Meandering into an offline life
I've been coding from the age of 12. But recent developments in the software industry and the kinds of laws being proposed, like Age verification, have started scaring me solid to stay online.
Its not that I have anything to hide. My life is Mundane, but I shudder to think of how controlled life would become if going online meant that every website out there would know who I am. Its creepy at best, scary at worst because the web could be totally personalized to convince me of something if the would be powers wanted to.
Add to this the amount of misinformation and threats online these days, the number of bots out there etc. are all convincing me that the web is gone to the hounds already and its hard to get it back.
While I do keep up hope that this will not be the case forever, this blog itself being an example, my mind has been slowly veering off the online life.
I don't keep my mobile online much and its not near me. I check it for messages maybe two times a day. I don't bother to open it till the afternoon.
Likewise I've been gravitating towards a totally offline setup on my PC. As of now, it has:
- Steam games I enjoy playing which can play offline without an internet connection
- A set of TV series and movies I can stream locally. The collection is already good enough to keep the family entertained for months.
- A few local AI models - Qwen3, Jan-code and Phi-3 - my offline encyclopedias that I can use for information. Three models seem good enough to brainstorm with. I can cross-verify any dubious results with other models to confirm and take decisions.
- a copy of all my critical docs from Onedrive.
All of these still need a backup solution, and I also need some additional hardware in case my PC stops working.
Apart from this:
- I've taken up gardening as a hobby. Why I didn't take it up earlier beats me, but the joy of eating things out of your own garden is unparallelled.
- I've taken up singing as a hobby. It turns out I'm pretty good at it and I thoroughly enjoy singing songs.
- I've bought myself a Radio. Local radio station news are really the best, so relevant to my local life. And the government channels here don't try to grab your attention, leaving the nerves calm. The newspaper is another good source of info. I read only The Hindu, because I know from sources that the news is thoroughly fact-checked.
- I've drastically simplified my life, and I'm slowly teaching myself skills. Earlier, when I had a need, I'd run to Amazon. Now I stop and think - how can I make this myself. Its so surprising how many things you can make vs buy. And these objects tend to also give you a smile when your eye catches them because you feel good about having made it yourself.
I'm financially independent so I don't need a dime to survive and my diverse set of assets are sure to grow, unless, like the gauls say, "the sky falls on our heads".
And the best part of it all, I've become so Happy! My wife says she's never seen me this happy and peaceful.
I don't know where this is going to lead, but this time around, I'm letting life lead me instead of me pushing it in the direction I want to all the time.
I might end up being offline most of the time, or I might even end up forgetting what a computer is.
Either ways, as long as I'm happy, I couldn't care less about anything else.