The Analog Life: 50 Ways to Unplug and Feel Human Again

In 2006, a UX designer named Aza Raskin invented a concept called “infinite scroll.” The feature provided an alternative to internet pagination — anytime users reached the end of a feed, timeline or results page, they could just flick the screen down for more. And like magic, more always arrived.

Raskin knew exactly what he’d built: “If you don’t give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling,” he explained in a BBC interview. “It’s as if [you’re] taking behavioral cocaine…sprinkling it all over your interface. That’s the thing that keeps you coming back and back and back.”

Did we know what we were walking into? Say you took a time machine back to the early 2010s. The iPad, the first commercially profitable tablet, had just arrived. Smartphones were adding a litany of features, steadily transforming from a situation-specific tool into an all-day ecosystem. Most of us felt lucky to have these things — and the original versions certainly weren’t cheap.

Now imagine stepping out of that time machine and telling someone that, in 2025, staying off those screens is considered a status symbol.

It’s true. We all know by now: screen time is a direct competitor to time spent in the real world. Infinite scroll was only the beginning. It was joined by push notifications, algorithmic feeds, like counters, gamified streaks, front-facing cameras, auto-play — all of it designed to keep us staring, tapping, coming back for more.

In 2023, the average online user spent nearly seven hours on screens each day. It’s impossible to spend your days hunched over a phone and not feel — vaguely or viscerally — that it’s doing something to us. The science backs it up: screen-time abuse disrupts sleep cycles, shortens attention spans and contributes to anxiety and depression.

Given a clear forecast of what phones would bring — and a chance to opt out — it’s hard to imagine people choosing this kind of life. Just look at Gen Z, the generation with the least free will in the matter, now embracing feature-free phones in droves.

So why is it so hard to stop? Because we’re hooked — exactly as the designers intended. (Raskin is now a Silicon Valley heretic who advocates for ethical tech.) We’re too overwhelmed by the addiction to even know where to start.

To that end, I’ve put together a list of ways to live a more analog lifestyle. As I make the rules here, I’ve stretched the definition of “analog” a bit to accommodate a reasonably modern lifestyle. I’m not suggesting you cancel your wifi. This is more about adopting sustained, analog-adjacent routines — and while there are 50 here, I certainly wouldn’t recommend adopting all of them.

Just cling to the ones that ring true. Perhaps they’re something to aspire to, or something you used to do, before we got into this mess of an era. These ideas are meant to create friction — to slow you down, interrupt default behaviors and make digital life feel a little less automatic.

Going analog isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about resistance. From old-school rituals, to single-use devices, to website blockers, these small interventions will help you live like a person again — instead of a user.

Old-School Daily Rituals

1. Read before bed

For 10 pages, for 10 minutes, whatever works. Books are our best remaining connection to what the great epistemologist Neil Postman called the “Age of Typography.” If the medium is the metaphor, reading is the sandbox you should play in at least once a day. The practice doesn’t just fire neurons and hone focus — it cultivates empathy, it rewires your relationship to time and space. As Postman once wrote, “A book is all history…it promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past.” What’s more analog than that?

2. Make family dinner sacred

At least one reason for America’s crisis of community: the erosion of “kinkeeping.” As family members devote more time to screens, race through busy schedules and move far away, traditions lose out. They’re hardly given room to breathe — if they’re ever introduced at all.

What can you do? Opt for the most basic and elemental tradition: the family dinner. It doesn’t have to be every night. A couple times a week — whatever your family looks like — sit down and break bread and chat. Once upon a time, we all worried over the prospect of dinner-table arguments. They’re not ideal, obviously, but the prospect of a little too much passion is better than everyone staring at the TV, or eating in their own rooms, ignoring one another.

3. Sip your coffee in peace

We usually pair coffee with speed-of-light emailing. But it goes better with: porches, stoops, sidewalks, parks, friends, dog walks, phone calls, books, newspapers.

