90 Days without a Cell Phone, Email or Social Media

In the article “90 Days without a Cell Phone, Email or Social Media” by Brad Sylvester is about Jake Reilly, a 24-year-old copywriting student at the Chicago Portfolio School living with no electronic conveniences such as email, text, instagram, twitter and more.

It’s well known as “the Amish project”, from October to December he unplugged from social media, email, texts, etc. because he felt like we wasn’t spending enough time with the people we care about.

 This article is basically an interview where Sylvester ask Reilly a number of questions about what he learned from his experience and how it change his life. Sylvester asks him questions like what steps did he take to prepare himself? Did he ever cheat or check what messages came in? Have finishing this make your life different? What else did you learn?

Reilly says he prepared his self by “suspended service for my cell phone. I deactivated Facebook. I deactivated Twitter, deactivated Linked-In, deactivated Spotify, and anything where there was a social component. I put up an out-of-office on both of my email accounts, like, “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I won’t receive this until the end of the year.”

Reilly never went back on any of the social stuff. There were a few times when the bank would send me email verification but he said “I genuinely didn’t want to see what was there, because once you look you’ve got an urge to read it”.

“It’s definitely different, but I catch myself doing exactly what I hated.” “I think that’s what my biggest thing is: There’s not so much chasing for me now. I’m here now, and let’s just enjoy this. You can be comfortable with yourself and not have to go to the crutch of your phone. For me, that’s more what I will take away from this.” Reilly said.

I personally think this is really cool and makes a lot of good points. I would be open to be doing it but do think it’s going to hard. In my opinion everyone should do this and maybe we could all get more connected.