The magic of blocking the internet

Go Slow and Make Things

My favorite reality show is my neighbor Karla’s dahlia garden.

As many of you know, I have been evaluating and adjusting my relationship to the internet for years. (It’s the thesis of this whole newsletter.)

Even though I no longer check social media, and I spend my days (usually) aware of what I’m doing when I’m avoiding work by clicking around, I still spend a lot of time staring at the internet in one form or another.

The first time I knew my relationship to the internet needed to change (circa 2018) was when I realized I always thought about Twitter when I was falling asleep. That was a sign that my brain had been impacted, and it took months to rewire it to a neutral, non-Twitter, place.

The act of scrolling is a form of hypnotism, and when you scroll on the internet a lot, you reshape your brain. You acclimate it to whatever it is you’re seeing when you’re scrolling. You’re shaping your neurons to want a default state of the scroll, whether that’s dog videos, other people’s accomplishments, or vitriol.

I have gotten off the internet before, and every time I get to an inspired state. And then I go back.

Last month, I listened to the Creative Rebels podcast interview with August Lamm, a writer, artist, and musician. She got rid of her smartphone and replaced it with a flip phone. Then, when she realized she was using her laptop as a “big smartphone,” she got rid of that too.

Lamm took these actions (which you might think of as “drastic” but it wasn’t so long ago that they were completely “regular”) because she was super addicted to the internet. (She still does access the internet and email at the public library.) I don’t think I’m as addicted to the internet as she was, but it is still a factor in my day. A time taker-upper. A mood changer. A brain shaper.

There were two parts of the interview in particular that jolted me. Here’s the first:

David Speed: There's that quote of, we all have the same 24 hours... I feel like you have more of a 24 hours than most of us.

August Lamm: [laughing] Oh, absolutely! Totally!

And then she goes on to talk about how she has time to learn two new instruments, and has started playing squash. She plays music, listens to music, sends letters, and writes, because she’s not scrolling. She’s not looking something up on the internet, just to check, and then realizing an hour has gone by. She says, “I'm making a life where I have no option to do things that will leave me feeling ashamed.”

The second thing that shook me awake was this:

August Lamm: I got one letter from a college student recently and he said he's in Nebraska and he was like, I don't know anyone with a flip phone here, so I'm writing to you because you're the only person that gets it. And then he said… Do you feel like your creative mind is just in overdrive all the time now that you've gotten your brain back? And like there's just too many ideas?

And to illustrate this he sent me all these drawings and poems and everything, and just kind of freestyle prose experiments, in the letter.

And I felt so understood by that. I wrote back to him and said, yes it's like having a manic episode constantly. You wake up in the morning, you're like, What if I wrote a musical?...But also I want to learn all these instruments, but also I want to learn to tap dance. I'm not making this up. These are real thoughts that you have. Like you're just every day thinking, and every person you meet, you're like, you're good at that. We should start a barbershop quartet.

I want that! I want to wake up every day bursting with creative inspiration. And then I want the time to actually follow that inspiration and see what happens. Why not start a barbershop quartet? (Well, if you’ve heard me sing, you know why not, but you get what I’m saying.)

While I no longer scroll on social media, I do still spend a lot of time on the internet, and it had, once again, taken over my brain. You all know that I love sewing. I’m completely obsessed with making clothes, how to do it, and what the possibilities are. I think about it a lot. Which is mostly fine. But the August Lamm interview made me realize that the reason my mental obsession (so much thinking!) with sewing felt slightly wrong (it had begun to seem like TOO MUCH thinking about it) was because of what I’d burned into my brain through hypnotic scrolling. I scroll on sewing info sites (Threadloop and Pattern Review), and I look at the Craftsnark subreddit. As far as social media goes, the sewing sites aren’t bad. There’s no algorithm to the feeds — they’re chronological — but they are scrollable, which is why I was thinking about sewing patterns as I was lying in bed at night.

So I blocked them.¹ And here’s what happened.

