My 24-hour Internet fast

It’s been many years since I fasted on Yom Kippur. Even back in the days when I did it every year, I never really believed that I was obeying a command from God or that I would be punished if I didn’t. Partly, it was a matter of cultural identity; I fasted because I was a Jew, and fasting is what Jews do on Yom Kippur. But also, I believed that on some level, it was good for me. Good for me physically, because a 24-hour fast would shrink my stomach and make me less likely to overindulge in the new year, and good for me spiritually, because going hungry for a day would make me more sympathetic to people in need.

Over the years, though, I began to have doubts about whether my yearly fast was really having the desired effect. It certainly wasn’t making me feel better physically; on the contrary, it usually left me with a throbbing headache and an uneasy stomach that didn’t want to accept the food it needed. And these discomforts, far from making me feel spiritually uplifted and sympathetic to all humankind, made me cranky and snappish with the humans in my immediate vicinity. I eventually reached the conclusion that fasting wasn’t doing either my body or my soul any good and quit doing it.

But I never felt entirely easy with my decision. Although I knew that fasting hadn’t done anything to make me a better person, it still felt wrong not to do something special on Yom Kippur — something that would give the day the same weight and significance it had in the lives of my ancestors back in the shtetl. So this year, as I attended the evening service with my parents, I found myself wondering: was there something else I could give up on Yom Kippur, something that really would be physically and spiritually beneficial even if it was difficult? And suddenly the answer came to me: I should go 24 hours without connecting to the Internet.

I quickly realized that doing this would be, in some ways, more of a challenge than going without food. No Internet definitely meant no work, since my job is pretty much entirely online these days — a mixture of Internet research, composing articles in Google Docs, and connecting to coworkers via Gmail, Slack and Trello. And most of the things I normally do as a break from work — checking email, answering online surveys, clicking on whatever intriguing article has popped up on Pocket — would also be off-limits. I wouldn’t be able to solve my daily cryptic crossword (downloaded from BestforPuzzles.com) over breakfast, listen to a podcast in the shower, or read the day’s top headlines from the New York Times. It would be a complete disruption of my routine.

And in a way, that was the point. An Internet fast would force me to take a break from all my daily habits, both good and bad — and in the process, step back and get a clearer look at which was which.

So, after a little initial hesitation — what about the emails I hadn’t answered that afternoon? What about other urgent messages that might come in during the day? — I decided to give it a try. And I made a further decision: as I went through my Internet-free day, I’d document it to see just how it had affected me, for good or bad.


Here's what happened.

***

Tuesday, 10 pm: Upon my return home from services, my husband Brian gets onto my computer to answer, on my behalf, the one email message I feel I can’t afford to leave dangling for the next 24 hours. He then ceremoniously disconnects the Ethernet cable from my computer to ensure that I won’t slip up and connect to the Internet without thinking about it. So now it’s official: I’m doing this.

Wednesday, 7 am: Since Brian is still going to work today, even if I’m not, the alarm wakes us at the usual time. After I take my pills and brush my teeth, I realize I’m not sure what to do with myself next. Since I can’t eat breakfast until half an hour after taking my pill, I’d normally spend the next 30 minutes checking email and printing out my morning puzzle before breakfast, but those activities are now off-limits. Instead, I pick up yesterday’s copy of the Daily Targum — a college paper I normally get only for the crossword — and actually read it.

Wednesday, 8:40 am: After Brian departs for work, I sit down and start writing this article (in TextEdit, which I can use offline). I quickly discover how much I’ve been in the habit of taking mini-breaks throughout my workday, every time I get stuck on a tricky paragraph, to check my email or play a quick game of 2048. Unable to engage in these diversions, I root around on my computer’s hard drive and unearth an old copy of Montana Solitaire, which I can play without benefit of Internet.

Wednesday, 11:10 am: I decide it’s time for a shower. Clicking on iTunes, I realize that I still have part of yesterday’s Hidden Brain podcast left over that I didn’t finish listening to, and since it’s already downloaded, I can listen to it today without breaking my Internet fast. It feels a little like cheating, but I do it. The topic of the episode is outrage: how it’s “hijacking our conversations, our communities, and our minds.” As the presenter and his guests talk about how social media, in particular, has become a constant stream of vitriol, I mentally run over all the emails that have entered my inbox over the past few days and are probably continuing to pile up this very minute. How many of them were from one political mailing list or another, shrieking about the latest travesty in the political realm and the urgent need for MORE MONEY, NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW, to combat it? All of a sudden, I feel a lot better about not being available to receive them.

