Could You Survive Without the Internet?

By Felix Emmanuel (U19MM1044)

Indulge me in this imaginative world I’m about to paint with words. Let’s imagine the impossibly possible, shall we?

You wake up one morning and, like most of us do, you reach out for your phone first. But then you notice something odd, there are no notifications or messages, and your news feed refuses to refresh. Your phone isn’t buzzing like it usually does, and no app seems to be accessible. You assume maybe your data has been exhausted. You keep turning your phone’s flight mode on and off, hoping it helps.

When you finally realize it’s not a data issue, panic sets in. You fear that your phone might be broken. You restart it multiple times. You try everything. You begin to pace as your heart races. You feel uneasy, like a student who has just been told, “results are out.”

What I’ve just described might send chills down your spine. But rather than just feeling secondhand fear from this “impossible” reality, ask yourself, could you survive it?

If the internet were to go down, I think it would be a scary reality. We’d all be in denial at first. It might take a long minute to truly sink in. The world would slow down. We would hear the stillness of things. Chaos might erupt. But eventually, we would return to actual reality, full time.

We would start to have more conversations, see people again, and find new ways to engage ourselves. Reading books from page to page could replace the endless scrolling we’ve become accustomed to.

It wouldn’t be easy, but we’d survive.

The internet going down would force us to confront just how dependent we’ve become. For some, it has even turned into an addiction. The key takeaway is this: we should learn not to depend too heavily on it. We must strive not to make it the central part of our lives.

We tend to be more creative, present, and intentional when we’re not overly reliant on the internet.