The creative inspiration came immediately

The first thing that happened on the first day I blocked the internet was that I was productive. I finished a freelance editing job, and then did a bunch of revision rounds on a picture book manuscript.

Now, listen. I am generally someone who gets things done, yes. I make my deadlines. I can focus. But I did more rounds of revision than I normally would in a day (I had nothing else to do!), and also I was doing better work. I’d been working on this picture book revision all week, but it was that day when I blocked the internet that I was really able to figure out the direction it should take. Would I have gotten there eventually? Maybe. But maybe not, also.

The next day, I woke up thinking about a picture book that has been rattling around my brain for about ten years. It’s like it had been waiting for this opening in my consciousness, and stuck a crowbar in that door to get in. I blocked the internet for another nine hours, and went for a walk. The ten-year-old book began to write itself in my head, and when I came back, I wrote it all down (by hand, in a notebook). Then I finished the picture book revision I’d made such good progress on the day before. I hope you’ve had the experience of writing and revising² until you get to the point where you know it’s good. Really good. It’s not like, “yeah, I think this is pretty good” but you read it and you feel kind of light and high and carbonated. That’s how I felt. It’s been a long time since I really felt that.

I sent the manuscript to my editor, and to celebrate (and because I was feeling too fizzy to sit and work) I took myself to the swap shop at the dump (it’s possible I need to get better at rewarding myself). At the swap shop, I found a book from 1967 that is perfect for research for a middle grade I’m working on. I also found someone’s collection of sewing magazines. It’s like life was telling me, “You want to go deep on sewing? Here. Get off the internet.”

My brain rebelled

Something else happened, too, when I blocked the internet. My brain totally rebelled. I really, really wanted to scroll things. Not only that, I wanted to buy things. It’s like this angry teenager inside me was yelling, “You’re going to take away my entertainment? Fine. I’m going to buy stuff. I’m going to spend your money. I’m totally getting this vintage pants pattern, and you can’t stop me.”

My rebellious brain purchased this.

I knew it was bad when, for pretty much no reason, I started looking at vintage tarot decks on eBay. I don’t need a vintage tarot deck. I’m not even sure I want a vintage tarot deck. I was seconds away from bidding on a group of five decks for “only” $119 when I realized what I was doing (and added eBay and Etsy to the block list).

A work-shaped thing (that isn’t work)

Clicking around on the internet is something that feels like working. Here I am, sitting at my computer. I must be working. It’s like: I can stand in my kitchen stirring a wooden spoon in an empty pot, but that doesn’t mean I’m making stew. (Or, like the Stevie Smith poem says, “Not Waving but Drowning.”)

The internet is such an easy form of entertainment. And let me say this, too: it used to be more fun! It used to even be inspiring, I’m pretty sure. But once the algorithms changed, they encouraged endless scrolling, and they rewarded sameness. They actively block us from our authentic inspiration, so that we are only inspired to create more homogenized content. Do you want that? I don’t.

It’s much easier to buy sewing patterns, watch how-to videos, and browse for fabric than it is to actually sit down and sew something. But I like actually sewing much more.

It’s easier to read about writing than it is to actually write. It’s easier to read gossip and drama about the publishing world than it is to write anything at all. But I always feel much better after I write.

It’s not even that it’s easier to read things online than it is to read a book (although, when I’ve been in a state of particularly fragmented attention, it can feel hard to sit and concentrate on a book). It’s just that it’s habit to open a new browser window and see what’s being presented to me. There’s some friction to finding a book, sitting down, and reading.

There’s friction to cutting out fabric and sewing.

There’s friction to getting up to go for a walk with my own thoughts.

There’s not even THAT MUCH friction to these things. I’m not talking about running a marathon or learning a language. I’m not talking about spending years writing a novel and making it great. Those things have even more friction to doing them (and consequently, are even more rewarding, eventually). The internet is all frictionless goo, blasting at my brain. I don’t want to acclimate my brain to frictionless goo. I want to acclimate my brain to creativity, inspiration, and doing things. I want to habituate my brain to turning pages rather than scrolling.

