Unless you were born before 1985, you don't remember a not-always-available internet.
I had a dream last night; I was in Cloud 9 - our college apartment - and the phone rang. It was one of my roommate's mom. In the dream I couldn't remember how to write down the message that she had called - did it go on a whiteboard (we didn't have one, it was actually a corkboard), or on a post-it, or did we just tell each other when we were both at home again. That thought led to a semi-lucid consideration of what it was like in 1994 - when I had email but had to go to a computer and use a floppy disk to store it. Going to the library meant true studying because no one had a smartphone. Listening to music meant a Walkman with a mixtape or a Discman with CDs, whichever tunes you remembered to grab before you left. There were no other distractions. No one knew where you were and no one could get ahold of you.
I considered what a drastic cleaning of my phone might look like: not only getting rid of social media apps but even email. I realized the folly of that though... there are still distractions in choosing the infinite amount of music on Spotify and the interruptions that are spam calls and text messages. This morning I even found myself distracted when I "had" to check the temperature of the coffee in my smart mug. Via an app on my phone, of course.
Lest you consider me nothing but a curmudgeon at this point, I love having the collective knowledge of civilization in my pocket. I love technology. But there was something to the monk-like lives we lived before technology permeated everything.
How are you taking a break from the digital world within arms reach?