I was stressed out from using my laptop too much. So on Wednesday, October 29th, I turned it off, put it back in its original box, and threw the box onto a high shelf where I couldn't reach it.
I'm writing this post to tell you that basically nothing interesting happened as a result. I did not suffer serious withdrawal symptoms. I was not bored out of my mind, but neither did I become interested in everything. I made no mathematical discoveries, composed no symphonies, and failed to even start the Next Great American Novel.
But: with my computer back in the box, I was noticeably less anxious. I cheerfully did difficult chores. I started reading books — first a collection of essays by Mark Twain, then the first volume of Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming (Note: I did not finish). I felt good, if tired, at the end of each day. Not elated or euphoric, but simply contented.
I took better care of myself, too. I never found myself simultaneously dehydrated and needing to pee — an eventuality that frequently occurs when I'm hunched over the computer for hours.
Yet I remained, I dunno, unimpressed by the whole experience, and after 5 days I gave up and revived my machine. Not having a computer is fine. It's just simply, unremarkably, okay. Nothing surprised me about it. I feel slightly stupid writing about it.
Other people — e.g. @rejectconvenience on YouTube — have referred to a kind of psychological phase shift that happens after 3 or 4 days with no phone. You stop compulsively reaching for your phone and you can just live in reality again. I don't doubt that that effect is real for some people, but it didn't happen to me. Even after 5 days, I couldn't shake the desire to pull my computer back out of the box and get some shit done. There was a design for a computer game level — for Heroes of Might and Magic IV — burning a hole in my brain, and it wouldn't let me go.
(Keep in mind that I'm starting from a baseline of not having a smartphone, not using any social media, and aggressively curating my web browsing experience by blocking all websites I don't actively link to.)
I suppose the part of the experience that surprised me most was that making a level for a game was the thing that pulled me back to the computer. But, as Eugene Jarvis once said:
The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games.
I don't know the context for that quote, so this is just my interpretation, but it seems to me that games are the only truly new experience made possible by digital computers. Every single other application — writing, publishing, music, video, real-time communication — has an analog equivalent. We don't need to play games, of course. But I wanted to play this particular game, and I guess that must count for something.