4. Read the newspaper

To that last point, consider getting a newspaper subscription, even just for one day a week (I’d go with Sunday, personally). It’s a slower and more resonant way to process the week’s headlines. No clicking away. Also, if I might submit some superficial rationale here: sitting in the kitchen reading a newspaper looks and feels badass. Take it on the train if you want to level up. (If a little public posturing helps you live a more analog lifestyle, then so be it!)

5. Handwrite a to-do list each morning

What did Benjamin Franklin, Ludwig van Beethoven and Michael Jordan have in common? They all woke up each day and jotted down a to-do list. Of course, none of those guys (even heyday Jordan) had access to today’s apps or programs, which are able to automate tasks and set reminders and track your progress with an attention to detail that a Five Star notebook will never match. But the old-fashioned way gets your synapses crackling. It combines manifestation, goal-setting and accountability in a potent package. I couldn’t recommend the habit more.

6. Go for lunch walks

I have spent six years begging people to go on walks during the workday and I will continue to do so for the next 60 — or until AI replaces us all. Bonus points if you leave your phone (and AirPods!) at home.

7. Talk to friends and family on the phone

Okay, you can take your phone and AirPods with you if you’re calling loved ones. I was inspired years ago by “the secret power of the eight-minute phone call.” The general idea is that casual connection protects against the erroneous perception of “time surplus,” an idea too many busy people have that in the vague future they’ll have all the time they need to catch up with friends or family. Just do it — ASAP and as often as you can. Hearing their voice is better than texting.

8. Have movie nights

One of the most depressing manifestations of modernity is “second screening,” or the act of scrolling your phone while watching a TV show or movie.

As English journalist Marina Hyde reported, “So many show runners [have been] given notes by the streaming channels: ‘This isn’t second screen enough.’ And what they mean is, the viewer is expected to be on their phone, sort of half doing something else, while your crime drama, or whatever, is playing. You can’t make it as complicated as you have, because they’re not going to understand it. They’re not going to be concentrating on your show.”

What are we doing?! If you’re going to watch something, watch something. I’d even recommend this for sporting events. Put your phone, tablet or laptop away. It feels upside-down that we need to work harder to make the television set sacred again, but start by having dedicated movie nights. Watch with family or friends, fire up popcorn, the works.

9. Use your cookbooks

I have no quarrel with platforms like NYT Cooking or Mob. They’re fantastic services and I’d be pretty hopeless without them. But my house — like many others — has a ton of dusty cookbooks we never use, for no reason other than our iPhones and iPads are always within reach.

10. Watch sunsets

Best show in town. Life is better as an opacarophile.

The Harder Goodbyes

11. Delete your accounts

Yeah, this is as drastic as it gets — especially if you delete, not deactivate. I’m sensitive to the fact that for so many adults (especially people born in the late 1990s, early 2000s), a personal Instagram page is essentially a living, breathing scrapbook. Getting rid of it is like cutting off an appendage. But — sticking with Instagram here — consider how much the app has changed, how much time you spend consuming versus sharing, and often with accounts you have absolutely zero emotional relationship to. Lose Instagram Stories, and sure, it gets infinitely harder to keep tabs on friend-of-friends from seven years ago. But maybe that’ll help us live more peaceful lives? Chew on it.

12. Block websites that waste your time

At some point along the line, I started using Instagram on my laptop; I think because I often have to link to social media accounts in my articles. What a brutal development for my focus. It got bad enough that I eventually did a decent amount of research to find a reliable website blocker. My criteria for these blockers: A) It should be free, and B) it shouldn’t fall prey to a workaround (when you’re hooked, you gotta plan for anything).

I settled on Cold Turkey. My favorite thing about the app: the only way to break the block is through “Pause for a Cause.” You literally have to pay money to surf your vice website — and Cold Turkey, a Canadian tool, donates the money to World Wildlife Fund Canada. I’m (proud?) to report I haven’t helped any animals out yet.

