I like to think I’m slightly better at controlling my addiction to technology than the “Brawl Star” and “Block Blast” addicts that sprinkle through my robotics team. But the second I signed up for this story, which required me to spend a day without devices, I immediately had regrets.
No more relatable Instagram reels? No more random “the story of the woman who ate her husband’s ashes” reels being sent by my friends? No more 6-hour gossip sessions over text about the same situation with the same five friends I’ve had for the past few years (you’d be surprised how often this occurs)?
It seemed like a recipe for disaster, but as it turns out, none of these issues cropped up — in fact, the results of the tech detox were notably positive.
Today, it’s hard to avoid internet-connected technology: It’s integrated in our lights, our cars and our heaters. So when approaching this challenge, I had to define what living without technology meant to me. For this experiment, it meant being without my broken, Taylor Swift-stickered laptop and my phone.
Now, I’ve tried to put away my laptop and phone before. But quite frankly, it’s too easy to reach over my bed and start mindlessly scrolling. To make sure this wouldn’t happen again, I made my mom hide my devices somewhere in the house.
Thankfully, this weekend was right before my math quest, so I would be able to allocate most of my 24 hours to either sleeping, math or physics (though Archimedes’ Principle did not sound nearly as intriguing as finding the area of polar curves).
I started off the challenge confident in the afternoon after robotics, immediately going to my desk to tackle my math homework, when I realized I did not have a stopwatch. Recently I’ve gotten into the habit of timing how long it takes me to do homework for specific classes, so how could I do this without my phone?
This meant going back in time to find an analog clock. And off I went on a 67-minute adventure to find, fix and set up a necessarily aesthetic, working clock. And after all that strenuous work, I became understandably exhausted and told myself I would take a 15-minute nap. Of course I ended up taking a 3-hour nap and woke up much later than anticipated: at 7 p.m.
After my quick refreshment, just 2 minutes into my math homework, I was staring blankly at the first question with some random limacon staring back at me. My fingers worked anxiously to unthread my sock; I sighed, wondering what was throwing me off until I came to the realization. Who was I without music? I tried again for another 15 minutes until I realized I absolutely needed music.
After only a couple seconds of begging my younger brother (bribing him with marshmallows), he opened up his computer to play my hours-long Taylor Swift playlist, and I passed it off as background noise. (Some purists would consider this cheating.)
Finally at 7:45, I began my math deep dive, studying for 4 hours until I was absolutely bored out of my mind. Closing my textbook near midnight, I searched around my room, anxious for something to do. I took a couple forward and backward rolls on my bed, cleaned up my room and rearranged the vines draped across my shelves, until I reached my singular shelf of books.
I took out the first one I saw — “Macarons at Midnight,” a classic book from the second grade by Suzanne Nelson. Remembering my enjoyment reading the novel, I flipped through it until my eyes reached the horror that was two pages of text messages between “RajBat” and “FrogPrincess.” No thanks. I proceeded to read chapter 4 of “Frankenstein” for the fifth time, lest I fail an upcoming English quiz.
I searched across the rest of bookshelves until I reached the last book, “Atomic Habits,” one of the four $2 books I had found on a random street in India. I thought to myself, what will I possibly lose by reading one chapter? And in I went, until I became totally immersed in the book, even closely reading certain parts I found applicable to my life (my English teacher Mr. Cortez would be so proud!) and sticking them to my bed frame. It was the first book in two years I had read with my own will.
I finally fell asleep around 2 a.m. and woke up just in time for a privately taught physics class nine hours later. Unfortunately, this was where the trouble started. Just as I put my phone in my pocket (I decided to take my phone with me in case my parents forgot to pick me up, which — spoiler alert — they did), I saw a sneak peak of 894 new text messages from my friend group’s group chat.
I had been on the outside looking in, and my regret sunk in. What gossip was I missing? I spent another hour attending physics class until I came home at noon. I physically didn’t feel like I had anything to do. All my math problems were done, I had finished lunch so I did what any other logical human being does at 1 p.m.: Take a 2-hour nap to kill the time. Then, when I woke up — and tada! — it had been 24 hours. The detox was over.
Although I was excited to go read my friends’ newest gossip, I was still extremely happy with the results of the tech-free time. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be to refrain from texting friends or scrolling though reels for a day. For the first time in two years, I willingly picked up a book without being assigned one; and for the first time in a month and a half, I did not get distracted by Instagram or Discord and hit my best homework high.
Bottom-line result: Even though I think this challenge was amazingly healthy for one day, it’s not always feasible to live technology-free, especially when most of my classes use technology. But some of the small habits I developed in just one day — such as reading 30 minutes before bedtime, or limiting the time I spend on my laptop to 1-2 hours each day — are habits I hope to continue.
