[tpoacher]

It isn't just a psychological feeling though. We've (unnecessarily) offloaded everything to the net, so there's a very real element of uselessness that kicks in when there's no connection.

E.g. back when you were coding BASIC, you probably had magazines and either ended up copying a lot of code by hand, or if you were lucky the mag came with a floppy disk. Now no such magazines exist. Manpages were all local, now it's readthedocs online. Fat local-friendly standard libraries in almost all languages have been modularised and package managers for the most part expect to install stuff by fetching it from the net.

So unless you have heavily prepared for the cyberapocalypse or sth, there really is not much you can do on your machine when the internet goes down.

On the other hand, however, when you can prepare in advance, it's great to shut off the net for a while. I do my most productive coding during flights, for example.