I have been terminally online since my sophomore year of high school. COVID didn’t help much when I had to move back home. I don’t exactly live in “the sticks”, but I live far enough away from a major data center that ISPs are comfortable being predatory with us. Ever since high school I’ve had a hard cap of about a terabyte on monthly data usage. This was not only for me, but for the whole household, which made things difficult.
Every month, I would get an email when we were approaching that data cap. That email had been a staple of every single month.
Things changed pretty drastically in the past month or so, though. For one, I graduated college in March. I moved back home without my desktop, and don’t really have a place to be online all day.
I also started full-time work. I have much less time to program for fun. I also had less time to watch anime, or watch Internet videos, or really whatever my hobbies might entail.
You can imagine my surprise when, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t get an email from our ISP telling me that we were close to exceeding our monthly data plan.
My browsing habits had changed. Though I had lost my desktop, I had begun using my server more for high-bandwidth jobs that I could offload. I checked this computer far less often, and when I did, it was over SSH.
It makes me wonder about the advantages of a lower bandwidth life. There’s less to spread your focus thin and encourages you to use the resources at your disposal. Instead of Googling something, I can just use the manpages or local doc server. Instead of watching the first episode of every seasonal anime, I can just watch a couple episodes of one that already aired, and just chip away at it.
It’s attractive enough that I’m contemplating some more drastic changes. I could start taking notes on pen-and-paper again, or journal or something. Maybe I’ll revive the old Nokia cell phone we’ve got sitting around and, with an older MP3 player, and get rid of my smartphone.
Hell, maybe I’ll even read a book.