The Solution

You want to get out of the hole? First you’re going to have to put down the shovel.

Sometimes the right path is not the easiest one.

But What Can Be Done?

For starters, please, please remember the slogan! You can see it on the home page. Look at it as often as you can. Over and over. This is your new mantra.

The whole point of a mantra is that you repeat it.

Repeating it means that it doesn't change, but you still look at it, many times over, repeatedly.

Not having a shiny new thing to look at every two fucking seconds is part of the therapeutic effect.

Initial Steps

Getting off the fucking Internet is not just some easy thing that can be done in one go. You can't quit cold turkey.

Our dependence is now basically total.

Perhaps, maybe, your money still exists somewhere on some "legacy" (non-Internet) mainframe bank server running COBOL. Or something. But even if this was still true, there's no way that you can access your money without the Internet. Giving up the Internet 100% raises actual survival questions. Like how will you pay for the food you eat next week?

You can't do that all today.

But there is so much that you can do.

It has to be a gradual thing.

Something you plan.

Something you learn how to do.

Like, learn in the old style, when learning took time.

And grow into.

And, eventually, master.

You must cast a long line to catch a big fish.

The One True Way

When you cut through all the bullshit, there's really only one thing you need to do. This is how you get off the fucking Internet:

Don't use the fucking thing so much.

Everything else here is just training wheels to help you with this one massive, fantastic, wonderful, amazing goal.

Your New Mission In Life

Your new mission in life, literally, is to see how often and how well you can learn to do this one thing.

It's literally your mission in life, really, in real life, because being on the internet is literally not "in real life".

In real life = not on the internet.

In real life and not in real life are actual logical opposites.

This is so simple that even a child can understand it.

The purpose of life and the purpose of the Internet are literally the opposite.

Read that sentence again three times, to let it sink in.

You cannot serve two masters.

Get off the fucking Internet.

Don't use the fucking thing so much.

This is the One True Way.

The First Rule

This is the first goal. This is the first rule of your brand new life in real life.

Rule:

Use the system when needed. Do not live inside it.

The Big Rewind

This is the core principle.

You can't get out of a maze by teleport. Teleport is a fantasy. You can't jump out.

How can you get from the centre of the trap to the outside world?

You have to walk out, reversing the path that got you trapped.

The Internet is the biggest maze that has ever existed. You can only get out by going back.

We are going to rewind the Internet, era by era. In layers.

The Internet was relatively harmless in the early 1990s. Therefore, the information that you need to get off it has been designed to appear and function like a website from the early 90s.

When you are trying to escape from a prison, you have to start from where you are, inside the prison.

This information is now being put on the Internet, in 2026, because that is where everyone is in 2026.

The Starting Position

You are inside the prison of the internet.

You have found the secret map that leads to escape.

Layer 0 — The Mental Prep

This is where you make the decision to get off the fucking Internet. Not necessarily today, but sometime.

Before your actual human self is completely eaten. All of it, eaten up.

Think about the things the Internet has taken from you and from everyone else.

Realise how much of your life has been destroyed, redirected, nullified, stolen.

Realise that you can begin to become human again.

This is a completely new life.

Life.

Think, for a minute, about what real, actual rewards in actual real life might feel enjoyable to you. Even just hypothetically. Do this regularly. Practice imagining real life experiences that would feel amazing. Exciting. Peaceful. Happy. Whatever you can think of that makes you want it, and makes you feel good when you think about it. Whatever you can think of, as long as it's something real, in real life. Not on the fucking Internet.

Every online reward is just an image on a screen of something real that your mind thinks it wants.

Forget about the online substitute. For every online attraction, try to identify the real actual thing that's behind it that you are attracted to, that you would like in your life.

It doesn't matter if you can't actually have the real thing yet. You can't have it online either. You can't have anything real while you are looking at pixels on a screen.

For now, just imagine that you could have it.

In. Real. Life.

Layer 1 — Kill the Feed (2026 → 2010s)

This will cut out so much of the problem. Even this one step is so huge that it probably warrants a gradual transition.

The idea is, no more feeds. No more "on the scroll". No more infinite scroll, trying to read something that never ends. No more algorithmic control of what you spend most of your spare time looking at.

Either delete or deactivate (also you can block, and if you can, remove the apps).

You can do them all together, or one at a time if that would be too much (it might well be).

You know what they are. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X/Twitter, Whatever Else You Have...

If content isn't something you deliberately go to the Internet and ask to see, (and it isn't an important personal message or email or phone call), you don't see it.

Doing this one thing will give you back most of your self.

