Turns Out the Internet Will Survive Without Me For 48 Hours (Allegedly)

A Wi-Fi router sitting in a dusty corner of a room, covered in cobwebs, wearing a tiny handwritten ‘Gone Fishing’ sign, surrounded by flickering fluorescent light, a single notification bubble floating sadly above it that says ‘47,832 unread,’ a motivational poster on the wall behind it that reads ‘YOU MATTER (ON WEEKDAYS)'

So I’ve been doing this thing where I stay off the internet on weekends. I know. I know. Very “guy who just discovered meditation in 2015” energy. But hear me out.

It started because of Warhammer. More specifically, it started because I have a truly embarrassing backlog of Warhammer models that have been staring at me accusingly from their little plastic sprues, and I kept not painting them because I kept picking up my phone instead. Turns out the solution to “why aren’t you painting” is sometimes just “stop doing the other thing.”

So I started keeping the laptop closed on Saturdays and Sundays. No doom-scrolling, no checking in on whatever disaster is currently unfolding, no falling down a Wikipedia hole about the history of a vegetable at 11pm. Just… other stuff. Painting tiny rat men. Reading. Existing in physical space like some kind of pre-WiFi human.

And honestly? It’s been kind of great.

Some weekends are better than others. There’s definitely a version of Sunday afternoon where I’m a little twitchy and I pick up my phone four times before I remember the rules. But mostly it sticks, and mostly by the end of the weekend I feel like a person who did things rather than a person who watched other people talk about things.

I’ve been spending too much time on screens. That’s not a revolutionary insight — I work in front of a computer, I relax in front of a computer, I’ve basically become a sentient monitor stand — but putting a hard stop on it two days a week has been a useful reset. The backlog is actually going down. I finished a unit last weekend that had been primed and ignored for an embarrassing amount of time.

I’m not here to tell you to throw your router in a lake. That’s your business. But if you’ve been feeling like your weekends are slipping by in a blur of half-watched videos and half-read threads and a vague sense that time is a flat circle — maybe try it. The internet will be exactly as chaotic and overwhelming when you get back Monday morning.

It’ll wait for you.

Stay healthy, paint your backlog, and take a weekend off.