I quickly burned through my whole data plan after the typhoon took out the neighborhood fiber connection. I learned (again) how much I rely on online access in daily life.
Though we have no Internet at 555, Tod’s office is fine so I can drink deeply of all the online tools over his WiFi. But if I’m at home, I am effectively offline or limited by 4G data on my phone.
Yesterday, I paid for an extra 5 GB of data but if I use my phone as I normally do that data will last a week at most. I need to change my habits and preserve my data, which means reviewing what I use. It’s not the first time I’ve reconsidered an offline life, a 2013 post details online use from a different era.
According to my recent stats, doomscrolling and sharing cat photos are my most data-consuming activities. That’s a fairly easy fix: I uninstalled all the social apps on my phone. That should save about 30% of my data right off the bat, but there are so many other daily activities that are online.
Documents & Blog Posts
I primarily use Google Drive for my productivity apps, but that’s online and I am not. I have one client uses Microsoft exclusively, so I have an Office 365 account – and I discovered that having those apps installed on my computer doesn’t mean I can use them offline. When I want to write at home, I resort to Pages on my laptop. It’s fine.
In fact, that’s how I am writing this blog post and if you are reading it, you know that I went to Tod’s office down the road, copy-pasted into WordPress, added photos (did I?) and published it.
Payments & Shopping
Apps are the way I interact with my money. Whether I am using digital payment systems like PayPay or online portals for monthly statements, I need the Internet to access most of my accounts.
Rural Japan has many delights, but shopping selection is limited. And perhaps doubly so when I want clothing in my size or specific art supplies. I buy a lot of things online and have them shipped here. To save me from myself, I uninstalled most of my shopping apps and I will “make do or do without” which is good for the wallet as well.
Communication
E-mail, Zoom, direct messages, group chats. This is where my now precious extra data is going to be used. Socials are over for a while. I won’t be posting on Instagram or Facebook from my phone. It’s a long overdue digital detox.
And since our “landline” phone is also out because it’s Hikari Denwa provided over the fiber line, there’s no phone except my smartphone and its per-minute plan, which is fine because I do not call people.
Music & Other Entertainment
We used to have an extensive collection of CDs, but we switched over to self-hosted streaming in the 2010s. Then Spotify came along and our own library languished. And now…No Internet, No Music (to rephrase a tagline from Tower Records).
We normally stream movies and TV shows to our computers. So that’s also gone. Now Tod & I have to converse over dinner and read books in bed like it’s the 1990s. Sometimes I try to zoom in on that small printed text; my eyes are not as sharp as they were in the 1990s
Education & Information
My true self is geared towards curiosity. If I don’t know a fact or piece of trivia, I Google it. I use Google Lens to identify bugs and plants and all sorts of things in my world. I ask Claude to help me dig deeper into a topic (especially when the sources are in Japanese). I learn from videos whether they are Reels on Instagram or longer forms on YouTube.
I do still have a library of reference books. But they aren’t as easy to use or as comprehensive as the wealth of knowledge online. However, they exist. I will use them creatively and try to zoom in on the photos for extra detail, probably.
The world is beautiful and things are fine, whether or not I have Internet at home.
CODA
In between drafting this over coffee and posting it in the afternoon, there has been a development. Tod got a call from NTT: “We know you don’t have Internet and it will take us some time to repair it, so we will give you a free 4G WiFi router until repairs are complete”
In other words, they are going to connect us to the Internet again. My 5 GB of data might last a while after all.
There may be something to writing these complaining posts. The water was repairs were completed on the day I wrote the blog post about not having water for 11 days, and now NTT is giving us hope for Internet at home on the same day that I am writing about it. Maybe I ought to whinge about something more substantial and see what happens.
