Aziz Ansari is unplugged, and that means unplugged. As in, no email, Instagram, no Twitter, and, in fact, no internet at all. He made the move after the second season of his acclaimed Master of None series wrapped on Netflix, and while it's unclear how long the unplugging will last, Ansari tells GQ that he loves the change. He likens his previous web-surfing ways to an addiction. "Whenever you check for a new post on Instagram or whenever you go on the New York Times to see if there's a new thing, it's not even about the content," he says. "It's just about seeing a new thing." The only solution: "Take yourself out of the equation and remove all these things." He's done so for a few months now and has shifted to reading books, filling his head with useful info instead of internet quick hits that are immediately forgotten.
Other points on the subject:
- "When I first took the browser off my phone, I'm like, [gasp] 'How am I gonna look stuff up?' But most of the sh-t you look up, it's not stuff you need to know." Instead of going online every spare moment, "be in your own head for a minute."
- "I was reading all this Trump stuff, and it doesn't feel like we're reading news for the reason we used to, which was to get a better sense of what's going on in the world and to enrich yourself by being aware," he says. Now it's "wrestling rumors." So he's out of the news-cycle loop but figures that if anything truly worthwhile happens, he'll get wind of it.
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