Wednesday, 12 pm: Time for lunch. As my tummy rumbles, I feel thankful that I’m skipping Internet today rather than food. Then I wonder how ironic it is that not fasting is making me more appreciative about eating.

Wednesday, 1 pm: After consuming my soup, biscuit, apple, two squares of chocolate, and a chapter or two of Ngaio Marsh’s last novel, I find myself once again at loose ends. I can’t do any work, and I can’t do most of the things I normally do for play, since they all involve going online. So instead, I sit down at my computer and start putting together a scenario for “Honey Heist,” a silly little role-playing game I’ve been meaning to run for a while. This is a task I’ve never managed to find the time to work on; during the day I was always either too busy with work or allowing the wonders of the Internet to distract me from work. Apparently a day offline was the kick in the pants I needed to get started.

Wednesday, 2:20 pm: Got so absorbed in planning my Honey Heist, I didn’t even notice it was past my usual time for my afternoon walk. It's chilly and damp out, but not too cold once I get moving. Since I have no work to get back to, I feel free to take my time strolling around town, gathering fall leaves, and stopping into the store to pick up some snacks for tonight’s game.

Wednesday, 3:50 pm: Back from my walk. Take my time arranging my newly collected leaves in their basket and fixing myself a snack (hooray for not fasting). Go back to “work” on the Honey Heist.

Wednesday, 5 pm: Brian comes home from work. I ask him if he knows what time sunset is, since I can’t go back online until then (and I can’t visit Accuweather to check for myself). He checks for me and reports that sunset is at 6:27 pm, so I still have about an hour and a half to go. He also brings me a fresh copy of the Daily Targum, so I have plenty to occupy myself until then.

Wednesday, 6:40 pm: The moment of truth. Having finished dinner, I reconnect to the Internet. In the course of this one day — counting from 5:30 last night, when I left for services — I have accumulated 40 emails (not counting survey invites) across my three email accounts. These include five work-related messages, six about dance practice, four about the concert series, five concerning a friend’s request to borrow a couple of board games from us (which Brian handled for me), one about our weeknight gaming group, and two shrieking political messages. The rest are all newsletters and other trivia that don’t really require my immediate attention.

It takes an hour or more to go through all these accumulated messages, sorting them and responding as necessary. If I'd dealt with them as they came in over the course of the day, it would probably have taken at least as much time, but it would have felt less burdensome because it would have been spread out into shorter blocks of 15 minutes or less. By the time I'm done with it all, I feel almost as tired as if I'd really fasted all day, and more than ready to collapse on the couch with some Netflix (courtesy of my long-lost friend the Internet).


***

So, now that it's all over, what conclusions do I draw from my experiment?

First of all, I can say with relief that I'm not genuinely addicted to the Internet. Going without it for a whole day wasn't terribly burdensome; in some ways, it was actually quite pleasant. Being unable to work or goof off in the ways I usually do left me with time free to do things I normally wouldn't, like planning my Honey Heist, and more time to spend on offline activities I enjoy, such as reading and taking my afternoon walk, without feeling guilty about all the time I was taking away from work. It was definitely less painful than going a day without food.

That said, I have to admit that my life with the Internet is, on the whole, easier than my life without it. It really was awkward not being able to do the little things I've come to rely on: printing out my puzzle in the morning, checking the weather report, sending a quick email message. And while I didn't happen to miss any urgent messages during my 24-hour "fast," that was largely a matter of chance.

As to whether this Internet fast was good for me, that's a tougher question to answer. On the one hand, I think my day without Internet was, on the whole, less stressful than a normal day with it. But the time I spent recovering from the "fast" was actually more stressful than usual, because I had to clear out a 24-hour backlog of messages. And I'll probably have to continue putting in extra hours over the course of the next week or so to make up for the day of work I missed.

I certainly wouldn't say that Internet fasting is something I'd want to incorporate into my life on a regular basis. But as something to do every year on Yom Kippur, it has its points. It certainly does make the day feel different from other days. It forces me to take my mind off my usual everyday concerns and focus on different things — maybe not spiritual things, exactly, but things I might never find the time for on a normal day. And at the same time, it makes me more appreciative of the many blessings of the Internet when I finally get to go back to it. (And unlike regular fasting, it doesn't make me feel too ill by the time I break my fast to be able to enjoy it.)

And if I want to feel more connected to my ancestors in the shtetl, well, after all, they lived without the Internet every day of their lives.

