1000 Unplugged Hours in One Year

Lately, I’ve been thinking about our Calicut days. We owned nothing but a bed in the beginning. Tucked away on the Centre for Water Resources Development and Management (CWRDM) campus in Kunnamangalam, we made our first home in a large bungalow surrounded by coconut and jackfruit trees.

But I’ve been confusing myself. Why am I looking back so fondly on the days when we didn’t have much? We didn’t own a refrigerator for the first two months we lived there. We cooked only what we would eat in one meal. Whatever food waste we had, we fed to the campus strays.

We didn’t have internet. So every afternoon, I’d trek from our house to Zac’s office on the Kerala School of Mathematics (KSOM) campus where I could video chat with family.

There was no washing machine either. So I washed clothing by hand in a bucket and rinsed everything under a tap.

Multiple times per day, our power would go off. And I’d lay on the bed and listen to the sounds outside. More often than not, I’d hear the adhan from nearby mosques and doze off in the heat.

We lived like this for a reason. Our KSOM campus housing kept getting delayed (our first experience with the urgency of Malayalee culture). We didn’t want to buy anything large that would need to be stored after moving into our campus flat.

But I wrote a lot then. Read a lot too. I hardly do any of those things now. My brain feels like it’s constantly firing on all levels. Even writing this, I’m struggling to concentrate and type the words on the screen.

I didn’t clench my jaw and grind my teeth back then. Didn’t chew down my nails as often. I don’t recall having as many headaches either. So what the hell is happening?

Social media is a huge contributor to these problems for me. I’ve become dependent on those hits of dopamine while checking my Instagram and Facebook feeds. As I write, my hands are itching to grab my phone and scroll my day away.

I don’t believe social media is evil. It is a fantastic learning resource for languages, crafts, recipes, you name it. I love seeing so many creative people out there. But I need a break.

And then I stumbled on (of all places – Instagram) a post by Hannah Brencher, who basically reached inside my brain and put my exact feelings in her own words. She talked about feeling a “holy, sure nudge” to turn off her phone. In her next paragraph, she wrote, “I was surprised to find my device had turned into a mini savior— I would go to it hungry, tired, and in need of affirmation.”

Oh my gosh, I thought. This is me. I even cried a little. It was what I needed to read in that very moment. I was not alone in feeling helplessly dependent on my phone and social media.

But Brencher created a solution for herself: the 1000 Unplugged Hours Challenge. The goal was simple: 1000 hours without her phone in one year. And she completed it. It’s not a Herculean task either – she calculated 1000 hours in a year to be either three hours per day or 20 hours in a weekend.

She wrote that life “surged back” in this past year, and that it was “a year of books, and quiet time, and laughter, and presence.”

Man, I want that. No, I need that.

It’s dawned on me in the last few weeks that Evelyn is at the perfect combo age where she is young enough to still love us beyond reason but old enough to hold deep conversations. If I keep scrolling, I’ll miss it all and regret it for the rest of my life.

So I’m joining Hannah Brencher’s 1000 Unplugged Hours Challenge. She even has a handy dandy tracker sheet you can download and print. This is great for people like me who need sheets, calendars, and planners to tell them what comes next.

I’m not sure what the fruits of this endeavor will be. For now, I’m aiming to be more present in Evelyn’s life, and I’ll take it from there. Here’s to my unplugged future!