overcome my addiction to the Internet

It was working for a while but I’ve been seeking distraction more and more again, recently.

This is my last day of home cable internet. Comcast jacking up the prices was my trigger for pulling the plug on the whole thing. When I move, I won’t be getting any type of cable or internet connection at all. It will be an adjustment – but it’s an experiment well worth doing.

dialup would make home internet use intolerably slow … and that’s a good thing, in many ways. on the other hand, it would be virtually unusable, and i’m not sure i want to go that far.

i’m not sure i want to get rid of my personal internet account altogether … that would tie me too closely to my job, i think. but, hm. it’s an idea.

is DSL cheaper/slower than cable modem? i currently have cable modem and they’re raising the rates. that’s another reason for my considering this measure.

Was generally depressed and dragged out this weekend. Did some websurfing binges. I’m not giving up on managing it though.

a friend suggested this, and it’s a great idea. break up my reading of blogs into groups: one group of blogs on monday, one on tuesday, etc. It lessens the temptation to hit Refresh several times a day, since it makes it far less likely that the current weekday’s blogs will have been updated.

This is something of an embarrassing confession.

When I’m home, I often get into this trap before I even realize it. I check a whole bunch of websites, typically some combination of: work email, personal email, Livejournal, Bloglines, Yahoo sports, online Personals ads, my friends’ chat room; I follow interesting links that come up during any of those checks; perhaps I post an LJ entry or comment, usually editing my words obsessively as I do. Then, when I’m done with all that … I start a new round of website-checking!

I do notice myself doing this, but while it’s happening it feels very unnatural and wrong to pull myself away – particularly when the thing I really “should” be doing is on the computer itself. It’s a bit like having just one more potato chip or scoop of ice cream. Or one more drink, I guess.

Net-surfing is, of course, a not uncommon phenomenon. I’ve been doing it obsessively or addictively, though, for longer than I care to admit; it’s one of the things that has kept me from doing more with my life. So this post is sort of a support group style declaration that I Have A Problem.

The tricky part, perhaps, will be fixing it without giving up the good aspects of these sites. Perhaps that’s not possible; perhaps if I really want to change I must do things like shut down my LJ. I gather that recovering alcoholics get better results from a policy of zero alcohol than from moderation. Hopefully I can find a happy medium with this sort of thing though.