In November I found something called Analogue Sunday, which proposed that people should switch off their computers, phones and TVs for one day a week. I tried it a few times - not so much in recent weeks I have to admit-and it was strange. The day would pass easily, I would sit and read, or go outside. But when the evening came I felt empty, there was a aching feeling like I should be doing something – and I had no idea what to do with myself, because every evening for I suppose, the last 4 years or so, I have spent checking Facebook – unless I’ve been out with friends. And the cycle goes, facebook, twitter, tumblr, lastfm, facebook, weather, news, facebook, twitter, 4od, facebook facebook facebook.

I tried to break this cycle, and I’ll be honest, it worked for a few weeks, and I felt so much lighter, not being constantly connected. But then I fell back into old habits. Even though I bought a phone which doesn’t have the internet, I still find myself checking everything on the internet each evening. Yet most of the time nothing of interest has even happened. Probably 98% of the time. And I keep thinking, why am I doing this? You join these sites to feel connected to the people around you. But I don’t feel any more connected than I would if my friends had to text or phone me to tell me their news rather than finding it out on Facebook.

See, my phone just beeped and I’m already clamouring to get it to see who it is. Even though I know it’ll be nothing that can’t wait until I’ve finished writing this.

I keep looking around me and watching everyone around me becoming more disconnected, focusing more on the technology they think connects them than the people that surround them. On Sunday I sat at a table with 4 other people. They all had their phones on the table. I’d left mine in my bag, but when the conversation dropped off, they would all look at their phones, and so I ended up getting mine out just to have something to do. We’d all chosen to be in each other’s company, and yet we were all more interested in what might have been happening somewhere else.

So tomorrow at 12pm for one week, I am switching off. I will check my phone once a day. I’m going to go through the work I have to do over the next week, and make sure I don’t have to go on the internet for it. I’m going to shut down my facebook and not check anything else – so this blog will be silent for a week if I succeed.

On Monday at work before something happened, I thought about leaving this summer, so I could be unemployed and have a summer full of cooking and gardening and eating and walking. And then I realised that doing those things didn’t have to be dependent on whether I had a job or not, but whether I made time to do them. Managing to remove myself from the internet will make some of that time.

I’m finding it difficult to disconnect myself from all of this – a society that wants you to be connected to absolutely everything, to people you don’t even know. But I don’t want these connections. It’s like, I rarely speak to my brother, but most of the time I know what he’s been doing because of Facebook. But he’s my brother, I should be speaking to him. It’s ridiculous.

I just want to see if it’s possible for me to fill my time with things that I find much more satisfying rather than finding out that someone I went to school with 6 years ago and haven’t spoken to since had a shit day.

It has to be, right?