Be Kind, Rewind ( The Summer )

A 30 day Digital Detox -- Inspired by the 90s

May 07, 2025

Once upon a time, in a town just like yours, a boy forgot his name.

He knew the one on his report card, the one his parents called out — middle name included — when he was in trouble, the one his friends asked for when they phoned him.

That name he knew.

He forgot the name the wind gave him.
He forgot what the trees called him when he sat in their shade.
He forgot how the sunset addressed him as he ran through a field.

And he wasn’t alone.

In this town, the one just like yours, everyone was forgetting their name.
They lost familiarity with the wind, lost the closeness of morning doves’ song, lost the intimacy of stretching shadows at dusk.

They forgot how to dance, how to sing, how to rub elbows with their fellow man.

The reports said it happened easily, progressively, systematically.

The slow trade of convenience and entertainment :
Of tag after dinner for a YouTube video.
Of reading before work for a doom-scroll.
Of sitting and eating around the table with family for microwaved meals in separate rooms, lit by flickering screens.

And then, one day, when this town was just about to be swallowed up by the blue glowing rectangles, the signal died.

No bars. No wi-fi. No feeds.

Just electromagnetic silence; thick as a fever dream.

Some went crazy in the quiet; kept checking for signal, looking for hotspots, the hush of reality deafening.

One day, in this town, just like yours, someone laughed.
The day after, someone climbed a tree.
Not long after that, people were laying on their backs watching pillowed clouds ebb into dragons and pirate ships and hot fudge sundaes.

And one night, when the whole neighbourhood was gathered round an open fire, roasting hotdogs and marshmallows, when kids ran through yards playing manhunt, they heard it.

Their names.

1. Why We Need a Disconnect

You know that town — the sleepy one that forgot its name ? And the boy, the one who lost himself to the screen ? Well, just in case you missed it :

That’s me, and that’s you.

Our current time is awash in noise. Drowning in dopamine loops, in sensationalized headlines, in every manipulative, high-fructose dose of false urgency the advertisers can force-feed us.

We’re rushed.
We’re distracted.
We’re adrift.

We’re tethered to these devices we carry with us, enslaved to the ding and chime of notifications, anxious at world events, afraid of missing out.

And those tethers? As weak as the cables we charge our phones with.
It’s not tensile strength that keeps us chained — it’s need.
It’s not wire, but want.

We call this psychological craving : addiction.

The idea of being legitimately present, with God, with others, even with self and thoughts is rare — almost mythological. Like we know a person who knows a person who heard that someone went to the bathroom without their phone, one time.

And they’re still in recovery.

I want to help cut the cord.
To detox from a lifestyle saturated by the digital and the virtual.

I want us all to feel the withdrawals, to go a bit crazy in the silence of Reality — and then, to laugh again ( without needing to post about it ).

And after the detox comes the rebuilding.
A new way of being.

One free from fabricated realities, from meta-verses and the algorithmic gods that pre-determine what you’re supposed to love.

Disentangle your soul.
Let your body find the source of the Beauty you’ve been scrolling for.

2. The 90s as a Framework

I wrote that piece on nostalgia for a reason ( I suggest you read it ) :

It laid out the feeling of the 90s:

The boundaries and inconveniences.
The personality and humanness.
The beauty and the boredom.

And somewhere, in the overlapping Venn Diagram of all that, we stumbled into a kind of living freedom.

The calm before the storm, the liberation you don’t know you have — the one you can only look back on with hindsight.

“Back then” screens didn’t steal our vision, and because of that, we could actually see.

See each other, see the moment, see the bright world all around us.

Yeah, there was boredom, but there was also stillness — one that echoed with a holy silence.

Maybe not perfect.
But in contrast to the constant noise and rush and speed of the digital age ?
Well, maybe perfect, actually.

Living online wasn’t a thing, which meant if you wanted to see people, you needed to show up.

Embodied. Human.

This whole event — 90s Summer — is just a riff on that memory.
A foot in the door. A way back through.

I don’t want to relive the past; I want to cast a vision :

For what might be possible again.

3. Challenges + Rhythms = Hope

As I’ve mapped this 30 days out — drafted ideas and compiled themes — one thing kept coming back to me :

Hope

It’s a core motif of my life, of my book, and now, even this little summer rebellion.

Hope is food and not fact.

And if things, Good Things, are going to grow and flourish they need tending and cultivating.

But those two, the tending and the cultivating, take effort. And most of the time the effort is harsh and brutal and it goes against our most base wants.

We want the garden.
We don’t want to weed it.

We want to play the symphony.
We don’t want to practice scales for ten years.

We want marriage, children, a community.
But not the thousand quiet sacrifices that love demands.

And cultivating hope in a hopeless time is damn near impossible.
But, if on the chance you can fall in love, well, then, hope is damn near inevitable.

And I only know of one true way to have hope :

You have to live.

Hope is easy if you’re drunk and consequences mean nothing.
It’s easy if you’re naive and walked the Valley of Shadow.
Hope is easy when your life is fabricated.

But real hope, lasting and invincible, hope that lasts ?
It needs to be tested.

That’s what these challenges are all about :
Daily, weekly, monthly rhythms focused on a way of living.

A structure to redeem the detox and let it help rebuild your living.
An anchoring.

They’ll probably stretch you, they’ll definitely hurt a little — but they just might bring you back to life.

4. Final Prep

If you’re into this you can follow along here.

I have a few things I will link and provide as downloads — and the goal is to start in June ( and maybe run through July for the brave and the bold ).

If you wanna go all the way, prep now.

Get a dumbphone.
Order an MP3 player.
Buy some disposable cameras.
Get a community.
Start praying.

And leave everything else up to yours truly.

90s Summer in bound.

Every Day Saints is a torchlight searching for the quiet miracles, the beautifully human stories and ideas that exist all around us. And it is a place to dialogue, not Holy Ground, but still a place of gathering.