I have loved the artful aptness of the phrase “terminally online” for many years, and I used it several times in You Should Quit Reddit to describe the behaviors of the heaviest users and moderators of the site. However, it wasn’t until I began to step back from over-engaging with the internet that it took on a deeper nuance. There’s some irony added by the fact that people who don’t spend time hanging out in online spaces like Reddit or Twitter have probably never even heard this term.

According to The Daily Dot’s Jay Hathaway, the similar phrase “Extremely Online” was first used as a descriptor in 2014.^[1] It was typically capitalized in the style of proper nouns, as if it were some sort of official title, and used in a self-deprecating manner. Some time in the latter half of the 2010s, the synonyms “terminally online” and “chronically online” arose, and soon after also began to be used as dismissive insults.

Spending a lot of time on the internet is not the sole component of being terminally online. The user also always seems to have their finger on the pulse of current events in internet culture, and likely considers what happens in internet spaces to be of high importance. They either explicitly rank browsing the internet among their hobbies, or at least imply as much by using it as their default way to fill time in their day.

I am about four years into the journey of reforming my technology habits, the timeline of which I prefer to begin with my first attempt at quitting Reddit in the summer of 2019. As I wrote in my book, it took me over two years of relapses with internet addiction to actually arrive at a successful strategy for leaving Reddit behind for good. And since then, I’ve continued to slowly chip away at the presence of technology anywhere that it does not add value in my life.

I’m clearly no longer a terminally online person, and I think that I can crown myself as a fairly successful, middle-of-the-road digital minimalist at this point. But can I cut away even more technology, not miss it all, and reclaim more time in my day? I’ve continuously found that the answer is yes. I don’t use the web browser at all on my smartphone anymore. A couple weekends ago, I set the parental controls on my router to completely block all of my devices from the internet between 7 AM and 5 PM on Saturday and Sunday. It was a test of complete disconnection, and it was a huge success in terms of productivity.

Whatever the next big step in this journey is, I’ve been feeling that there’s some sort of bold, dividing line between it and where I’m at now. That the act of slowly chipping away isn’t revolutionary enough.

It seems to me that the default state of most digital minimalists is still that of being connected. They use self-control, practiced habits, and mental fortitude to reform their behaviors in order to resist the pull of addictive technologies and the online world. But surely there’s some mental bandwidth being used to resist always-on technological distractions that could be repurposed for more useful ends if we simply flipped the script, toggled a setting, and kept our devices offline for most of the day.

I went back to check Cal Newport’s definition in Chapter 2 of Digital Minimalism to verify that I was not crazy:

A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

Maybe I’m overfocused on semantics, and what I’m describing is simply a deeper level on a spectrum of digital minimalism, an “extreme digital minimalist” if you will. Or perhaps there’s truly something different here if we start from “a philosophy of technology disuse” that splits the difference between digital minimalism and Luddism.

It’s the pursuit of progress via perspective shift. Is the glass half-empty (I am a former internet addict who needs to resist the allure of being online), or is it half-full (by maximizing my offline time and using technology only when required, I can live a more productive, meaningful, and present life)?

I thought that I was clever coming up with the phrase “Extremely Offline” to describe the latter state of being, however it’s already been in use for years. The earliest use of the term that I can find is from 2018. Well, it’s new to me at least, and I like it.

Precious little things of value that I do in a day outside of work actually require my devices to have an omnipresent internet connection. For example, I wrote this entire post locally on my PC; aside from five minutes of background research and the act of posting it, no internet connection was required. As an experiment, I unplugged my ethernet cable for most of the time spent writing this article, and it felt like I went right into a zone of focus.

It’s time for me to take the next step. In the near future I’ll be experimenting with and reporting on several practices in pursuit of becoming an Extremely Offline person, which don’t require escaping to the woods or cancelling one’s home internet package.