Last week I didn’t use my phone, computer or TV for 4 entire days. From when I fell asleep Thursday night to when I awoke Tuesday morning, the only screen I saw was the GPS in my car. I expected it to be difficult. Instead I was surprised how quickly it felt strange to always be staring into a black mirror.
I’ve wanted to do this ever since I learned Christopher Nolan doesn’t use a cell phone or check email. He lives as much of an analog existence as one can in 2026, the reason being he seeks to minimize distractions, which get in the way of creativity. It’s hard to argue with the results for anyone who has seen The Odyssey or any of his other work.
I don’t work in a creative industry, unless you consider nicely formatted excel spreadsheets as art, You should, but there is considerable research indicating the mere presence of your mobile device can impair your attention span and going three days without your phone changes the way your brain works (See this great article from Giacomo Falcone, no relation to the Gotham crime family).
I was hoping to spend a full week analog earlier this summer while in Montenegro but it wasn’t possible with my work, therefore I decided to take advantage of the waning days of summer, while my wife was out of town to see what this experience would be like. My job cannot be done without a device so I took Friday and Monday off. Nobody could contact me, unless by way of smoke signal, carrier pigeon or IRL.
The only fixed plans I made in advance were two golf rounds, otherwise I had a clean slate; I just needed to make sure my dog was walked and attended to. I could have scheduled other activities with friends but with no way of contacting me, they would have to show up at the precise scheduled time. My friends are way too flaky for that.
I chose to leave my schedule open, which in hindsight was smart. Without my phone, alarm clock or anything to disturb me, I woke up late Friday morning. My dog eventually came to politely remind me she needed to be taken out. The clock on the kitchen stove showed it was 10:30AM. I don’t wear a watch so this would be the last time I knew the time for the rest of the day.
It was a beautiful day out, after I finished walking the dog, I went for a run. I left the house with nothing but $50 cash in my pocket. It was a nice feeling. I’m accustomed to running or working out without music, but I occasionally use Strava to track my distance and pace. Without my phone, watch or anything I couldn’t really focus on that. I could approximate that I ran somewhere between 10-15 KM but I have no idea if it took me 45 or 90 minutes. I finished at a popular brunch spot, managing to avoid the hour long wait because they had an individual spot at the bar.
The server told me the pancakes I ordered would take about twenty minutes. With nobody to talk to, no book or phone to distract me, time moved at a snail pace (I explained why in You Aren’t Imagining it, Summer Does Fly By). The only reference point I could use to figure out the pace time was elapsing were people at other tables leaving and sitting down. This reminded me of when I used to take canoe trips as a kid. Only the councillors had watches, the campers would try to guess what time it was based on the position of the sun in the sky. The winner would get an extra handful of dry granola or something; it doesn’t sound like much but when you’re away in the wilderness for a week at a time, your standards drop immeasurably.
I couldn’t see the sun from where I was sitting so the pancakes could have taken an hour for all I know. Eventually they arrived and they were worth the wait. As I was getting up to leave I saw a few people I knew. How did they have time to grab brunch on a weekday? Does anybody work anymore? Considering I was also there, I couldn’t pass too much judgement. I walked some more, stopped at some cafes then eventually went home, unsure of how long I had been away, took the dog out to be safe.
I grabbed Capital Returns and proceeded to read on my balcony in the sun until it started to set. Prior to starting the detox, I posited in a Substack note whether I should attempt to read all 10 books I had in my reading queue before the end of August, approximately 10 days. I didn’t mean it seriously but once people said it would be stupid or impossible, I felt I couldn't back down. The books from that list represented more than 3,000 pages. I agree 300 pages per day would be a lot. I’ve read fiction books of more than 200 pages in a day without retention suffering but some books are not meant to be digested that quickly. Part of the fun comes in speculating what’s going to come next. Other books are also slower reads. A hundred pages of Simulacra and Simulation is not the same as a hundred pages of The Alchemist.
