Exactly a year ago I challenged myself to live in a community.
Without Wifi.
I thought it would be tough to find myself cut loose from the illusion of social media connection, engaging in real-world contact and staring into nature instead of a screen.
Deep down I knew I needed this abrupt limbic hijack disconnect. Just to experience how addicted I really had become.
I had an escape route.
Just 3 minutes down the mountain where I lived a world of connection and downloads opens itself again. I am not on the north pole. Driving home every night, I stopped to download podcasts and videos I really wanted to see.
This is how a minimum of 8 hours of complete WWW disconnect a day impacted my life only in 4 weeks’ time.
Super Focus
The mountain download times says it all. I got super focused on what I wanted to see. To give an example: In those 4 weeks, I watched the complete ‘War on Sensemaking’ videos made by Rebel Wisdom. I discovered the incredibly valuable work (and brains) of Daniel Smachtenberger and Eric Weinstein.
They became my conscious Netflix, my information safe haven. True messengers in a world of distorted A.I directed noise.
I said goodbye to numb scrolling.
And above all, I trained towards this new ability. The conscious choice to take in valuable information when I want, and how much I want.
I love this, I don’t want to go back and get drowned again in our poisoned information ecology. Even better, I feel a calling to help clean it. And for this, I need to stay clean myself, for an elongated period of time.
Kick-Ass Sense-Making
I got a major increase in my sense-making abilities through the 8-hour absence of dopamine-driven scroll and screen time.
Let me explain.
As you can imagine, the radical breakdown of useless screen time through addiction gave me a sea of exponential extra time. I used it for… just thinking. Processing my life, what happened that day, the world in general.
This is what happened: I woke up at 5 or 6 AM. And believe it or not, I watched Daniel Smachtenberger solve the problem of our pending civilization crash with his brilliant thesis.
Snippets of diluted dis-information around the same topic would have gotten me depressed and made me stay in bed longer. The Facebook hang-over I call that. But not anymore.
Now, I got out of bed motivated and inspired, and the world slowly but surely started to make sense again, even facing total disruption and system collapse.
True and deeper connections
What happened outside of screen time? As you can guess, I got more and deeper connections to the people living in the community.
Imagine having a conversation at a table with a bunch of people, and nobody watches his or her phone. They are not even on the table. Old school pre-social media bliss.
Imagine no notifications for a moment. None…Nada…Zero.
You get over your FOMO in no time. The alternative is way more fun and pure and honest and…human.
I did not get bored one second. Too much stuff going on. A lot of human processing, chit-chat, laughter, and sharing circles.
Imagine coming home and a bunch of people is making music and chatting in front of the fireplace. One hour later we are all dancing to 80ies music after a wild karaoke session.
There is not a moment I missed a Wifi Connection on these occasions. I did have to run down the mountain at some stage to download some Michael Jackson and Tina Turner to keep the party going.
Life got simple again
Look at nature for a moment (as I did a lot those 4 weeks). It’s all so perfectly simple.
I promise you that when you cut out the noise of your ordinary life, your life gets unimaginably simple again. And with this simplicity comes a sense of peace.
When I look back at those 4 weeks of evenings and nights without Wifi, I can much better discern the psychological effects of social media and screen time in general.
It takes away my peace. Being in the Facebook snakepit is highly disturbing.
In a world in transition we don’t need more turmoil, we need to come back to nature, our nature.
It is as simple as that.
Bye Bye digital anxiety
I wrote a lot about the concept of digital anxiety. Before the rise of social media addiction, people reacted analytically to incoming information. They didn’t get overwhelmed, they weren’t manipulated that much.
Yet.
At the moment the world became our oyster in an exponentially more technological-driven information landscape, the overwhelm took over.
The process of sense-making in humans comes through the senses. It is chained to our ability to do something about what comes in through a direct sense. A threat, a thunderstorm, a hand kiss. Anything coming our way that can be sensed directly.
The digital age came with this huge disconnect from the world outside us. This resulted in an erosion of our inborn ability for sense-making.
We feel collectively increasingly powerless and helpless in a world that goes increasingly rogue and feels ‘off. Or as Daniel Smachtenberger puts it:
“We’re making more and more consequential choices with worse and worse sense-making to inform those choices, which is kind of running increasingly fast through the woods increasingly blind.” — Daniel Smachtenberger
You can’t sense climate change. You can’t sense global surveillance capitalism. You can’t sense a global migration issue. So we need to rely on the info that is coming our way, specifically selected to confirm our world bias and almost always part of some kind of narrative warfare.
Many people have given up on sense-making altogether.
As we learned from Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, as a result of social media profit models, A.I regulates and manipulates for maximum screentime and attention. That’s why what we see on-screen needs to disrupt us, disconnect us and overwhelm us.
Information has become a weapon directly pointed at our emotional center.
So we react emotionally to almost everything. Canceling people, Feeling outraged by tweets by people we don’t even know. We have collectively lost ourselves in a dangerous weaponized information ecology. The result can potentially be real-life conflict, civil outrage, and even war. Something really nobody desires or wants.
In my 4 weeks of WIFI-Less evenings and nights, I managed to completely disconnect from these feelings of overwhelm, disconnect, and above all separation from my fellow human beings.
On the contrary, I got more and better, and deeper connections than ever.
Conclusion
My community Wifi less experiment gave me a big trunk of my life back.
It offered an amazing clarifying peek into the digital anxiety rabbit hole that social media is.
I am no longer hooked on snippets of attention-seeking bits and bytes. I feel free from information overwhelm.
Being out of the matrix for 8 hours a day gave me back my peace of mind. In addition, it enhanced my super focus mode and sparked my own sense-making abilities. For me this is crucial.
From good sense-making comes good decision-making.
I feel more and more in charge of my own life again, and got increasingly clear that my mission is to help others in their process of good sense-making. That’s why I founded this platform.
I feel in peace, connection, and quietness in a world in deep transformation, turmoil, and separation.
I hope I’ve inspired you to do the same. Even for a week. What is there to lose when the win can deeply transform your life, increase your happiness and peace, and makes you feel deeply connected to fellow humans again?
Lucien Lecarme