My Year of Tech and Relaxation by August Lamm

Many of us yearn for a way to be fully online without all of the mindlessness, passivity and addiction that often entraps us. Some of us oscillate between fully online and fully offline in a sort of mad dance to establish what feels right. Others have lost hope that it’s possible to engage in a way that feels true and alive, and have resigned to us... See more

Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. We're

all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it.

That's why I don't have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I

want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world.

[5]

My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a

better form of exercise than hik... See more

A typical culprit, for example, was technology restriction rules that were either too vague or too strict. Another mistake was not planning what to replace these technologies with during the declutter period—leading to anxiety and boredom. Those who treated this experiment purely as a detox, where the goal was to simply take a break from their digi

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My friends and I all happily logged into our email addresses from our crappy little apartments, checking in after hours from the used sofas where we watched The Hills and Rock of Love, using the laptops we’d bought in college. We competed to be the first to arrive at the office and the last to leave, marking our productivity by the time spent in th

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You can even bring this orientation to your electronic communications, whether it is texting, email, spending time on Facebook or Twitter, or sharing photos and videos—whatever your preferences. How? First by being in your body as you use your devices, and thus being in the present moment. Second, you can construct texts mindfully, with full awaren

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for nearly fourteen years afterwards, I stared at a smartphone every single day. Five thousand days, all in all. I can’t think of anything else I’ve done with the same level of commitment. There have been days where I’ve had nothing to eat or drink and there have been nights when I didn’t sleep. But until very recently, I never once went twenty-fou... See more