Despite understanding this, I still read the entirety of Capital Returns that day. The sun was starting to set when I finished, I made myself dinner which I had to do without the benefit of the timer app. This was harder than I expected; I’m more chemist than artist in the kitchen. Needless to say some items were not cooked well. I finally looked at the clock on the stove by the time I was finished and it was around 8:30PM. The past 10 hours felt like 30, and this was only day one.
Day two started earlier than the previous day, from the stove I saw it was around 8AM. My golf round was at noon, so after walking the dog, I went to the gym, I got there the same time as my friend, we could socialize between sets. Normally I leave my phone in my locker as I train and keep my phone in my bag when I golf, so that day wasn’t dissimilar to other weekend days I’ve had. Yet the cumulative effect of not using a phone, laptop or TV for almost two days was already noticeable.
You might be wondering what is the difference between a digital detox and a dopamine fast. A dopamine fast would have required motionlessly staring at a blank wall. A friend of mine in the Canadian army during training finished each day that way. It wasn’t even mandatory, he just saw one too many Jocko Willink videos.
Although this was not a dopamine fast, I felt the absence of cheap synthetic dopamine. Most of the modern internet/software design is based on what casinos do to keep people gambling. The bright colours, bells & notifications are meant to be addictive. Getting away from that for even a couple days makes it more evident.
(How your phone looks at you while you’re trying to focus)
Besides exercising, playing golf, reading, walking the dog or eating I had limited distractions. The lack of interruptions allows your brain to follow its train of thoughts longer. The distractions don’t need to be digital, any time you switch tasks or stop and start, it takes between 15-30 minutes to return to your state of focus. Considering the average person looks at their phone more than five hours per day, and picks it up over a hundred times, there is very little focus or concentration going on. This is unfortunate, because if you don’t pay full attention to what’s happening you are depriving yourself.
Your ability to think is heavily reliant on information retrieval, things you’ve stored in your memory. By not concentrating on what you’re doing, you’re making it difficult to remember. The less you can remember the more limited your archives will be.
“Creativity is memory” — James Joyce
It’s fitting the book I read on day two was Novelist as a Vocation by Haruki Murakami. On sharing his views on what it takes to be a full time professional fiction writer, he highlights the importance of being able to pull from your memory. This can only come by focusing while you’re writing but also as you are experiencing things so you can draw upon the memories later.
The deeper I got into the digital detox, the more I would experience floods of memories from years ago coming back unprompted. Nothing particularly noteworthy or traumatic. Walking past a store I haven’t been to in a long time brought me back to high school when somebody got busted shoplifting there. Re-arranging my book shelf brought me back to when I bought some of these titles, reminding me there was a time I thought Scott Galloway was worth paying attention to. I normally wouldn’t notice these kinds of things and have these recollections if I was on my phone.
On the third day I read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. The book was published 60 years ago, well before personal computers or mobile phones but the lessons are just as relevant today. Reading about history helps give you perspective, our increasingly shorter attention spans make us forget lessons from the recent past as much as from centuries prior. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". This is why you should always read old books.
By day 3 you get accustomed to the lower volume of inputs. The internet gives you access to more information than you could possibly process, making it harder to focus and go deep on any particular topic. Without information technology, you have far less to process, which actually lets you think and extract greater insights from what you are consuming. Reading a book is naturally slower than scrolling TikTok or Substack notes, which limits your intake.
Even without digital distractions, I acknowledge my doubters might be correct that consistently reading 200 pages every day is too much. Perhaps you can recall most of what you read within a few days of finishing it, but fast forward a few months and I’m sure if you got questioned on it you would sound like a politician trying to explain AI.
I noticed my brain works in a different way when it’s not constantly interrupted. Normally, a thought has to compete with the possibility of something more stimulating appearing every few seconds. During those four days there was nowhere else for my mind to go. One thought could lead to another, then to something I had read years ago, then to a memory, then back to whatever I was originally thinking about. I didn’t have more thoughts, I actually got to finish the ones I started.
Nolan and Murakami are definitely on to something. This isn’t limited to creative fields either. Cal Newport in his books Digital Minimalism and Deep Work advocates for the same thing and he’s a computer science professor. If you’ve followed his work, he’s been pretty consistent in his view that to succeed at anything you need to take a craftsman mindset, which requires deep focus and sticking with things for extended stretches. As most physical work increasingly gets automated and even repetitive shallow knowledge work, what will set people apart, is the ability to reflect deeply and come up with solutions to problems that can’t be easily solved by LLMs.