13. Make your phone super boring

There are a bunch of nerdy, jailbreak-y ways to revert your phone to its “grayscale” setting, or make the home screen look less like a slot machine. Here’s an insider’s tutorial.

14. Lock away your apps

If you need extra help, I also highly recommend Brick, a portable device (thanks to its magnet, I keep mine on the kitchen fridge), which locks the apps of your choice with a physical tap. So if you leave the house, you can’t access XYZ apps until you return and tap your Brick once again. My favorite use cases for it: “bricking” certain distracting apps when I leave the house for work, and locking myself out of work apps on the weekend, including Gmail and Slack.

15. Go email-free on weekends

Beyond using Brick, I often stuff my laptop in a zipped backpack, or tuck it away in a drawer for the entirety of the weekend. I know myself: if it’s sitting on my desk I’ll inevitably open it up and start zipping through my usual online haunts. The absolute best feeling? When I’ve shut all the hatches on work stuff and don’t have to bring my computer on vacation. More on travel in a bit.

Devices That Do One Thing Well

16. Get a record player

Another Mount Rushmore symbol of analog living. InsideHook’s editor-in-chief, Mike Conklin, put together an awesome turntable guide for beginners earlier this year.

17. Get a film camera

Photography is dynamite for mental health, and a perfect way to start looking up and around at the world again. It can get a little expensive, but I love the delayed gratification associated with developing film. The Nikon F100 is next-level, but look into the Fuji X100V and the Canon AE-1 Program, too. Really affordable point-and-shoot options include the Kodak Ektar H35, Camp Snap and good, old disposables.

18. Get a pocket radio

You might need to be a baseball fan to truly appreciate this one. I grew up listening to Yankee games on the way home from dinners, family gatherings, the beach, etc. It still makes me feel happy — and connected to a time before my own — when I hear scratchy radios beaming out commentary in the heat of New York summer. The Puerto Ricans on my street hold it down. Obviously, there are so many other things you can do with a radio. Here’s a cool one from Tivoli Audio.

19. Get a paper tablet

Paper tablets are an absolute revelation. I use the model below, from Oslo-based electronics company reMarkable. This is a tech solution, not tech for tech’s sake. It catalogs (and sorts into notebooks and folders) every note you ever take; it lets you choose between blank pages, lined or graph paper, and spreadsheets; and it’s all syncable to cloud servers, if that’s your thing. I like taking it places to take notes for articles and fiction projects — and I also use it each morning to fulfill #5 in this guide.

20. Get a kitchen timer

Like this one: the famous Pomodoro Timer. It’s not for cooking, it’s for staying on task. Developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, the “Pomodoro Technique” calls for 25-minute rounds of deep work, interspersed with five minutes of rest. The method encourages you to work with the time you’ve got — in the form of a trusty, ticking tomato — rather than fight against it.

21. Get an alarm clock

There are many new terms for the negative consequences of bringing our phones to the bedroom, from the complex (revenge bedtime procrastination) to the simple (bed rotting). There is no reason to bring your phone into bed. Burning blue-lit short-form videos into your brain and then expecting sleep to come quickly and deeply is an exercise in insanity.

Of course, you still need to wake up in time for work, workouts or parenting duties — and that’s where a good alarm clock comes in. I use the Loftie, which has some great white and brown noise options, and I can vouch also for Hatch. If you’re in the market for a handsome, heirloom-worthy model, go with the Tivoli Model Three BT.

22. Get an e-reader

At this point, we know e-readers are not the enemy. Sometimes you’ll still hear people grumbling about them — “I just love the feel of a real book” — and that’s fair enough. It’s also important to support your local bookstore as much as you can.

But look, any e-reader worth its salt has: a warm backlight, crazy battery endurance (literally over a month on a single charge) and access to scores of classics at bargain prices. Also, if we must discuss tactility, I actually love the feel of a Kindle — especially while reading outdoors, when my hands are feeling either dried-out or a bit grimy. At the end of the day, e-readers aren’t screens the way we’ve come to know screens. They’re just an alternative method for reading. And we could all use some more reading in our lives.

