check email again. This time, in total will be less than fifteen minutes and it should stop me from having any anxiety that life has exploded and no one told me. 

This will also mirror the intermittent connection which I am planning for one day ‘copping with.’ I don’t know if this will be a long term experiment or if I will extend it to more days as time goes on, but I sincerely like the idea of having ‘time off’ from the constant stream of data coming.

The very fact that I even feel this digital fatigue is a little telling to me. I don’t regularly look at any social media and I only check news feeds in the early afternoon. I am always connected but I don’t feel that I am ‘terminally online’ in any way. 

Maybe the simplifying I have been doing has wormed it’s way into my subconscious and this seems like the next thing to do. 

I’ll up date you in a few weeks. I have a feeling that this is going to be interesting.