Becoming Extremely Offline

In 2025, I will be Extremely Offline.

Context

I have heard the term Extremely Online¹ circulating around recently. It’s been used to talk about things as dumb as whether or not someone will understand a meme, to things as serious as election results. The gist is someone who is more involved with the internet than with their real life.

It might sound from the way I’ve started this article that I consider myself to be Extremely Online and want to change that. Really, I don’t think that applies to me. I tend to not use social media much, and don’t have any of those apps installed on my phone, but there are some ways I use the internet that I think are making my life worse rather than better. I’m going to break those down, why I would like to change them, and how.

News

In 2025, I am going to get my news from a calm source². I try to be an aware person, who cares about the things going on in my city, state, country, and world. However, I have found this to be an incredible source of anxiety in my life. The future, and chaos of it, causes me a lot of stress. Especially since getting married. I think largely this is because the most stressful stories are the most seen.

Rage-baiting³ has not only taken over Twitter, Facebook, and all short-video platforms, but it has also taken over the news. Look no further than r/politics on Reddit to see how pervasive this has become. The frustrating thing⁴ is that it works.

I know that a lot of news necessarily is about serious, difficult, scary things. That’s okay, and I understand that I’ll need to know about those things. I just want to avoid news sources that are trying to monetize these emotions for views, retention, and profit.

Unfortunately, I don’t currently know what this looks like. A couple months back I purchased a subscription to the New York Times in hopes that a relatively middle-of-the-road-politically, world-respected news outlet would do a good job of telling me what is going on and allowing me to draw my own conclusions. I think this might still be an okay solution for me. However, I don’t like how overwhelming the home page is. There are so many articles. It is particularly hard to parse in a way that many other websites aren’t. I don’t know if its some subconscious attribute of their UX or something else, but it is so hard for me to decide which articles to read in a timely manner. I’ll probably continue to try this out for at least a couple of months and go from there.

I have also heard some ads⁵ for newsletters emailed to you with daily summaries of things going on. This sounds nice in theory, but I am a little skeptical of these small publications and whether or not they will have high journalistic standards.

In general, I will be trying to get my news from a real source, and not from social platforms where attention grabbing headlines are posted for engagement.

Reddit

In 2025, I will not use Reddit. In my alternatives section, I’ve already listed out some of the problems I have with Reddit, and ways I have been getting around them. I firmly believe Reddit is one of the worst places on the internet. Sometime in the last week, I officially deleted my account. There’s not much to say here. In general the vocal portion of Reddit is a hive mind of nerd-adjacent people⁶ who like to talk down to people about anything and everything they can.

The last holdout I found useful on Reddit was getting less-biased reviews of things I was thinking about buying. It’s so hard to find opinions on mainstream products like backpacks, cameras, shoes, laptops, etc by just searching the internet. There are too many terrible “10 best <x product>” posts that are just referral farms with no helpful information at all. However, the pitfall is that Reddit folks would like to convince you that if you don’t have $500 to spend on a camera, you just shouldn’t get one⁷.

My solution to this is partly helped by another thing I want to do in 2025, which is to go to stores to shop instead of doing it online. Specialty stores have employees who are actually good at helping customers find what they need, so I’m going to just do that. I do still need to find a solution to researching products online though, as there aren’t specialty stores for everything.

YouTube

In 2025, I will limit myself to 30 minutes of YouTube a day. It is not an exaggeration to say I love YouTube. It taught me how to cook, how to take better pictures, tons about programming, how to home-brew, etc, etc. I love learning new things, and it has taught me so much. But, it also causes me to waste so much time that I wouldn’t have otherwise wasted. I would be lying if I said this post wasn’t delayed until now because I was dragging my feet on cutting my YouTube use.

Especially over the last few years YouTube has become significantly more similar to other social media apps and is fighting to keep me on their page as long as possible. Shorts, auto-play, recommendations, the home page, search that just recommends other videos, etc are all ways that YouTube is trying to make it easier for me to just watch another video that do anything else. My strategy here is two-fold.

Part 1: Learn from reading instead of watching. I want to retrain my brain to want to find a book about a topic to learn, instead of a YouTube video about it. I got a library card almost a year ago and have only been to the educational section once. I want to go more. If there is no book⁸, I would like to find someone online who writes about it. A good example is a James Popsys, a YouTuber whose videos I really enjoy. They are inspiring, educational, and decidedly a good use of my time. However, he also has a blog where he posts loads about photography, and way more photos than in his videos. I want to read things like this more than I sit back and passively watch.

Part 2: Lock down YouTube. I already don’t have the YouTube app on my phone, so I never watch on it. On my laptop I have installed the Unhook browser extension and turned off everything except for my subscriptions. On a busy day, there will likely be three new videos posted here. On a slow one, maybe none. My goal is that this would condition me to go to the website significantly less because almost never will a video I haven’t seen be shown.

Part 3: Whoops part 3 - if part 2 doesn’t work I’ll get more strict. Starting by setting a hard limit on my laptop, and after that DNS blocking it on our WiFi if I have to.

Conclusion

In 2025 I will be Extremely Offline. The things listed above are (were) the main holdouts keeping me tied to the internet in unhealthy ways. No doubt, I will still use the internet. However, I am hoping to do so in a much more controlled and quiet way. There are also some things I want to do more of that my current relationship with the internet is preventing. I’ll maybe write about those thing more in depth, but a quick list is: read more, write more, take more pictures, be less anxious, be more attentive, be less consumeristic, be healthier.

There are a few places on the internet that are really good for me, and I think its worth shouting them out.

• I have fallen in love with Flickr as a place to share photos with other photographers and see their work. It has no algorithm.

• I have been playing around with Mastodon some. It feels like a modern version of forums, and I have really enjoyed its quieter take on social media. I may delete my account here though sometime this year if it proves to be too much like social media.

• I am semi-active on the Snappiness Forum. This is a YouTuber who has curated a very cool forum of talented, unpretentious, photographers.