23. Get a wristwatch

I’m no horologist, but fortunately, InsideHook contributor Oren Hartov is one of the best watch writers on the internet. Peruse his work to figure out which one is right for you. Personally, I like dive watches, military-inspired timepieces, that sort of thing. On my wrist right now is the Marathon 36mm MSAR Quartz. It looks sweet and makes me happy. Do I need to explore a trench anytime soon? No. But it certainly saves me looking at my phone when I need to know the time.

24. Get a game console

Specifically, one that isn’t connected to the internet. So many of the old classics apply: Nintendo GameCube, Sony Playstation (1 or 2), the various Game Boy models (the original, the Color, the Advance). Hilariously, they’re all expensive antiques now — and adding a few games could run your bill higher — but gaming is fun, has been shown to relieve stress and is way more worthwhile in its offline iteration.

25. Get a dumb phone

This one is tied to that “harder goodbyes” section from earlier. Subbing your smartphone for a dumb phone like Light Phone is a huge deal — you’ll immediately lose access to a variety of useful everyday apps (Venmo, Uber, Google Maps). These sorts of phones keep adding features, though (somewhat paradoxically), in an effort to carve out sustainable demand. So you might be pleasantly surprised at how much you can accomplish with one. Give it some research.

Paper Trails

26. Keep a calendar

One of the great holiday gifts of yore is the novelty calendar. Let’s bring it back. To be clear, I am a Google Calendar fiend, and find the platform invaluable for organizing my schedule and honoring my obligations. But pin-up calendars were always more of a household item, where various members filled in key events or travel dates. I think it’s a nice way to encourage awareness of each other’s lives.

27. Journal once a day

Or even just once in a while. Journaling can be a reflective experience, in which you carefully catalog and remark on recent events and impressions. It’s an immensely useful way to preserve your past selves, or capture the tiny proclivities of the people in your world.

It can also be a confronting experience — you might find yourself bumping up against pent-up frustrations. But that can be useful, too (it’s cathartic for you, beneficial for others). Regardless, I like that journaling is a private matter. If a meditation practice has always felt out of reach, journaling might be your ideal on-ramp for peaceful introspection.

28. Send handwritten letters

In this essay, I go deep on a Great American Bromance: the handwritten letters shared between Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I think most of us are so out of touch touch with letter writing (beyond stiff wedding Thank Yous) that we’d assume letters demand a formal comportment — and are therefore boring, onerous, anachronistic. But Hemingway and Fitzgerald knew how to have a laugh. “You were wise not to tie up with Hearst,” Fitzgerald wrote. “They are absolute bitches who feed on contracts like vultures, if I may coin a new simile.”

29. Frame your favorite photos

Once you get your film photos developed, hang them on the fridge, frame them for the end table or the wall and send ones of interest to friends or family. Receiving photos of yourself in the mail is a thrilling experience — assuming you don’t have a stalker.

30. Collect mementos

I keep a military surplus container in my closet that holds receipts from special dinners, ticket stubs, metro passes from trips abroad, you name it. Marie Kondo did a number on the hoarders, but I think it’s important to keep some physical clippings around. They all carry the potency of memory, even a simple napkin doodle, and in a manner surprisingly different to scrolling through your camera roll.

Social Reconnection

31. Organize a weekly card game

Or a board game. Catan-heads stand up. A little competition, a couple hours of shooting the shit…this is the exact sort of thing we all once took for granted. Find a few reliable people in your orbit and bring it back. Bonus points if everyone agrees to leave their phones in their jacket.

32. Join a club

Club culture has been having a massive moment over the last 18 months or so. Run clubs, book clubs, cold-plunge clubs, dinner clubs — they’re all over the place. I’d approach this with a slight degree of wariness; some of it reflects corporatized copycatting, as businesses big and small have gotten more clever at leveraging community. For their purposes, clubs are commodities that can be captured and posted on social media. (So if you found the club through social media, it’s a sort of closed loop.)

