Ask HN: Have you ever gone without a computer or phone for an extended period?

People were always shocked when they'd hear this. "How could you possibly travel without any electronics?" They were unfazed by my response, "This is how people took vacations up until 5 years ago."

My experience was positive. When I returned to work, I'd be full of ideas and energy. But it's less convenient. To travel safely, I had to research everything I might need: directions, alternative routes, phone numbers, restaurants, sites to visit. When I landed, I needed to find an international calling card and public phones to call my loved ones. These were difficult to find 5 years ago, and I'm sure it's close to impossible now. But everything always managed to work out. In a lot of ways, it created so much more of an adventure. It put me in a lot of unfamiliar situations that I needed to reason through.

There's no way I could do this anymore. I've started to prefer unstructured vacations where I travel to cheap places on a whim. Buying last-minute tickets is so much easier with an internet connection. Also, my girlfriend would never put up with it. She'd rather just have a phone with a map. And in some ways, that's so much more sensible.

From birth to age 12.

My technological monasticism was aided by the era, since the period of time we're talking about was 1970 to 1982.

Why shouldn't it be taken seriously when it's the only variety of anarchism that's actually self-consistent? You can't run a large, mass society on anarchist principles, because social organization on a large scale will always require some way of formally resolving disputes, and that pretty much implies that conventional politics and "rule" by some over others will be a thing.

For me personally, HN is definitely a focus-stealer (I think I have at least 100 HN tabs open currently, that I really should just go and close). It's a tricky one, because I get a lot of value from it, but I guess that value is diminishing if I'm checking up on things every hour or so. I imagine those who've gone full cold-turkey on HN aren't here to comment, but I'll assume they've found benefit from that. Might have to start DNS blocking this one for a while and see what happens.

I did the friend unfollow trick on Facebook a few years back now, and definitely noticed the happiness benefits straight away, but still often catch myself clicking through random profiles when I do have to travel there.

To your point on convenience, I'm often frustrated by how easy it is to type 'yc' or 'fa' into the search bar in a moment of weakness, and then go down the rabbit-hole of distraction for hours. Obviously, a responsive search bar is an immensely useful feature for a web browser to have but this convenience does often make it easier to do something that is not in one's overall interest.