Nick Bilton, who like me seems to go everywhere with a really nice camera (you don’t this kind of bokeh from a smartphone camera), has a couple recent pieces about getting away from gadgets and life online.

As every aspect of our daily lives has become hyperconnected, some people on the cutting edge of tech are trying their best to push it back a few feet. Keeping their phone in their pocket. Turning off their home Wi-Fi at night or on weekends. And reading books on paper, rather than pixels…. There could even be a business model in products that encourage us to step away from our gadgets.*

In one way, this is nothing new: talk in Silicon Valley about the need for digital Sabbaths or other regular, formal breaks from computers dates from about 2001, in the early days of cellphones and Palm Pilots (and pagers– remember those?). Here’s a piece from 2001:

In an era when the boss wants us available 24/7, and when the high priests of the new economy bombard us with ubiquitous marketing messages, some burnt-out survivors are taking another look at their cell phones, pagers, home satellite dishes and “constant connectivity” to the Internet….

“We seem to have no way to put a human handle on our ingenuity,” he says. “Between 80 and 90 percent of the messages we get every day are marketing messages, designed to make us feel incomplete. This is having a terrible effect on our inner landscape.”

The bit about pagers and home satellite dishes dates the piece a bit, but otherwise that could have been written this week.

But I think what is starting to change is this: the absolutely certainty that if you’re not always-on and hooked to your Blackberry then YOU WILL DIE IN AN INSTANT. During the dot-com boom, the conventional wisdom was that if you stepped away from your desk you’d be ground into the dust while your competitors pivoted around you and new players disrupted your industry.

Today, it’s starting to be okay to step away for a bit to restore. Which is a very good thing.

*The commodification of digital Sabbaths or detoxes recently started to be a thing out here, in the form of Internet-free vacations.