That being said, the people you meet and interact with and possibly become friends with via a club are real people. The time you spend doing whatever you’re doing — especially if it involves an hour or more away from screens — is also very real. It’s up to you, using the same social sniff-test skills you cultivated in kindergarten, to determine whether a club is worth your time (and potentially money). How to choose? I recommend going for A) an activity you already love, or B) something you’re determined to learn more about it.

33. Linger after events

This is such a hard social skill and one so few of us (me very much included) are in the habit of practicing anymore. But I can give you an example of a time I sucked it up and things went well.

After a few weeks of working out with an athletic club, I noticed I had a tendency to rustle my things together, call out some congenial goodbyes and get the hell out of there. Sometimes, famished and tired, that’s all I needed or wanted from the evening. Other times, I was in the mood for more social interaction, but too in my head to know how to generate it. I ended up making a habit of stretching after sessions (or untying and retying my shoes — seriously) to chat with the slow-to-leave crowd. Believe it or not, this led to drinks down the street on a couple occasions.

34. Go to live events

There is something electric about being at a venue for a reading, a speech, a performance, a match or game. It’s so good for the soul. Wherever you land on religion, remember: Americans used to unanimously attend weekly services. Our secular world lacks in connection, and our online addiction has wrought a twisted politics. Early Americans’ sense of politics was local, and their auditory comprehension and patience was masterful, far surpassing our own. (Each installment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, for instance, lasted three hours. The original “stump speeches” saw average Americans sitting around literal tree stumps, listening to people talk for hours at a time.)

When we hear “live events” we think Ticketmaster. I certainly wouldn’t argue against seeing your favorite musician or basketball team. I do so as often as my bank account will allow. But keep an eager eye and open heart to the smaller events that still remain, often staged by recreation centers, nonprofits, places of worship, universities and high schools. It’s good for them and great for you.

35. Host dinners

As I’ve gotten older, and people have started forming their little family units, I’ve noticed that for something special and out of the ordinary to happen, like a dinner party, someone must step up. It’s a game of social chicken, similar to kinkeeping. If no one puts something on the calendar, nothing happens. Months go by, you blink, a decade’s gone by, everyone’s got kids and you wonder why you don’t have any friends. So just make the Partiful.

36. Show up to things when you don’t feel like it

Which means showing up to other peoples’ dinner parties. More chances for connection is generally a good thing. Think about it this way: even if it’s a train wreck, you and your significant other can roast everyone involved the entire way home — one the great gifts of the human experience.

37. Play on sports teams

Sports teams have a massive impact on emotional well-being. What could be healthier than running around with friends for an hour, possibly dipping in and out of the flow state, while your phone is stashed in a backpack? It’s even great when things aren’t going well. I watched a 50-year-old guy get thrown out of a softball game the other day for arguing the call on a play at the plate. His team was furious! And they looked like they were having the time of their lives. Pick a sport, join a local team — you’ll regret not playing more once your body starts to wear down later in life.

38. Volunteer once a month

There are so many portals online for getting involved. Try VolunteerMatch and Volunteer.gov for starters, or just Google a cause you’re interested in. Volunteer work has always epitomized the idea of leaving one’s comfort zone, but has that ever been truer than right now?

39. Invite people to your errands

In an age where we’re floundering for social connection, I think it’s worth trying wacky things.

40. Drop by a friend’s house unannounced

See above!

Travel Like It’s 2003

41. Leave parts of your trip unplanned

A couple fantastic travel stories I read this year: one writer’s trek through Switzerland, guided only by locals’ hand-drawn maps; and another writer’s sojourn to Morocco, conducted without a phone or guidebook. These are flashy online articles, of course, meant to generate clicks, but I think they both succeeded in starting a conversation, too, about why we travel the way we do in the year 2025.

