Notes: Digital Lent

On Ash Wednesday, March 5th, a friend—an author—for Lent¹ will vanish.

Forty days. No internet. No digital input. A cabin by a remote lake. Total analog immersion. Digital amputation. Personal retreat.

Books, paper, ink—only the physical world allowed. Severed from the matrix - his days will be spent repairing the cabin, writing, meditating, existing in a non-digital present. His wife will restock his pantry once a week. No words, no distractions, a monastic supply drop.

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Jealous. Inspired. A desire to attempt a similar defrag—a Digital Lent if you will.

I’ve done Vipassana before—ten days of silence, breath, bodily sensation. Arising and passing attempting to tune the sense gates. I’ve disappeared into nature of extended periods and had the joys of defragging, reformatting my cognition away from the hyper mediated attention algorithms. But my friends —structured withdrawl from the neural entanglement of the modern — at this moment feels not just appealing but necessary. Urgent.

Unlike my friend, I won’t be heading to a cabin. Obligations, responsibilities tether me to the grid—family, professional, employees, contracts. He would call this an excuse. Cope. A failure to fully sacrifice as Lent inspires. But i can still carve out a perimeter, enforce my own version of severance.

This is my strategy. A tactical retreat for those can’t full leave to the cabin by the lake but want out.

The Why

Modern media is a Skinner Box. Dopamine-loop hijacking social engineering. Fractured attention. The endless doom scroll. The damage is widely known and felt.

Writers like Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism) and Jonathan Haidt have mapped the cognitive wreck: the erosion of sustained thought, mind hive formation, slippage into short form hamster wheel paralysis, the slot-machine engineered addiction, a slow-motion cognitive sinkhole.

The question isn’t whether modern media is harmful. The question is: What do you do about it? Warnings matter, but more importantly what matters is execution.

The Plan and the Tools

Positive Mental Deliberate Action

• Disconnection isn’t passive. It’s an offensive maneuver — a kill switch. The current environment hijacks via dopamine loops, stimulus-response ways and algo. coercion. It does not want to be rewired. The system fights back and presents withdrawal as discomfort, tempts with justifications and micro-negotiations (“I’ll just check for one second” , “Just one clip…”) and fake productivity (“This is for research”).
• To even have a chance to disengage and override the embedded operating viral scripts: I require collaborative Positive Mental Deliberate Action - a collective, conscious, violent rupture in routine - not just a commitment to avoid vices but one actively constructing new cognitive pathways. The goal is not just avoidance but consciousness awareness.
• Redirection is mandatory. This means reframing attention, immersion in deep work, physical, natural labor and sustained narrative absorption. Luckily I have some training from meditation and goal setting, but every action must be intentional. The first step I think must be deliberate as disconnection without redirection is just another form of drift.

These tools can hopefully help:

Tools to Build a Digital Moat - Root Level Lockdown

• For the desktop: The app Cold Turkey will lock down all high-stimulus digital vectors—news, social media, porn, Netflix, YouTube etc. It’s the only app that enforces total restriction at the root level. I played around with Freedom and others but I find Cold Turkey to the be only one that is so hard to bypass that it helps keep one with the guardrails. I’ll surrender the password to my partner. I recommend the same. No backdoors.
• On mobile: Apple’s built-in restrictions are useless. Their incentives do not align with mine. Real containment requires for me at least Foqos or BRICK—apps that enforce constraints with brute authority of requiring a physical NFC card to unlock. My partner will hold the NFC card to ensure compliance. Yes there are minimalist phones (dumb phones and light phones) to explore but since I require mobile only authenticator apps for several finance tasks - I’m stuck with that anchor and opportunity for testing.

The “Roland Box” : Physical Device Lockdown

Inspired by Roland, the Japanese host who locks his phone in a time-safe every night, I’ve acquired a mobile time-lock safe. Once sealed, it stays sealed. No override. No loophole. If something burns down and I need to call for help? I’ll figure it out.

Limited Digital Access

• 15 minutes per day to check essential messages (both email and texts). This will require me to very thoughtful and will make a plan of action prior. Mail/message app time will just be sending/processing via wasting time in a loop of email etc. Tim Ferris of 4 Hour Work Week Fame has tips on email/time management.
• Strict pre-planning. No aimless scrolling, no inbox loops. For emails requiring longer responses, Draft offline in Ulysses. Print for review.
• Employees and partners will handle any urgent digital matters and can call me on the the burner number I set up.
• Outsourcing Digital Responsibility as much as possible. An assistant will handle necessary online interactions and assist as required. (for others I can recommend the very reasonable Fiverr, Upwork)
• Grey scale the device.

Analog Regression

The principle: Analog > Digital

• Single Purpose Camera > cellphone camera. Photography without the net anchor. Maybe use that old film camera…
• Paper Journal > Digital Notes
• Printed Matter > Screens - Maybe start with habit review techniques like Deep Work, Atomic Habits or the Power of Habit
• Single Task > Multitask
• In Person > Screen to Screen
• Quality > Content slop. No algo. sludge.

Surveillance of the Self

Continuous audit with an accountability partner to detect leaks in the imposed firewall. All device usage will be logged and reviewed by an accountability partner for total transparency as an enforcement mechanism.

The panopticon turned inward.

Necessary Exceptions

• Zoom and other conference tools stay for work-related calls. Arg.
• Close friends will be notified. No chat apps. No casual pings. Social commitments require pre-planned scheduling. Remember the 90s?

Additional Goals

• Handwriting first workflow. Inspired by the Sprouter , I’ll write my pieces by hand or on a typewriter before transcribing into Ulysses. I love his commitment to craft of writing in the meat space.
• I’ll input notes into my zettelkasten (my second brain of notes) using physical cards first and then processing them into Obsidian.

Execution

Writing this down materializes the protocol. Invites others to join in the cabin retreat. These measures are aspirational, but I hope doable. The lattice of digital control is totalizing, but it hopefully has its weak points. This is an experiment in breaking its stranglehold.

If you want out, maybe you’ll join me your own version of a Digital Lent.

If you have suggestions, optimizations, or better tools, please let me know. This is a live experiment. Let’s refine it.

空海 （Kūkai) homage to the founder of Shingon Buddhism. Another great teacher to guide on a digital retreat and eventual return: the Lotus Grows From The Mud.

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1. Lent is traditionally a period of sacrifice, reflection, and renewal. This version—Digital Lent—isn’t religious (it can be), but the principle remains the same: stripping away distractions to focus on something deeper. Like Jesus’ 40 day journey in the desert maybe this small sacrifice can help refine, and be preparation for emerging stronger in purpose and mission.