In a world where the use of communication technology has become almost as natural as breathing, it's easy to overlook how deeply it shapes our daily lives. To explore the extent of my dependency on my devices, I decided to disconnect for 24 hours, embarking on what I called an “unplugged experiment.” These are my reflections…

During my first hours of the unplugged experiment, I was reminded of my experience at a Buddhist meditation retreat during which participants had to endure ten days in complete silence, and without any distracting media. I remembered thinking such loud thoughts that I constantly worried some of them had slipped out and I had unconsciously broken my vow of silence.

I experienced a similar kind of mild paranoia on that first evening without communication technology. I went to heat something up in the microwave and momentarily panicked that I had broken the rules of the experiment. Of course I hadn’t, but it got me thinking that I was abstaining from something whose use seemed as natural and everyday as speaking.

To resist the urge to reach into my pocket to check something but nothing in particular, just as to keep my mouth from vocalising my stray thoughts, I had to keep a watchful eye on myself. Communication technology has woven its way into our everyday existence and become our tools for functioning without our even knowing.

Finding (n)evertime

If you haven’t noticed already, different spheres of life are merging because technology transcends space and time. However, some spheres really need those blurry boundaries to remain solid. I realised I had looked forward to this experiment. I wanted to have to disconnect so that I could take a real day off from work.

On a Saturday evening, I switched my devices off, put them in an unused room and shut the door. I woke up the next morning too early for a Sunday, but what a pleasure it was to watch the sunrise knowing I had the time to nap later on if I needed to. Occasionally, I felt a habitual tick to check the time, look up a word from my book or check to see if a message had come through; then I remembered and shrugged off the urge.

Every activity happened slowly that day. My mother and I took a walk along the beach and found a spot where we could lounge on the warm sand for a while. For the first time in weeks, I felt the grip my mind had on everything start to loosen, and before long I had fallen asleep. I could not remember the last time I had felt so unburdened and safe to relax.

There is an unspoken expectation that you are and should always be available because technology allows you to be, a phenomenon I believe is called ‘evertime’. This deep, unusual rest I was experiencing was due to being truly unavailable for work connections for the first time in years.

The truth is that communication technology is not as unobtrusive as we have normalised it to be. In some ways, technology has slipped into my daily routines unnoticed, often enhancing certain aspects of my life such as maintaining long-distance relationships and entertainment. In other ways, it symbolises the inescapable pressures of working and being a student, and too often, rather obtrusively, interrupts my personal life.

We often feel like constant availability through technology is a duty instead of a choice. Communication technologies are, in fact, not invisible additional limbs but tools whose importance in our everyday lives needs to be renegotiated. For peace of mind and overall well-being, we need to push back on the ‘evertime’ expectation and unplug so that we can properly recharge.