Turning It All Off

The other day while mindlessly perusing Facebook, I came across a picture on my timeline that said,

“No cellphone, no Facebook, no computer access, no wifi for three months & you get $3 million. Could you do this?”

I thought, “Heck YEAH I could do it for $3 million!” and promptly forgot about it. Actually, I guess I didn’t forget about it because it’s been percolating in the back of my mind for days now.

Let’s pretend that my day job and paycheck didn’t come from using my cellphone, computer and wifi on a daily basis. Could I just turn everything off for three whole months?

I feel like I could walk away from Facebook with only a tinge of regret. I mean, I love keeping up with my friends and the weather reports from Foot’s Forecast are really helpful, especially this week with the ice/rain/sleet/snow mix that we’ve been getting. When it comes to my blog’s Facebook page, I’d basically be committing blog suicide if I turned if off for 90 days. I mean, even when I post regularly Facebook only shows posts to 1/5 of my followers (that’s on a super good day) so if I didn’t post at all I imagine my numbers would get so low I might as well close the account. But still, for $3 million I could totally do it.

When I think about living without a cellphone… well, that would probably be the hardest part for me. We no longer have a home phone, so I need my cellphone in case of emergencies. I guess if we can say “cellphone only in case of emergencies” I could do it. I mean, as long as my childcare providers could get me whenever they needed to. Going without texting my husband would be super hard though, since I’d never know when he was getting off of work, whether I needed to pick up Jack, or if he needs me to buy more Prilosec when I go past Costco.

What about all the other stuff, like Pinterest, Instagram, my favorite blogs, my OWN blog, news websites, reading on my Kindle and more? I’ve become so dependent on having the internet at my fingertips that it would be really, really hard to walk away from everything. After almost four years of blogging at least 3 days a week, every single week, it would be really weird to just stop. Also, I can’t tell you how many times I google random stuff like “what temperature to cook baked potatoes” and “local spa massage reviews.” So yeah, living without my googling ability would be super-dooper hard. And don’t even get me started on the online shopping!

Now it’s your turn – could you turn it ALL off for three months? What would be the hardest part for you?

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4 thoughts on “Turning It All Off”

  1. I do think it would be tough, but I could do it assuming emergency phones would be allowed. I think I’d go see people in person more.

  2. My first instinct is I couldn’t do my job – which I LOVE! But 2 million (because Uncle Sam would surely take at least a third) could make some nice investments that could set me up to travel and retire and then I wouldn’t need my job. I would miss some of the interaction but I could spend my newly found free time reading paper books which is very very attractive. I wish this offer was real!

    And the comment about spending more time with people… this brings us all back to the question you had about dropping by unannounced.

  3. I’d have a hard time because I like to know things and Google is right there. I can find out how to do anything. At the same time, 3 months isn’t that long and I could really use 3 million dollars.

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