Money Crashers: Income Sharing Agreements (ISA): A New Way to Pay for College

My latest article on Money Crashers is part of what you might call my Making College Cheaper series. I've done pieces on tuition-free colleges, the pros and cons of paying for your kids' college education, and free or cheap college classes for senior citizens. And in this piece, I'm tackling a relatively new way to pay for college: income sharing agreements (ISAs).

First pioneered in the U.S. via Purdue's "Back a Boiler" program, ISAs are now available at nine U.S. colleges and universities, as well as some non-degree-granting programs. These schools, in essence, offer to cover your tuition costs for you in exchange for a cut of your earnings after you graduate. But is this really a good deal for students? To be specific, is it a better deal than a traditional student loan?

The answer to this question, it turns out, depends on several factors, such as your college, your major, your chosen career, how much you need to borrow, and what your other options are. This article explores those points, along with the history of ISAs, how they work, and where they're available. It should tell you what you need to know to decide whether you, or the future college student in your life, should consider this financing option.

Income Sharing Agreements (ISA): A New Way to Pay for College

Money Crashers: How to Survive a Job Without Benefits

When I decided to quit my full-time job and become a freelancer, one thing that made it an easy call was that Brian and I had just become engaged. Within a few months, I knew, I'd be able to rely on his job for health insurance, so I wouldn't have to pony up for an individual policy—which, in the days before Obamacare subsidies, could be hugely expensive, particularly in New Jersey.

However, many Americans don't have that luxury—and their numbers are growing. According to a 2018 NPR/Marist poll, over 30% of all Americans who work full-time say their job doesn't provide health insurance. Retirement plans are even less common: 40% of full-time workers say their job doesn't provide one. And of course, all of us in the gig economy are on our own when it comes to vacation days and sick days. On the plus side, we can take time off whenever we want—we just have to go without pay to do it.

If you're in this position, my new Money Crashers article is for you. It provides info for freelancers and anyone else who doesn't get workplace benefits about how to supply your own health insurance, retirement funds, sick leave, and vacation leave. And if you're not in this position, you might want to check out the article anyway; the way the economy is changing right now, you could need this information soon.

How to Survive a Job Without Benefits: DIY Health Insurance, Retirement & Vacation

Money Crashers: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession

Earlier this week, as I was looking at the traffic report for my Money Crashers articles to see which topics seemed to be the most popular with readers, I noticed something interesting: For the past several months, my story on getting help in a financial emergency received far and away more hits than any other. And that was interesting, because the article had first come out two years ago, and it certainly wasn't hugely popular at the time. But around mid-2018, it started creeping up the ranks, from 3% of all site traffic to 4%, then 5%, and now over 7%. Clearly, some time in the past year or so, more and more people have felt the need to know about this.

To me, this looked a lot like a sign that, no matter what the official jobs numbers say, there's definitely some weakness in the economy. And right around the same time, I read a New York Times editorial by Paul Krugman—who was, let us not forget, one of the only economists to see the subprime mortgage crisis coming before it hit—indicating that he thinks so too.

And so I dropped a line to my editor and suggested that the article I'd written last year on how to prepare for a recession, which they'd been sitting on for several months, probably should be published now—because if we waited much longer, it could be too late to do anyone any good.

So here it is: my take on how to weatherize your life to ride out the coming economic storm. It talks about how to:

1. Improve your employability, so you'll be less likely to lose your job and/or better equipped to find a new one
2. Develop extra income streams, which will help you get by if your income declines
3. Increase your emergency savings, so you can survive a period of unemployment if necessary
4. Reduce your expenses, so you won't have to tighten your belt in a hurry later on
5. Pay down debts, so you won't have to struggle to pay them later on
6. Increase your insurance coverage, so a disaster won't bankrupt you
7. Adjust your investments, not to make them "recession-proof" (which is neither possible nor desirable), but to make sure you're not risking more money than you can afford to lose

Read all about it here: 7 Things You Need to Do Now to Prepare for the Next Recession

Recipe of the Month: Rosemary Potato Soup

At some point in the past couple of weeks, I was leafing through a magazine whose name I can't remember and spotted a recipe for potato soup with rosemary. I remarked to Brian that this sounded good, but I didn't bookmark the recipe, and I'd forgotten all about it until Monday night, when he called me to the dinner table and I walked in to find the kitchen redolent with rosemary. Apparently, the idea had stuck in his mind, and rather than go hunt up the recipe, he'd simply made up one of his own.