Yes you will feel withdrawals, and probably cravings. If the thought of it is too much, temporarily deactivate these services (rather than deleting your accounts completely).

Your own mind will begin to return. Your own actual thoughts and feelings. Your own actual life. Clearly this might be disconcerting at first.

Your attention will begin to recover. Thoughts and opinions and emotions from the Internet, designed to hook you and trap you into thinking they are important enough to sacrifice most of your real actual "in real life" life for, will begin to fade away. Your thoughts and feelings and experience of life will begin to regain their natural form.

Layer 2 — Compartmentalise the Internet (2010s → Early 2000s)

In the early 2000s, people went online. Then they dialed off. The Internet wasn't connected all the time. It was a very part-time thing.

Especially at first, you don't need to fully unplug your router and take the SIM card out of your phone.

Just use the fucking Internet in batches. Be online, and then be offline.

Then you can aim to reduce the time you spend online.

But, at first, just try to have some time offline, in some sense.

Make some boundaries.

Perhaps have periods of time when you are "online", and only during those times.

Perhaps you need the Internet for work, or study, or some other currently-necessary thing. There are still times when you can be without it. If you focus on this.

Perhaps, disable notifications on your phone but let actual phone calls work. (Remember the voice phone network is part of the Internet now). Figure out something that will work. You can go further into this later.

For today, think of one thing you can do that will help with this, really help, today.

For the long term, think of more things you can do that will help with this. If your work needs you to be online all the time, what other work is possible? Really think outside the box.

Layer 3 — Think of Ways to Do Things Offline

Everyone is so used to thinking "Doing things online will save time". But, if this was true, people would have more time now than they did in the history of the world.

The idea that the Internet saves time is straight up complete bullshit.

Yet it really does seem like it would save time, heaps of time even. This is how the trap works. Don't be sucked in by this.

Every time you do something online, think "How could I do this offline?"

Every time you do something online, think, "Could I do this with an earlier type of technology?"

If it takes longer, it's probably better.

And it will probably save you time.

Layer 4 — Reverse The Flow

This means reversing the flow of information, content, thought, life, making it flow from the Internet to reality instead of from reality to the Internet.

Currently, you do, experience, and think about things in real life — and then you take them to the Internet.

A real experience turns into a photo, a short video, a post, a comment, a reaction, on the Internet.

The Internet is the master of all, and all things must be brought to it.

That is how most people now behave.

Just say fucking no to this.

Go to the Internet for whatever you really need, and bring that back into real life, into the real world, a real object, a real experience.

Make actual reality the primary reality.

Doing this enough will make the Internet smaller, and reality bigger.

This is the beginning of freedom. This is the start of how we get our lives back.

Layer 5 —Stop Getting Validation from the Internet

This is one of the biggest harms. And one of the most recent.

In the early days of the Internet, the 1980s and 90s, the Internet was an information source. Sometimes it was a means of communication (though even this was rare).

It was almost never the means of finding your primary validation as a being.

There was a sense that out there somewhere was a real world of people and things, real people, real things, the real world. It was out there. It was real. You interacted with it. You talked to other people. You hung out with them. You worked with them. There was a whole bunch of things you did all the time, in real life, like people had done since the dawn of time.

This real world spoke back to you. As the voice of real people in real life. Perhaps on the phone. Perhaps in physical paper letters.

This was your base connection to other beings. To something outside yourself.

This is really important.

We are a social species.

Even if you think you are unsocial, that's just a comparison. It means you're less social than obvious "party people". You still need social contact of some sort. Everyone does. This is why solitary confinement is rightly regared as the worst of all punishments. People fear it more than physical violence, hardship and often even more than death.

Social contact, in some form, is essential to life.

Before the internet existed, none of this contact came from the Internet.

Now, almost all of it does.

Now, people think of the Internet as the other people on the Internet.

As if looking at a screen is actual contact.

It's been carefully engineered, with trillions of dollars spent, to make it feel like actual social contact.

That's why it has such a strong pull.

Yet it's not actual contact. It's actually looking at a screen. The more time you spend on fake socialisation, the more hungry you are and the more meaningless your life is.

Which means you are pulled even more to what your brain has been fooled to think feels like like actual social validation.

On the fucking Internet.

Layer 5 of the One True Way is to aim to break this trap by seeking validation in real life. In anything other than the Internet, and things on the Internet.

There are two things to do:

• Reduce ways you get validation from the Internet, and
• Increase ways you get validation from anything else except the Internet.

Coming Soon

Much much more...

Next page: Never Forget