I Went Without Internet for a Day. Here’s What Happened

I stood on a ridge in the Sandia Mountains near Albuquerque, New Mexico, surrounded by pinyon trees and red-barked pines, listening to the trill of dark-eyed juncos jostling through the underbrush. Amid all this winter beauty, my phone chimed. And chimed again. And buzzed and beeped. 

A friend sent an Instagram link. Uber Eats offered a discount deal. Target had a coupon for cleaning products. Someone drove by my Ring doorbell camera. Enough! It was time for a challenge. It was time to embrace a day of quiet — a day without internet. Could I do it? Would I enjoy it?

I picked the Saturday before the Super Bowl. At first, I was giddy at the idea. No constant interruptions? No news? No emails? Sounds great! Then, a fuller scope hit: No security camera alerts. No traffic updates. No remote monitoring of the foster cat’s shenanigans. No streaming Eastbound & Down. So it was with a mix of anticipation and trepidation that I prepared for an internet-free day.

My no-internet ground rules

The internet is so entangled in my life that I had to scrutinize what a day without internet would even look like. I thought back to my childhood, to the death throes of rotary phones and how my parents would track appointments on wall calendars and plan car trips with paper maps. My experiment would be like time travel, a return to the olden days. So voice calls were in. Everything else was out.

Here’s what I did at 10:30 p.m. the night before.

Unplugged the T-Mobile Home Internet gateway: This disabled my home internet, including Alexa devices, television streaming apps, the Ring doorbell camera and my Wyze security cameras. Down went the Wi-Fi for my computers, thermostat and smart plugs. I waved a temporary goodbye to my T-Mobile Home Internet experience.

Turned on Focus Mode: I went through all my apps and added them to my Android phone’s Focus Mode (found under the Digital Wellbeing settings) list. My one concession was voice calls. I could make or receive voice calls, but that was the extent of my allowed phone use. No text messaging.

Day of the no-internet experiment

My no-internet day started well. I have a non-internet-connected alarm clock, so I got up on time. Instead of answering texts and scrolling through political news, Facebook events and the Albuquerque subreddit, I read a Louise Penny mystery along with my morning coffee. It was quiet and blissful. My daily digital cares had been lifted away.

It would have been easy to just stay home and read a book all day, but I needed to engage with the world to truly understand the meaning of an internet-free day. My husband and I committed to exploring estate sales. We made a list of addresses the day before. That morning, we got out a map of Albuquerque from an outdated 2002 road atlas. With silent phones and a sense of optimism, we hit the road.

Missing my Google Maps

My husband drove and I navigated, squinting at the tiny print, paging through the street index and tracing the grid on the map. The first two sales went well. The third was more of a challenge, located outside the city in a place not covered by my map. The first true obstacle of the no-internet day appeared in the form of a construction-related traffic jam on I-40. With no traffic alerts, we fled the highway and found an alternate way on old Route 66.

What came next was a turn into the wrong neighborhood, some fruitless wandering and then, finally, a solution. We called the estate sale people. Kudos to yesterday’s us for writing down the contact information. The estate sale person offered to text us a map, which we declined. Instead, we got some old-fashioned verbal directions. 

It worked. Between the directions and a few neon-green signs, we found the sale in a remote, semi-rural community. I scored a vintage glass deviled egg plate for a few bucks. We wandered around the nearby mountain towns, reveled in the scenery and stayed away from the interstate going home.  

A night without streaming

I’m not a total streaming junkie. I usually have one or two subscriptions going at a time. Currently, that’s Prime and Max. I’m on a discount offer with Max, so I’m burning through what interests me before canceling when the deal runs out in June. With no streaming, we turned to a classic method of accessing entertainment: an antenna. 

My mind hovered in a state of childhood flashback as I scrolled channels, skipping through the paid programming, cop shows and shopping networks. “This sucks,” I thought to myself. I couldn’t check the online TV guide; I just hit the remote repeatedly. 

As Bruce Springsteen sang “57 Channels and Nothin’ On,” we ended up on an old Western movie channel watching a gunslinger Willie Nelson stroll around town with a pained expression on his face. Mostly, we worked on a jigsaw puzzle. 

The Willie Nelson movie turned into a Kenny Rogers movie and I bailed early to play with the cat, read and go to bed, my phone nothing more than a paperweight tucked away into the nightstand. This was not a regular night for me, but it was a perfectly lovely way to finish a day without internet. 

The aftermath of my no-internet day

The best part of having no internet for the day was the pause on micro-interruptions — all the little things that steal attention: neighborhood alerts, store sales and emails that need to be deleted. I enjoyed the quiet so much that I didn’t turn the T-Mobile Home Internet gateway back on until Sunday morning, 36 hours after the experiment began. 

As much as I fretted about my security cameras going dark in an age of porch pirates and petty theft, it wasn’t a problem for one day. I wouldn’t want to go forever without them, though. Instead, I reset my Ring camera’s motion detection to reduce random alerts from cars and dog walkers. I followed these tips to cut down on annoying smart home camera alerts.

What I noticed most was how often I reach for my phone for frivolous reasons, to feed the weird little questions that pop into my head throughout the day. How do I cleanly open the funky tab closure on the Costco bagel bag? Does Whole Foods sell king cake? Who performed the song Rainbow in the Dark? I made it through just fine without the answers. 

Sure, I made a hash out of the bagel bag, but that’s OK. Instead of punching in Google queries on my phone, I figured things out. I embraced the views. I chatted with my husband about New Mexico road trips. I lived life, however briefly, without a digital crutch.

My final thought: Just say no to notifications

I’m carrying some lessons from my no-internet day forward with me. I’ve become more ruthless about notifications. Sorry, Uber Eats, Target and Ring neighborhood alerts — you’re out. Weather, text messaging and calendar alerts are allowed to stay. 

I’m working on being better about reaching for my phone for every little thing. Now that I’ve unlocked the full power of Focus Mode, I can put it into service. I can have my quiet moments on top of a mountain where the only alerts are the squirrels calling from the trees. 

I’ve already developed a sense of nostalgia for my internet-free day. It’s a rosy memory of fun times in the car listening to the classic rock station on the radio, not knowing if we would find our destination, not worrying that it even mattered. 

The internet could have smoothed our path and made our day more efficient. But I didn’t miss out on anything. We navigated. We entertained ourselves. The world didn’t end because I didn’t answer an email on Saturday. I even forgot about doing Wordle. 

I still love a lot of what the internet can do for me. I just don’t need it sitting on my shoulder every waking moment, endlessly whispering in my ear. 

So here’s my hearty recommendation. Shut it down sometimes. For a day. For a few hours. Get a map. Go for a drive. Watch an old movie with an antenna. The internet will still be there tomorrow.