Ask Lemmy

It's hard to remember now, but you truly can just step away. I think about it sometimes. Not as a single deliberate act but as a gradient for the next few decades of my life, just like the gradient to this point in which tech became increasingly important...only in reverse. If you can quit social media, if you can go back to iPod/CD/records/radio/humming, if you can be content to share your thoughts in a journal or blog or letters to the editor instead of networked communities, if you can be happy with older cars that don't spy on you and add the safety / guidance features you need for a couple hundred bucks, if you can use a dumbphone and/or a landline, if you can read books and do art and build things and stare at the wall and go on walks and garden and visit with friends (etc.) instead of scrolling and clicking and Discord'ing...

...and on and on, you feel me? It doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't have to be baby-out-with-the-bathwater. It doesn't have to be all-encompassing and hardcore. It's just remembering, and learning to return to (where you need it), the fact that we all used to live without all this shit barnacled onto our attention spans and our wallets. We used to live without surveillance capitalism and constant notifications and screens and error messages and just...skinner box shit, you know? It wasn't perfect, but there were a lot of things that felt better...at least compared to the tech landscape of 2026. If you need to turn the dial down on some of this shit, just do it, and enjoy the journey.

I've deleted YouTube off my phone. I've also reinstalled it like three times in the past week. It's hard to break habits. But I find that when it isn't on my phone, I may listen to more music or NPR in the car; I may listen to an audiobook, but also, I am finding more and more that even these things are too overstimulating, because AirPods make it seem like you really should have headphones in at all times, even though you absolutely should not...and your entertainment (even mild stuff like instrumental music) is just often at odds with things that deserve your full attention like (debatably) work. I love a lot of content on YouTube but it's a firehose and it's never ending (just like all content on the Internet) and anymore it all just tires me out. It tires me out that it's in competition with real world considerations like work. It tires me out that I always feel like I'm missing out on things and I have to check to find out what they are and then figure out how I'm going to cram into my daily schedule catching up on them all. It tires me out that the algorithm so transparently thinks I just want the same ten themes ramrodded down my throat forever; it's insulting that the system thinks I'm that simple and easy to satisfy, you know? And so it's not that I'm anti-YouTube. It's that I'm anti-how-much-YouTube-has-become-embedded-in-my-schedule-and-my-consciousness.

I feel similarly about the Apple Music service and app. I don't want a playlist to curate my own tastes in a random order and serve them back to me as Heavy Rotation. Anymore I don't know what I want to listen to, I just feel like I should be listening to something. What kind of a way is that to feel about music? I'm trying to use my iPod more, and the wired headphones are more of a pain in the ass than I thought they were for the first 30 years of my life, and I can't do it all the time...I just can't. But that's okay. I'm at least in dialog with myself about when and why I want to do things like listen to music, or listen to music through a specific convenience device, instead of just moving automatically out of impulse and routine.

I could go on. I have typewriters. I don't use them for all or even most of my journaling and writing, but sometimes I need or want to slow down and hammer out my letters as deliberately as possible, in a medium that is not connected to the Internet or indeed anything that plugs into the wall at all. I'm trying to revisit anime and video games from the past and especially with the way computers and hardware manufacturers are heading in the age of AI (fuck your thin clients, Jeff Bezos), it's just a reminder that I've got more old, wonderful content to catch up on than I could ever know what to do with, and there is no reason to stress about whether I'm up to date on all the new stuff.

I'm just rambling now, but you know what I'm re-learning to enjoy lately? This goes back to YouTube, Music, headphones, all of it. Just silence. I think I mentioned it earlier. But just...silence. Or whatever is closest to silence. The sound of the cars driving down the road outside. The sound of the air intake for my central air system when it spins up and tries to keep my old house warm. The (horribly irritating) sound of my animals licking themselves. Not everything has to be "content". Not every moment has to be entertaining and informative. Good Christ, but I could stand to have less information coming into my perception all the fucking time, you know?

Just do what you gotta do for you. Don't apologize. Don't rationalize it. Don't get strangers on the Internet to sign off on it. If you gotta get off one service, ten services...if you need to see x% less screen illumination in the course of your day...if you need to redefine your relationship with any part of the technological world, it's your thing to do, and you've only got one life to live, so go ahead and experiment. I think a lot of us are re-learning that it's entirely within our control to do. We've just been so habituated that it's like flexing an atrophied muscle or bending a stiff joint. It doesn't feel good. Not right away. But you know it will, and probably sooner than you imagine.