'I wish the internet had never been invented' - Why it's time for a digital detox

I've weighed up the benefits – the instant communication, the ability to find the sum of all human knowledge simply by typing words into Google – and I've weighed up the downsides – the Twitter trolls, the time-wasting videos and the page after page of absolute rubbish, to come to this conclusion.

I am not some luddite who wants us to go back to the days of horses and carts or embarrassed teenagers having to buy a copy of the Daily Telegraph in which to wrap a copy of a book explaining what those various lumps and spots are all about.

But am I really so wrong to believe the internet has gone a bit too far now?

We're not ready to cope with all the information it has to throw at us.

I stare at the screen of my phone or my tablet computer virtually all the time that I'm not at work, where I happen to be staring at the screen of a desktop computer.

High resolution images made up of millions of pixels are shone into my eyes all the time when I'm not asleep.

And most of the time I'm now struggling to sleep, possibly because I'm addicted to these blinking lights and get the same buzz from someone replying to me on Facebook as someone addicted to drugs gets from their latest hit.

This isn't just a woe-is-me rant about the modern world, however. Let me see if I can convince you that it's time we all had a digital detox:

1. Everyone's a writer

I used to love the Amazon Kindle. Thousands upon thousands of books of every kind imaginable are there to download instantly.

I've never been one for displaying my books on the shelf after I've read them either. You don't get someone who finishes a beer and then puts the empty bottle on show – that's called littering.

But as they've become more popular, the problem with publishing ebooks is that there's just so much guff. The bestseller list on Amazon is littered with titles going for 49p a time.

There's a reason loads of these never get made into actual proper, bound volumes – they're not worth the paper they aren't printed on.

2. Everyone's a doctor

It used to be the case that if someone had a penchant for melodrama over their health, they'd have to buy one of those medical encyclopaedias and go through it trying to match their mucus to a particular disease they hadn't actually got.

Now they can type it into a search engine and all manner of advice and possible conditions come up in less than a second.

It doesn't help that when you then ring the NHS helpline 111 for assistance, you can pretty much just get sent to A&E anyway because no-one wants to take the risk of telling you to act like a pair of curtains and pull yourself together.

3. Everyone's a critic

There was a time when trolls just lived under bridges in fairy tales. Now they're very real and they're taking over.

It doesn't matter if you're a big name celebrity or just an ordinary person with an opinion, there are people out there who love nothing more than to shout abuse at you. Such people were once the sad bores, sitting in the corner of the pub with maybe one or two like-minded others.

Now they share their bile and anger at the world with everyone, whether we want them to or not, over Twitter and Facebook.

4. Everyone's a potential victim

Every single day I get either an email or a junk direct message on Twitter from someone trying to get me to click a link or hand over my cash.

A lot of them are bound to be scams. There's no way that there are that many Nigerian millionaires who just need you to put up a couple of thousand pounds so they can transfer some money and share the proceeds with you.

And there's absolutely no way that Apple is giving away free iPads to people who share a link on Facebook.

Worse than those who try this, however, are the people who fall for it. The scammers are only there because there are so many mugs.

And that makes me fear for the future of humanity. It won't be horse meat or global warming that gets us, it'll be our own gullibility as one by one we click a link that turns our iPhones into mini nuclear warheads. Or something like that.

5. Everyone's less interesting in real life

Next time you're having dinner with friends or family, keep an eye on how many times they check their phones.

You can be out on the town with someone, actually in their company, living your life and experiencing your anecdotes in real time, and you won't be able to compete with their mobile.

It's been called 'phubbing', meaning phone-snubbing, where people ignore the real, actual human beings they are with in favour of checking Facebook and Twitter.

It's the equivalent of not watching your kid in the school play because you're too busy filming it for later.

Life is far too short to spend it all on the internet.

Actually, that's a good philosophical line to end things on. Let me just tweet that . . .