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What's up?

See my Arrival Post as well for some pics.

To summarize, I'm currently living alone in a cabin in the Dominican Republic, near a remote mountain village. I will be mostly unreachable for the next few months as I work to detox from the internet, modern tech, the 24 hour news cycle, the election and politics, and all the other BS going on in the world.

I barely have internet here, and there's no cell reception.

For the most part I'm basically unplugging- no current events or political news. No email, texts or notification dings. No YouTube, Netflix, or other Internet Rabbit holes to fall down.

However, I will still try to keep this ole' blog updated along the way.

How will that work?

It's not really about banning all tech from my life, but the mindless use of it. A lot of modern technology, especially the smartphone and PC, has been designed to use us more than we use it.

How much time has been spent zombie-scrolling a feed? How many hours of sleep lost? How many trains of thought derailed by some notification bell?

Our attention, many aspects of our lives in fact, have been co-opted for profit, and these devices have been built for that purpose. Just like any technology it's a tool- not for the User but for the Corporations that increasingly dominate our lives.

If a smartphone or social media is a hammer, we're the nails.

Anyway, I'll try not to rant too much about that.

I'm trying to retrain my brain to a time before it was always logged on and to use technology as beneficially required, not as a distraction.

Here's a pic of all my electronics- not shown is the ancient, AA powered digital camera (a Lost & Found find) I took the picture with. My iPad, smartwatch, gaming laptop and all that are in a box back home, while my iPhone will stay off while I'm here.

The electric razor and fan were some fluffy personal items.

The main use of the laptop is for writing. Increasing my creative output is one of the goals I'm aiming for here. It runs a flavor of Linux I configured to be distraction free and efficient.

It also allows me to update this website offline, and when I get a connection, I can upload the changes with a simple terminal command without having to "browse" anything.

I will not watch any videos on it, but there are a few games, in the form of code writing puzzlers- basically to win you try and program elegant solutions to some problem. It's nerdy but makes for good logic training.

The video iPod has my original iTunes library, mostly consisting of low quality mp3s pirated from Napster circa 1999. It's also an educational resource- it's loaded up with tutorials for yoga, guitar playing (oh right, I also brought a guitar), language training and some audiobooks.

It's also, aside from my Kindle, the main source of passive entertainment I've allowed myself. It has some shows from my childhood, mostly Nickelodeon fair, as well as older stuff like 'Gilligan's Island', 'The Munsters' 'Knight Rider', etc.

Which brings me to:

The Rules

Part of being more mindful about my tech use is also placing restrictions on it.

1. Two hour a day limit for passive video entertainment.

2. No screens after dark (besides the Kindle, with the backlight off)

3. Limit Multitasking and No "Channel Surfing"

Rule 1 is fairly obvious if I want to avoid mindless consumption. The tiny 2" screen size of the iPod also helps dissuade me from excessive watching.

Rule 2 is to help get my sleep cycle back on track after years of graveyard shifts and late night binge watching and scrolling.

And rule 3 is probably the most important one to retraining my brain, and is quite a change for me.

If a book or show is such a slog that I can't power through it, it gets deleted. Before, I would jump around to something else and come back to it later, to the point where I was reading or watching 3 or 4 things in bits and pieces, skipping between them constantly.

It's no wonder that I eventually discovered I had problems focusing.

So for videos, if I start a show during my entertainment time, I either finish it or forgo the rest of my two hour allotment that day.

For books, I have to completely finish one, or delete it, before moving on to another.

(I do allow myself two books at a time, one fiction & one non-fiction, but no going "back and forth" between them just because I'm bored. I usually read non-fiction during the day and save the fiction for evening hours)

In Conclusion

So, that's the gist of it. I personally find it fairly restrictive but I have a lot of damage to repair. I'm working on an article that will go a little bit more in depth with all this and include some of my other daily routines, but this should be enough for now to get everyone up to speed, and explain why my blog won't have any mention of "current" events for awhile.

I've left a way for a couple of people to contact me in a dire emergency. Barring that, if it's not big enough to affect me here, I won't know about it.

I'm pretty isolated from the World right now and so far am enjoying the peace and slower pace while I try and undergo some major self-improvement.

-Quiet