Not having any idea what was in the original recipe, he just worked with what we had. Our leeks in the garden are ready for harvest, though smallish, so he used two of those. And we happened to have some leftover silken tofu in the fridge that needed using up, so he pureed that and used it to thicken the soup. He also tossed in some garlic, a carrot, a bay leaf, five potatoes, salt, and a generous portion of fresh rosemary harvested from our herb garden. And for stock, he used our favorite vegetable soup base from Penzeys Spices.

Considering what a simple assortment of ingredients this was, the result was amazingly hearty and flavorful. Thick, creamy, savory, fragrant with garlic and rosemary, and full of mouth-filling chunks of potato and carrot. And it's vegan, too.

Now, technically, it was still September when he prepared this dish. But it was so tasty, I just couldn't resist the urge to share it with you as my Recipe of the Month for October. The only change I've made to it is to cut the salt; the version he made Monday used 1 1/2 teaspoons, which we both agreed was a little too much. But if your soup stock has less salt in it than Penzeys, you might want to use the full amount.

ROSEMARY POTATO SOUP

Heat in pan:

• 1 Tbsp olive oil

Sauté in the pan for about 5 minutes:

• 2 small leeks, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
  

Transfer to stock pot along with:

• 6 c. veggie stock
• About 5 russet potatoes, cut into chunks
• 1 carrot, chopped
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 Tbsp. fresh rosemary, snipped into fragments

Cook 1/2 hour, then add:

• 4 oz. silken tofu, pureed
• 2 Tbsp. cornstarch dissolved in water
• 1 tsp. salt (or to taste)

Heat through and serve.

For us, this recipe was not only tasty and satisfying, but also remarkably cheap. Since the leeks and rosemary came out of our own garden, they were more or less free, and the other ingredients, by my calculations, cost about $2.90. The pot of soup provided five servings in total (two for dinner, three for lunch), so that works out to less than 60 cents per serving.

However, if you aren't lucky enough to have a garden, leeks and fresh rosemary could be a bit pricey to buy at the store. I think you could probably substitute a chopped onion for the leeks without really harming the flavor of the soup, though you might have to sauté it a bit longer before it softens. And technically, I guess, you could use dried rosemary instead of fresh, but I honestly think it wouldn't be the same. Much better to cadge some fresh rosemary off a friend who has a garden, or buy yourself a plant and find a sunny window to grow it in.

Vegan dessert experiments

One of the biggest challenges in our attempts to go dairy-free (or nearly free) is figuring out how to get the dairy out of dessert. Cookies aren't really a problem; not only has Brian invented at least one good vegan cookie recipe, we can make pretty much any cookie vegan by using plant-based butter and aquafaba (or another vegan substitute) in place of the butter and eggs. And we've already discovered that our favorite chocolate pudding is actually better with almond milk than with the skim milk we used to use. But there are still lots of desserts we love that are heavily dairy-dependent, with no obvious way of making them otherwise.

The most obvious example is raspberry fool. This simple dessert pretty much has nothing in it but raspberries, sugar, and cream—and in a spectacular case of bad timing, we discovered it only about a month before I first started thinking about getting off the moo juice. So even as I was giving up milk, I was assuming it would be pretty much impossible to give up cream without also giving up this fabulous dessert. I'd seen vegan whipped creams in the store, but they were all the kind that comes in a spray can, which would be impractical for a dessert that calls for the stuff in bulk. And all our attempts to make vegan whipped cream at home, using either chilled coconut milk, aquafaba, or a combination of the two, had been spectacular failures.

However, I still had hopes that I could at least find a decent vegan substitute for the canned whipped cream of which I've long been such a heavy consumer. And one day, while searching for "best vegan whipped cream," I hit upon a recommendation for a product called Coco Whip from So Delicious. This stuff comes in a plastic tub, like Cool Whip, but unlike that product, it truly is vegan (and doesn't have as many weird, unpronounceable ingredients). And after a little digging around on the So Delicious store locator, I was able to find that it's available at a nearby Shop-Rite.

The reviews of this stuff on the web mostly said that the product itself is great, but the packaging is a pain in the butt. Many reviewers said the tub was really hard to open, and some had actually cut themselves trying. So we were a little wary when we first tried it, but we found it wasn't all that bad. It requires a little force, but it wasn't actually hazardous. And to our delight, the Coco Whip blended almost as well with our mashed, sweetened raspberries as real whipped cream. It had the same light, fluffy texture, and if the flavor had a faint hint of coconut to it, there was nothing about it that was incompatible with the raspberries. The only thing we didn't like about the product is that it comes in a nonrecyclable plastic tub, but that's probably less damaging to the environment than cream from a methane-belching cow. (And to be fair, the cardboard cartons that we buy cream in aren't recyclable either, since they're lined with plastic.)