You don’t need to suffocate a trip with itinerary and Instagram. I searched high and low for an Anthony Bourdain quote I swear I remember reading, but I’ll have to paraphrase his sentiment. Basically, he urged fans of the show to not travel to the exact places he’d visited in episodes of No Reservations and Parts Unknown. Expert guides and AI-generated advice can be really useful on a trip, but they also collapse the world’s corners in deference to the algorithm. On a chart, this looks like overtourism. In person, it looks like a long line for a Kyoto coffee shop. Don’t worry, there’s a lot of coffee in Kyoto.

42. Talk to real people for recs

In a similar vein, some of the best and most surprising experiences I’ve had on trips have come from chatting to locals. That’s by no means a hot take. In fact, it’s an extremely cold take. But it’s still worth saying. People are proud and opinionated all over the world. Give them a chance.

43. Buy a travel guide

If you’re a little shy, or the language barrier is too much to overcome, and you’re intent on exploring a place without peering down at your phone all the time, just get an old-fashioned guidebook. Pro tip: You can also skim them at the bookstore or airport and save some cash. I did a long waterfront run in Auckland this year at the behest of Fodor’s.

44. Send postcards

Hand-written letters with glossy photos that you can magnet to the fridge? Now that’s what I call analog.

45. Explore your backyard

We’re inclined to romanticize the idea of jumping down the rabbit hole of a foreign city, totally phone-less. Or ditching modern life for a cabin in the woods. Total tech detox. But those ideas are so appealing because they’re the exact opposite of our current situation. A maximalist, burn-it-all approach always sounds amazing — and is never sustainable. Eventually, you have to go back to work.

That’s why I recommend feeding yourself bite-sized morsels of analog travel, in a place that you know like the back of your hand. Somewhere you know the train, bus or ferry schedule. It’s as simple as setting out on a Sunday with your phone left at home. Dotting your i’s and crossing your t’s so people know where you are (or better yet, are with you). If this sounds daunting, you probably shouldn’t make the leap to phone-less travel abroad.

A great way to do a bite-sized version of the bite-sized alternative I offered? Just start leaving your phone at home when you’re meeting people for coffee or dinner.

No More Tracking

46. Sleep without a wearable

I used one for years, before stopping in early 2024. I haven’t looked back. As I’ve said before, the only people who need to track their sleep biometrics are either: A) running a marathon, B) pregnant or C) Patrick Mahomes. Sleep-tracking doesn’t just lead to “nocebo” (the self-defeatist opposite of the placebo effect), it also forms yet another phone habit, wherein you’re eager to check your stats the second you wake up so you can see how you did.

47. Stop logging your workouts

I’ve been on Strava for five years, logging an activity essentially every day, so I’ll openly admit: I have zero intention of following this advice. But you have to know yourself, and recognize some of these workout apps for what they are: social media platforms. If that stresses you out, if you’d rather just log some exercise without reading your stats or inviting the eyes of an online community, then do you.

I more easily identify with this point in the realm of strength training. I don’t log my lifts, and lately, assuming I have a decent plan for what I want to accomplish on the gym floor, I’ve been leaving my phone in the gym locker. It leads to really efficient workouts. I typically end up wasting time in between sets when I have my phone.

48. Let days go unaccounted for

Things like recurring podcasts, daily games and habit-tracker apps all leverage our ingrained “streak anxiety.” It ties all the way back to big tech and gamified psychology. Don’t worry if you miss a day — you’ll be A-okay.

49. Do things without proof

A similar unease greets us when we attend to something rare or special (a sunset, a concert). We can’t imagine not capturing it. But not only does recording the moment interfere with its sanctity, it also messes with your long-term memory of the experience. This is called the “photo-taking-impairment effect.” Allow yourself to sit in moments and appreciate the feelings they generate, over the consternation of preservation.

50. Turn off your screen-time reports

Kind of ironic, right? Follow a fifth of these rules and you’ll start turning in the best screen-time report cards of your adult life. Don’t pay them any mind.