The good news is, I don’t think you need to ditch all of your computers. Blocking the internet, which I’ve only been doing for three weeks, shifted things quickly for me. Within a day, I was no longer thinking about the internet as I drifted off to sleep.

A week into it, I had two days where I conveniently forgot to block myself from the internet. I didn’t scroll too much, but I did scroll some. The result was pervasive anxiety and existential dread. Rather than scrolling leading to numbing, it was a fast track to crushing feelings. The opposite of numb. My brain, despite its early tantrums about wanting to scroll and buy things, had already adapted.

I am noticing that it’s still hard, though, to abandon the internet entirely. Not hard from a convenience standpoint (although there is that), but hard because it involves whole new habits and routines. I may decide to get rid of my phone and computer eventually in order to live in a place of authentic inspiration. We’ll see.

We live in this time now where so many of us have the same hobby, and that hobby is scrolling on the internet. (It’s definitely a hobby, considering how much time it takes, how much I think about it, and how much money it costs me.) This hobby has been foisted upon us. We didn’t ask for it. I’ve had enough of things being foisted on me. I have enough other things I’d like to do.

Hazards of the analog world. I went to a flea market and found this doll. (I did NOT buy it.) (I did get an extremely cool wool grandpa cardigan, though, for $3.50. It was such a grandpa cardigan that there were discarded toothpicks in the pockets.)

The internet is inhuman. Yes there are humans on the internet, but the internet itself is not human-shaped. And I find that when my brain tries to adapt to the robot-shaped world, the space it fits in gets smaller and smaller until it is a box full of malaise and anger. I would like to get back to having a human-shaped brain. I want to think of things. I want to notice things. I want to smell the air and think about the smell, rather than think about what the robots would say about it. Mark Zuckerberg famously wants to “move fast and break things,” but all I want to do is go slow and make things.

Thoughts and Links

• If you’re interested in engaging in some mostly-offline creativity with a group of other people, I invite you to join me for the Story Blocks project, which starts in October. We’ll be opening ourselves up to inspiration, inviting playfulness into our writing, and developing picture books. It’s available to all paying subscribers of this newsletter.

• I will be at the Bath Book Bash on Saturday, September 13th. Come say hi!

• Every week, I get emails from people asking if there are any copies of my Two Dogs in a Trench Coat series they can buy (it’s “out of stock indefinitely” which isn’t quite out of print, but instead a strange limbo space). You can buy the e-books and the audiobooks (I recommend the audiobooks! Oliver Wyman is a fantastic narrator), but the actual physical books are hard to get. Last month, I stopped at one of my favorite Maine bookstores, DDG Booksellers in Farmington, and there they were, a few copies of the first Two Dogs on the back-to-school table. It looks like they have the fourth book in stock as well.

• “One Thousand Vintage Garments Found in an Appalachian Farmhouse.” So much story and history in what we wear!

• Here are some photos from the World Dog Surfing Championships.

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• Do you have a kid in your life who would love a sweet early chapter book about a bakery witch who lives by the sea, and all their friends? (Or: maybe this is you!) The first two books in Kara LaReau’s Witchycakes (Book 1: Sweet Magic, Book 2: Changing Magic) series are out, and I recommend them. They’re adorable.

• Hedgehogs Don’t Wear Underwear is a (slightly French) ode to wearing what makes you feel like yourself, from Marissa Valdez (who is the illustrator of my next picture book).

• A rescue cat is adopted and is dismayed to find that there are RULES. No scratching the screen door? No chasing the baby? It’s too much! So the cat quits. Just look at that face on the cover! (It’s I Quit by Kristen Tracy, illustrated by Federico Fabiani.)

1. I set up a block list on Freedom to stop me from looking at these sewing sites, as well as YouTube and Substack (which I’ll go to as a work-avoidance distraction). I set it for nine hours.

2. I’ve been working on this particular book off and on for a year.