"When I flew back and forth from New York this week, I didn’t pay for internet. Instead, I worked on my sprawling current project on student debt (like the piece on burnout, I’m trying to think about it, and the discourse that’s accumulated around it, in a much more historical and contextual manner). When I reached a pause in my writing — a moment when I’d usually flee my draft to Twitter — I just stared at the seat in front of me, or out the window, or watched seemingly every one of the other people on the plane watching Crazy Rich Asians.

I’ve long known that creating an internet-free space is good for my writing. The app Freedom from the Internet made writing my dissertation possible. Actual freedom from the internet, in whatever form, makes so many other things possible. This isn’t news to me and it’s certainly not news to you. But it’s incredibly difficult to make the decision for freedom on our own — we need apps and wifi-less locations to force it. When we say it’s a bad habit, we focus on the “bad” part and not the “habit” part — we feel shame, or regret, instead of actually thinking about the fact that habits are incredibly hard to change.

Which is why, as Newport points out, a digital “detox” doesn’t work — because you just re-enter into your old habits once you come back from it, immediately retoxifying yourself. You have to commit to a different sort of relationship with your phone — one that will feel awkward at first (what do I do with all this time!) until you start new habits (in your mind, in the physical world) that supplant the ones you had with your phone (or you computer, or your iWatch, or DadPad, whatever, I don’t know your life and your gadgets)."

— Anne Helen Peterson