Meet ‘NoSurf,’ the Self-Help Group That Told Us to Log Off Before It Was Cool
The rise of a community dedicated to combatting the endless scroll
In December 2017, Bryce Gordon was a 20-year-old college student in Bellingham, Washington, when he realized he needed to radically change how he lived his life. He was spending way too much time online.
Most days, he’d return from classes to his apartment, crack open his laptop, and spend the rest of his evening on the internet, browsing Twitter, 4chan, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sometimes he woke up in the morning still wearing his clothes from the day before, his laptop screen the only source of light in his bedroom. He stopped folding laundry or cooking himself meals. He’d been living like this for years.
“I was doing very poorly in school, neglecting tons of responsibilities and necessities in life,” Gordon says. “I had all these ideas of a life I wanted to lead, but I wasn’t doing it. I started to think more about how that might have to do with my use of the internet.”
That month, he conducted a Google search for “internet addiction, reddit.” The first result that came up: a subreddit community called NoSurf.
A growing awareness of the harmful influence that the internet, and especially social media…
