You are familiar with this scene. Inside the metro, people peering into their smartphones, heads bent and shoulders hunched. Inside cafes, people staring into their gadgets, not speaking; a man or a woman holding a phone in one hand, the fork in another, as they put food into their mouths, silently, without looking away from their phones. At night, inside dark bedrooms, faces are lit by the glow from gadgets, as people furiously scroll and type deep into the night.

I could relate to these scenes because there are times I am one them, my neck hunched in the middle of a multitude of people similarly bowing to the powers of their smartphones. When lying down, you lift your gadget and let it hover above your face, staring at it for hours, with the deference and obsession of a devout paying respect to the Holy Host.

This blog is a chronicle of an attempt to rediscover life outside smartphones, without the buzz of social technology. The day I bought my first smartphone was the day I got looped into the social media rabbit hole. Arguably, I know that my online habits are not the worse, but social technology, for me, transformed from just being a tool to connect to others to become an inescapable way of life, something I can’t control. Where before I would have to put myself mentally or physically into a space to experience the world, now I navigate daily life through apps, which are providing me choices and making suggesting decisions on my behalf for me.

This isn’t about waging a war against Facebook and others. It’s about striking a healthy balance between the online world and the offline world, something I cannot do if I can’t even build a habit of disconnecting.

It took me a while to make this decision of disconnecting, even just for 24 hours every week. The idea brewed in my mind for quite sometime, after a series of nasty exchanges online over politics, and feeling hollow afterwards, and I just kept on delaying the decision out of fear. What if something happens and I’m the last to know?  How do I contact my friends, I don’t even have their phone numbers? What if something big happens to me – an accident, the love of my life – how do I tell my friends? I read that social connectivity is a response to a sense of modern isolation, of loneliness, so what if disconnecting means feeling more lonely, more isolated?

What if I enjoy being disconnected?

I wouldn’t know unless I try. So here we are.

Here’s how it’s going to work. The goal is to reach a point where I can have a day or more where, based on my own bidding and without trepidation, I only use emails and SMS for communication. If I want to go to a place, I look it up in the map, and go. If I lose my way, I ask for direction. In a restaurant, I will rely on conversations with staffs or referrals by friends or my own decision, not crowdsourced reviews, to decide on what to order. When I have ideas that I wish to share – about politics, something that has happened, inane thoughts – the instinct I am aspiring to have is to write these ideas first, on a journal, before making a decision whether I wish to share them, and how.

This blog is an attempt to help me reach that point. For this experiment, I wish to disconnect partially, once a week. By disconnecting partially, I mean no FB, no Twitter, no IG, and no hook up sites (you shall not pass, Grindr!); I will only use, sparingly, those that I need for work, such as email and IMs (we use Slack, sometimes Hangout, and I’m revealing this as a shoutout to the nerds out there).

First day is May 25, 2016. Location: Bangkok, where I have been living for a few months now. Country of origin: Philippines, the social media capital of the world. See, I mean it, the struggle is real. Enjoy.