How to be less online in 2025
How to stay sane and be in the world more — some thoughts
Next year, it will be ten years since I got my first book deal for Ctrl Alt Delete: How I Grew Up Online with Penguin. I was a little baby Millennial and I was already analysing the Internet through a lens. I wrote the book as a time capsule. (After all, our memories do eventually fade, so it’s good to write things down. Writer Kim France recently said she noticed some of her early memories were in ‘fuzzy black and white’ like an old movie). It’s a privilege to be a published writer — you get to print things in ink and they live on.
Ctrl Alt Delete uses words like: ‘floppy disk’, Petz, Game Boy, HTML, MSN, ‘CD-ROM’, dial-up, AOL. We will forget the absurdity of these things one day! Maybe someone many years from now, in one of the last remaining analogue libraries, will pick up my dusty book and think: “how very, very odd this is.” That’s always been my secret aim, anyway.
Anyway, it’s nearly 2025 now and we live in an increasingly wild environment online — and sometimes it feels like a full time job finding ways to avoid losing one’s mind, even if you are pretty clued up about it all. I want to spend less time online in 2025 and in this modern world it’s not easy, it actually requires strategy and knowing how to set boundaries. It feels like everything is set up to keep us glued to our screens.
Do you, too, want to spend less time online in 2025?
Here are some thoughts as we reflect on the year ahead (with also a few tips from some clever author friends). Hope you enjoy reading and feel free to add any of yours in the comments!
ps I’m going away/offline for a few weeks in January and so will be a little bit quieter here <3 Thank you so much for all your support, and I’m excited to bring you lots more in 2025.