“What I Learned From Going a Week Without My Laptop”
Published: 2025-09-08
Day one was pure denial. I stared at my laptop screen like a worried parent checking on a sleeping baby. Maybe it’s just tired, I told myself. I pressed the power button again. And again. I tried every classic fix: unplug, restart, whisper a little prayer to the tech gods. “It’ll be fine tomorrow,” I thought. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t. That night, I scrolled through my phone, convinced this was just a minor hiccup — not the beginning of a week-long breakup with my most important companion. Then I learned it has hardware issues and it will be a while after which i will see my laptop again. The first day was hard I barely got out of bed as I had no work to do , no code to learn but I had work , actually a lot of work to do. I had recently enrolled in an internship program so I had plenty of work to do.Yet I couldnot even leave my bed.I felt defeated , disheartened and whatever a heartbroken person feels.I wanted to do so much but could do so little. My procrastination got the better off me I would got to sleep at 3 am and wake up at 11 am. After wasting two whole days , I decided I would continue my work . I knew it would very difficult. Yet , I thought if I could just do some coding maybe I would feel normal.Maybe I will make some little progress in my work.So downloaded google colab , started coding ,made a netflix data analysis, used some new libraries and plotted some graphs. Not only that started reading books again. A hobby which was long lost due to my tiresome schedule . So, I turned to books — dusty ones that had been sitting on my shelf for far too long. The first I picked up was White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. There was something deeply comforting about getting lost in another world, another voice. As I flipped through the pages, the loneliness didn’t feel quite so sharp. In White Nights, Dostoevsky talks about fleeting moments of light that make the darkness bearable. My week without a laptop felt exactly like that — a long, confusing night with tiny glimmers of brightness. Sure, at first it was chaos. I went through the five stages of grief, complained to anyone who would listen, and dramatically refreshed Google for miracle fixes. But somewhere between picking up White Nights, crocheting a slightly lopsided coaster, and squinting at Google Colab on my phone, I realized… maybe this wasn’t the end of the world. Yes, my laptop still has a hardware issue and will be gone for a while, which stings a little — okay, a lot. But now I know I can survive without it. Maybe even thrive (on good days, with enough chai). Because life without a laptop isn’t just about surviving boredom — it’s about finding new ways to create, even if that means swapping a keyboard for yarn and a good book. And who knows? By the time my laptop comes back, I might have a new scarf, a few finished novels, and a killer thumb muscle from coding on my phone.
Source: https://dev.to/swastika_bhattacharjee_aa/what-i-learned-from-going-a-week-without-my-laptop-23jk