I must be the first person to say that they love the internet in China.
To be clear, the internet here is crap. I have a VPN, and the internet works almost all the time, but the speed is SLOW and even the best VPN goes down once in a while. In addition, the VPN app on my phone is spotty often and doesn’t load the usual social media apps either.
Despite all that, I still find myself much happier here than I was in London, and part of the reason is that the terrible internet is also terrible for my bad browsing habits.
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| Insert joke about the Great Firewall of China. |
I no longer find myself doing any of the following because the speed is just not fast enough:
- Scrolling mindlessly on my phone
- Scrolling mindlessly on my laptop
- Watching Youtube mindlessly
- Watching Netflix mindlessly
As I can no longer do any of those things, I’ve had to find other ways of occupying my time, things like:
- Learning to be fluent in my mother tongue, Mandarin Chinese.
- Reading about history, economics, teaching, math, science, anything and everything.
- Learning how to cook better with Chinese ingredients
- Blogging
- Sort through photos
- Reflect on my teaching and become better at my craft
I’ve always been one of those FOMO types and learning and trying new things is of vital importance to who I am as a person. When I had access to all of the internet and various streaming services, I default to the lazy option in my downtime. I was absorbing new information but it was a lot of useless shallow bits of knowledge. My goal wasn’t to be an encyclopedia, I want to be a maker, not a consumer. This made for a lot of cognitive dissonance since I wanted to do more but it was too easy to give excuses and justification after a long day of work.
Now, however, I find myself filling up my spare moments with things that really bring me value. No more mental anesthesia. As a result, I notice that I’m much more social as well and pay better attention to friends when we hang out.
This past week, the VPN was down for 5 days and you would not believe how productive I was. I wrote up multiple drafts of blog posts when before I would do maybe 1 a week, I started sorting through my thousands of photos, and I also solidified my goals for 2019. As well, I actually had time to start a few small side projects and it was just amazing.
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| Such as sorting through all the timelapses of the sunrise to find one that’s focused correctly. |
There’s a lot of talk about digital detox in recent years. This is the equivalent of forcing myself to go to rehab. If you’ve been wondering how you can get more time to do things, move to China. If you can’t move to China, I recommend these apps to simulate the benefits of Chinese internet.
What would you do if you can’t use the internet as much? Would you take the time to rest or work on other projects?