Nothing works without internet anymore

18 Feb, 2026

Today is day #3 since our internet service decided to give up... Somehow... I'm still alive...

If that first sentence sounds like it was pulled from the diary of someone slowly losing their mind, I apologize, because that’s certainly not the case.¹ At least, I’m not the one losing it in this house.

Almost 72 hours ago I was enjoying a YouTube Short when, out of nowhere, the video froze and boom, now I’m writing this entry in my computer’s NotePad because I literally can’t access any other offline text editor besides this one.

At first I thought the service would be restored almost immediately; that it was just a small hiccup. But no. It was Sunday, and then Monday was Carnival, plus I live in the third world, so despite the countless calls my girlfriend has made to customer service, no technician has come to fix what seems to be an issue with the exterior wiring.

But here’s where it gets interesting—this story can be told from two very different perspectives: hers and mine.

I’ll start with the spoiler: she’s the one who has suffered the most from this whole ordeal. On one hand, she’s on vacation and had planned to rest a lot these days after pulling double shifts. On the other hand, for her, resting means being in bed watching TV and scrolling TikTok non-stop, eating chips and cuddling with the cats.² The problem? Most of the things on that list require internet, and not just “a little bit” of internet, not the “I’ll use my phone data” kind of internet. No, they require A SHIT TON of internet.

First comes the frustration that things didn’t go as planned; then the anger that almost all of her vacation have passed and the internet is nowhere to be found. It’s been so desperate for her that she hasn’t stopped cleaning, because she doesn’t know how else to kill time. It might sound extreme, but it’s in situations like this that you realize it’s not ideal for your hobbies—or most of them—to require an internet connection.

Her music? Needs Spotify. The show she was watching? Streaming. The podcasts she listens to? On YouTube. Hell, even the workout routine she follows when she doesn’t go to practice is on YouTube and there’s literally no way for her to do it.

I don’t blame her. She works a lot and trains in her free time. When she rests, she literally rests. She rots in bed, and I think that’s fine. Still, this experience has taught her that she can’t rely on the internet as much as she thought she could.

No one, ever, should trust the internet with the level of confidence millions of us have in it today.

And that’s where I come in and say that, actually, I’ve been having a good time without internet these days. The reason is simple: even though I enjoy the modern benefits of the internet, I still use it sometimes the way we used to use the internet decades ago.

My music library is stored locally on my computer; I have dozens of movies I haven’t watched saved on a hard drive;³ I have comics and books to finish in physical format; I have classic and recent video games sitting on my shelf that don’t need to go online to check if I own the license; I like to write and I do it literally wherever I can.

And no, this doesn’t make me better than her, maybe it makes me a little more “aware”? But that’s about it.

To be honest, even though I’ve been having a good time reading, playing on my 3DS, and writing—yes, I do miss the internet. And yes, over the last year I’ve made an effort to step away from streaming and to make sure not everything I do or consume depends on a single service, while also curating my personal libraries (physical and digital). That last part has been key these past couple of days, and I can’t stress enough how much I recommend anyone reading this to do the same.

Of course I miss the internet. I miss playing online, having my music stats uploaded to my Last.fm profile, and I would much rather be writing this in a Drive document than in NotePad. The difference is that my days weren't ruined by any of these trivialities which, while they do help me enjoy my hobbies more (or at least make them easier), aren’t indispensable to my leisure.

The good news is that after the first 24 hours, my girlfriend started looking for other things to do. For example, she planted a fern and started reading magazines she had bought but only flipped through. She even went and dug up her DVDs to watch something.

The world didn’t end, and she actually proved to herself that there is life beyond the internet.

Now the real problem is that I work from home and tomorrow, with no excuses, I’ll need to relocate to a café or to a friend’s or family member’s house in order to get my work done. That’s where the romanticism of a life without internet ends: when the options are eat or starve. But that’s another topic… I think.

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#2026 #eng