After the success of that vegan dessert experiment, I was emboldened to suggest another one this week. We happened to have some silken tofu left over after making another batch of our recently discovered vegan mozzarella, and I was musing about whether it would make a good substitute for evaporated milk in a pumpkin pie. Brian had heard about this kind of "tofumpkin" pie before (a friend of his made one during his post-doc years, which he dubbed the "resplendent tofumpkin" pie), so he knew it was theoretically possible, but he'd never actually tasted it. So we decided to give it a try this weekend, and if it worked, we might consider making this year's Thanksgiving pumpkin pie the same way.

Brian did some research on tofu pumpkin pie recipes and came up with one that was sort of a composite from several different websites. The filling was:

• 5 to 6 oz. silken tofu
• 8 oz. canned pumpkin
• 3/8 c. sugar
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. ground ginger
• 1/4 tsp. ground cloves
• 1/8 tsp. ground nutmeg

To make it a true vegan experiment, Brian also decided to make the crust with our favorite vegan butter, rather than the real butter he's been using in his pie crusts ever since he discovered what shortening does to your arteries. So the crust contained:

• 1/4 c. fake butter
• 3/4 c. flour
• a little less than 1/4 tsp. salt

He said he had to add much less water to this crust than he usually does, presumably because there's more moisture in the vegan butter than there is in real butter. He started out with 2 tablespoons of water, and even that turned out to be too much, so he had to add a little more flour. He eventually managed to get a workable dough, rolled it out, laid it in the pan, filled it with the custard, and baked for about 10 minutes at 450 and another half-hour at 350.

Sadly, this experiment was not nearly as successful as the first one. Part of the reason the pie looks a little odd here is that it's a half-sized pie baked in a slightly-larger-than-half-sized pan, since Brian forgot when he started the recipe that our smallest pie pan is currently in use as a cat dish. But the other reason is that tofu, even silken tofu, simply doesn't have the same texture as evaporated milk and beaten eggs. The pumpkin filling never firmed up to the point that you could put a knife in and have it come out clean; it remained soft and dense, with a custardy texture that isn't what you expect in a pie. And the crust, while acceptable, was crisp and hard, not light and flaky like a true butter crust.

So it looks like when Thanksgiving comes around, we'll have to take a break from our dairy-free eating and buy ourselves a can of evaporated milk and a pound of real cow-based butter for the pies. But since Thanksgiving comes but once a year, I'm not going to worry about it too much. It's probably more important to focus on trying to find a vegan whipped cream substitute for our everyday use. (Coco Whip is great in a fool, but keeping it on hand for other desserts isn't really practical, since it doesn't keep nearly as long as well as whipped cream in a pressurized can).

Two more Money Crashers articles

It never rains until it pours! Money Crashers has published two more of my backlogged articles in the past 24 hours. The first one is on financial literacy — or, where Americans are concerned, the lack thereof. It turns out that Americans get failing grades on many tests of basic financial knowledge. In one very basic test presented in the British newspaper The Guardian, only 64% of Americans could answer the five simple questions correctly. On a similar quiz administered by FINRA, the average respondent got only three questions out of six correct.

This lack of financial literacy shows in the average American's financial situation. Most Americans have outstanding debt, and significant numbers have high-interest consumer debt. Only about half of us have an emergency fund, and less than half are saving enough for retirement. In all these areas, our lack of financial literacy is holding us back.

For those who don't want to be part of these sorry statistics, this article offers a rundown of what financial literacy means, why it matters, and how to improve yours.

How to Increase Your Financial Literacy & IQ – Why It Matters

The second article is a companion to my earlier piece on the gender wage gap. That one talked about how much less women earn compared to men, and why. This one is about how much women spend compared to men — in many cases, for basically the same products.

This phenomenon, known as the "pink tax," has been in the news lately. CBS ran a story in June about how New York is considering a law to abolish the pink tax, and NPR's "The Indicator" podcast did an episode on it in August as part of a series on the gender gap. So my article on the topic arrives just in time to help you identify the products women pay more for than men — and, where possible, figure out how to pay less.

Pink Tax: 9 Things Women Pay More for Than Men (and How to Save)