No wifi: 12.6.2025

I woke up this morning and checked my phone. I turned airplane mode off for a couple minutes in order to see messages from friends. I had dreamt of somebody I know/knew whom I'd recently sent a letter to after nearly two years of minimal contact following a consistent two year friendship/penpalship and a brief fling (primarily over the telephone), then woke up to a message from him. He's moved halfway across the country, which I found out a few weeks after I sent the letter, and his mother included the letter to him in a care package she sent him, which was stolen from his Brooklyn apartment's stoop. He said he'll try to clairvoyantly respond to my letter. I was tempted to respond, telling him what I'd written. I am just going to leave it for now. I went back and forth so much, debating whether or not to send it in the first place. I felt a release when I sent it, then assumed I'd never hear anything back after I hadn't yet heard anything back, then was anxious all over again once I learned he'd moved and that the letter therefore probably hadn't made it to him yet. 

I've often thought I might be a little bit psychic. It's not an uncommon occurrence for me to dream about somebody and then get a call from them that day. I used to be much more spiritually inclined than I am now, but I do think maybe we all are connected to one another in some way and that causes us to know things just before their time or know when people are thinking about us. Do I think of you when you think of me? 

This lack of internet is turning me into a diarist. Or maybe that's the free time. My boyfriend is out of town for a friend's birthday weekend and I've got almost an hour before I need to leave for my sculpting class. I need to get dressed and pack a lunch. I am excited for the sculpting class, but I also think I'd rather sit here and enjoy this outpouring of thoughts while it lasts. It's been a while. This lack of wifi is turning me into a diarist. 

Last year, I did two little experiments. One time, I didn't listen to any music for two weeks (except music I had no control over, ie. buskers) and another time I slept without a pillow. Sleeping without a pillow was a total bust. Not listening to music was fine, aside from the fact that I often turn music on as a motivator to get out of bed on the days when I just don't feel like it. That part was a bit rough. 

If I'd really thought it through, it would've been obvious that the pillow experiment wouldn't lead to anything. There is no problem I can see with sleeping with a pillow. The music one can be traced back to my spotify wrapped statistics from a few years ago. It was either 2021 or 2022 and I listened to over 100,000 hours of music. I was constantly listening to music, trying to keep external stimuli constant, whether I was in my apartment, at the grocery store, at work. At that point in time, I was working from home. I didn't have all too many friends in the new city where I was living. I had been dumped in early 2021 by my first love. My spotify wrapped statistics showed in the following years that my music listening decreased. I do think it was intentional and remember talking with my older sibling about it. The no music thing would've been much more impactful at that point in time than it was at the time when I did it, but there's no going back to change things in this life. 

Life without wifi.

A little over a month ago, I cancelled my apartment's wifi. One of my roommates decided she didn't want to pay her portion anymore because she already pays 70€ per month for her unlimited phone plan, an exorbitant amount, but that's none of my business, and then another decided that she didn't want to, either, because she spends half of her time traveling, anyway. Her reasoning makes more sense to me, but I digress. My third roommate said that she didn't like the idea of jus the two of us sharing and paying for wifi that the other two are not allowed to use and would rather not have any at all than feel greedy for hoarding the wifi, and so I was left as the only one left who wanted wifi in the apartment. I don't particularly want to foot the 54€ per month bill (also too expensive, if we're being honest, but it was all sort of last minute and so I didn't compare prices and then, once we had it, life got in the way and I never got around to comparing prices), so I cancelled it altogether. 

The day before yesterday, I came home from a trip to an apartment sans wifi. I kind of can't believe that I have no wifi in my home in the year 2025 (almost 2026!). Yesterday, I thought I'd lost my key and, after half an hour of manically searching the entire apartment, I sent an email to my coworkers, telling them I'd be working from home until I could figure out a replacement key. This was my first full day of no wifi, and so I had to use a hotspot on my phone to remotely connect my laptop to my work computer. I have 27GB per month of cellular data. I'm not entirely sure how much 1GB of data is or how much I should picture 27GB as being, but I do get the sense that it's not enough to watch youtube videos on a regular basis or something like that. 

I primarily work in the office, only really working from home on days when there's no train to work because of strikes or when I'm visiting family or when I'm just feeling too unmotivated or sick to go into the office (but not sick enough to call in sick). My plan was just not to work from home anymore. Just my luck that I would lose my keys! I later found them in my shoe from the day before. Don't ask me how they got in there, I don't know. 

Tonight, I have decided that I will keep my phone on airplane mode most of the time when I'm hanging out at home. For a while now, I've been frustrated by how jumpy I am when it buzzes and by the ease of access other people have to me, so this feels like the perfect excuse to have my phone off more of the time. My laptop will, primarily, be used without internet as well. Maybe this means that I'll get into the habit of bringing my laptop with me to work in order to go to the library afterward to use the wifi there. Maybe this means that I'll become much more thoughtful about when, why, and for what I'm using the internet. 

There is something comforting and nostalgic about the idea of the internet being somewhere you go to a place to have access to. Although I don't remember a time before we had the internet at home, I am just old enough to remember having to go to the computer room (in our case, the basement and then the family room, or maybe the family room and then the basement) in order to access it. The internet was bound to a specific place, a room in the house, and to a thing, the big, gray, plastic machine called the computer. I think it was gray. Maybe it was white. I'm not entirely certain anymore. At some point, my mom got a laptop. Then, there was an iPod touch in the house. I'm fairly certain that was when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. Eventually, there was no stationary machine at all anymore, no room. No location of the internet. When I was in 8th grade, I got my first smartphone. That meant that the internet came with me, everywhere. And that is sort of where it stands today. Or rather, last week. I've always had wifi in my apartments, at school, at work. I've always had cellular data in all the places in between. 

All of that is to say that I am kind of excited to see what comes of this. How does it feel to be wifiless in the 21st century? Does this change anything about my relationship with myself, other people, etc.? Does it change how I interact with the world and with information?