The problem is the modern workplace has been set up to distract us constantly. Between non-stop meetings, emails, Slack/Teams notifications, Peggy coming to your desk to whine about whatever or needing to take your phone out for stupid 2 factor authentication every time you need to login to an app, how can you enter a flow state?
I typically try to batch my meetings together to create more uninterrupted stretches throughout the day but I have a difficult time not checking Slack or my emails every few minutes. When I started my career my first boss said they never expected to wait more than 5 minutes for a reply, regardless of when they contacted me. That has unfortunately not gone away.
Even in my personal life I have a difficult time not responding immediately when a text or email comes in. I would rather resolve it right away than have it hanging around in the back of my mind. I also find it rude to leave people on read. This feeling is not widely shared as we covered in The Death of Social Credit.
Responding right away gets things dealt with quickly but it comes at the expense of my ability to focus. This is also clearly a me problem, nobody would take it badly if they had to wait a little bit for a reply. This is part of why the digital detox was nice. Knowing I couldn’t see any messages until Tuesday morning, relieved me of the mental burden of having to respond.
The final book I read during the four day digital detox was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway which felt fitting. The story chronicles a bunch of expats living in Paris during the 1920s, as they meander about out in the French capital and travel to Spain. Not much actually happens but typical with Hemingway, the beauty is in the descriptions of what they see. Very much what I was living through. This was before cell phones or TV, you had to go outside for entertainment. They went fishing, watched bullfighting, drank a lot, which makes sense for people with excess leisure time in those days they had to work to find distractions. Nowadays we have the opposite problem. We have too many distractions resulting in a society that can’t sit alone with their own thoughts. This explains many problems.
Even in Hemingway’s time I’m sure people were complaining about the constant interruptions arising from telegrams or cholera outbreaks.
We’ll take any excuse we can find to distract ourselves, whether technology is actively trying to do it for us or not. We’ve become so habituated to constant interruption that we’ve accepted it as a permanent state, as if we have no control over it. For those four days, I had no digital distractions and it felt incredible.
That’s not to say I was focused all the time. My dog frequently let me know she was bored and wanted me to stop what I was doing to play with her. My neighbors redoing their driveways made plenty of noise. Even if they didn’t, I’m sure I would have decided it was suddenly essential to do laundry, reorganize my pantry or find some other chore to create some sort of break in the action (or lack thereof).
When I finally turned my phone on Tuesday morning, there were no disasters. No historic news I regretted missing. A couple of work items had been delayed and a few messages from friends went unanswered, but otherwise I had missed almost nothing. By late morning, I was already caught up.
That was probably the biggest takeaway from the four days. We treat constant connectivity as though everything happening deserves our immediate attention. Most of it doesn’t. By removing the option to check, I stopped thinking about what I might be missing and paid more attention to what was actually in front of me. Days felt longer. Old memories resurfaced. Most importantly, I could finish thoughts without something interrupting them.
This experience has not made me anti-technology. I wrote this article on a laptop, published it on Substack and distributed it over the internet. I have no desire to go back to churning butter on some farm. I make a living hitting combinations of keys in a climate-controlled room and no longer need to worry about dying from a minor infection. Progress is good. In the days following the detox I am still using my phone & computer and watching TV, but I’m trying to avoid it when they aren’t necessary.
The is because everything comes at a cost. The internet gives us access to more information than any person could possibly consume. The trade-off is that if we’re constantly connected to it, we leave no room to reflect on what we are exposed to.
I originally wanted to go analog for a week. After four days, I wish I had. My own undisturbed thoughts turned out to be more entertaining than most of the nonsense I see online. I’m kind of fascinating. Not only did I not miss anything, I gained by reducing distractions and input allowing for better and more clear living.
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Great article, Ben! Would love to try this someday!
I gave it a shot over a summer break in college and it was relatively seamless. Definitely not the case now. You think about doing this occasionally now?