Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle!

Last week, Gregory Stock asked us whether we’d be willing to give up the internet for five years if doing so meant that one thousand children would be permanently provided for, saved from starvation. I said no — uncomfortably, honestly, without a lot of pride attached to the answer — and I tried to sit with what that “no” actually revealed about the gap between the values we claim and the costs we’re genuinely willing to absorb.

This week, Stock isn’t letting us off the hook. Because of course he isn’t.

The follow-up question is this: Would you still do it if you also had to give up texting, email, phone, and TV?

Same thousand children. Same five years. Same deal. Just… more of everything you’d have to surrender to get there.

I’ll be honest — when I first read this follow-up, my immediate reaction was something like a short, humorless laugh. As if Stock had watched everyone squirm through last week’s question and decided the appropriate response was to make it worse. Which, fair enough. That does seem to be his whole thing.

My Answer: Still No. But Now for Different Reasons.

Last week my “no” came with a lot of caveats and philosophical scaffolding. I talked about professional obligations. I raised questions about systemic frameworks versus individual sacrifice. I noted, somewhat carefully, that the internet is load-bearing infrastructure for my work in a way that makes five years offline genuinely complicated rather than just uncomfortable.

This week I’m not going to build that kind of architecture around my answer, because I don’t think it needs it. The answer is still no — more clearly, more quickly, and with considerably less hand-wringing — and the reason is simple: what Stock is now describing is not a sacrifice. It’s a sentence.

No internet. No texting. No email. No phone. No TV.

I want you to actually picture what that life looks like, because I think the imagination tends to gloss over it and land somewhere vaguely romantic, like a rustic cabin with good natural light and a stack of paperback novels. That is not what this is. What this is, functionally, is a kind of enforced isolation that most people in the modern world have no framework for surviving — not for five years, and arguably not for five weeks.

What That Life Would Actually Look Like

Let me walk through a typical day in this hypothetical, because I think it’s useful to get specific.

I wake up. I can’t check my phone — I mean, I don’t have a phone anymore, or at least not one that does anything useful. I can’t scroll the news, check my email, or look up whether the weather is going to cooperate with whatever I had loosely planned. I work from home, but the work I do requires the internet, requires email, requires communication with a network of providers and stakeholders across the region. That work no longer exists in any functional sense. So I’m also, effectively, unemployed.

I could read. I could write — longhand, I suppose, into notebooks that no one would ever see, because the blog is gone too. The blog that has existed in some form for over twenty years. Gone. Not paused. Gone, for five years, which in internet time is approximately three geological epochs.

I could call someone. Except I can’t, because the phone is gone too. I could write a letter. An actual letter, with a stamp. To the people in my life who do not live in my zip code — and that is most of them — a letter is now the primary available infrastructure for maintaining the relationship. Which means the relationship is, for most practical purposes, on a very long and uncertain hold.

And at the end of the day, I could watch television. Except I couldn’t, because the TV is gone too.

What remains? Books. Board games, theoretically, if I have someone to play with. Conversation with whoever happens to be physically present. The radio, maybe, depending on how strictly we’re interpreting the terms of the deal. And Krypto, who would be an excellent companion through all of this but who is, I should note, entirely unable to discuss whether Buffy Summers made the right call in the Season 5 finale, which is the kind of conversation I would desperately need to have at some point in year three.

The Ethics of the Escalating Hypothetical

Here’s the thing that I think is worth pausing on, because Stock is doing something interesting by adding these conditions rather than simply repeating the original question.

The children don’t change. The number is still one thousand. The stakes are the same. What changes is the cost — and by changing only the cost while holding the outcome constant, Stock is essentially asking: at what price does this deal stop being worth it to you? Or, more pointedly: did you even mean it last week when you said no, or are you just going to keep saying no as the price escalates, and what does that tell us?

I think what it tells us is something uncomfortable about how we evaluate sacrifice. Most of us are capable of imagining a version of generosity that costs something. Fewer of us are capable of imagining a version that costs everything — or at least, everything that connects us to the world as we currently experience it. And the follow-up question is specifically designed to find the edge of that imagination and push you past it.

It also raises a question I don’t have a clean answer to: is there a number of children, or a length of time, or a combination of conditions, that would make me say yes? I’d like to think the answer is yes, that somewhere there’s a threshold I’d cross. But I’m genuinely not sure that the version of this deal where I give up all communication technology and television for five years is the one that gets me there. And I’m not sure whether that’s a reasonable position or a failure of moral imagination.

What This Actually Says About Modern Dependency

The more uncomfortable observation — the one that sneaks up on you if you spend enough time with the question — is what it reveals about how thoroughly these technologies have become structural to ordinary life rather than supplemental to it.

We talk about screen time and digital detoxes and unplugging as though the internet and our devices are vices we’ve developed, habits we could break if we really wanted to, pleasures we’ve let get a little out of hand. And for some people, in some contexts, that framing is probably accurate enough.

But Stock’s follow-up makes visible something that the original question left partially obscured: for a lot of us, these aren’t habits. They’re infrastructure. The phone isn’t a luxury — it’s how I maintain relationships with people who matter to me. Email isn’t a convenience — it’s how I do my job. The internet isn’t entertainment — it’s the entire scaffolding on which my professional and creative life is built.

Asking me to give up the internet, texting, email, phone, and television for five years isn’t asking me to kick a bad habit. It’s asking me to dismantle the structure of my daily life and spend half a decade living in the ruins of it while a clock somewhere counts down. That’s a different ask. A genuinely, qualitatively different ask. And I think it’s okay to say that out loud without feeling like I’m making excuses.

Though I’ll also admit: the fact that it’s infrastructure rather than habit is itself the thing worth examining. How did it get that way? When did it happen? And what does it mean that most of us can’t honestly answer those questions?

Your Turn

I’m curious where the follow-up lands for you — especially if last week you said yes.

Because here’s my suspicion: a lot of people who said yes last week, or who said they would say yes, or who at least felt the pull of the virtuous answer, are having a different experience with this version. And I think that’s worth sitting with rather than explaining away.

So — would you still take the deal? Would you give up texting, email, phone, and television on top of the internet, for five years, to permanently feed one thousand children? And if your answer changed between last week and this week, what does the thing that changed it tell you about yourself?

Drop your thoughts in the comments. I’d genuinely love to see where people come down on this one — and whether the escalation clarified something or just made everything more complicated.

Until next week, this is Aaron, still here at The Confusing Middle, still letting Gregory Stock make me progressively more uncomfortable one question at a time.