I'll be honest, I wrote all this out and read it to my wife before posting, and we both laughed at how crazy it sounds. It's the aggregate of lots of little decisions in the past year and we're not solid on any of it yet. We'll be using tech for a lot of things still, we'll have a server with our personal images, and I'm looking at some Arduino stuff for home automation things. I don't think tech is bad, just a lot of it is designed as a feedback loop of addiction.

I just read about noprocrast mode on HN, I might turn this on too. I guess it lets you spend 20 minutes on HN every 3 hours.

Until you open up incognito windows to get around the noprocrast. ;) It's still a good hurdle and a tiny reminder even when I bypass it, though.

> I don't think tech is bad, just a lot of it is designed as a feedback loop of addiction.

Totally agree with this. I turn off all most notifications on my phone and tell people that if they really want to reach me, a phone call or SMS is still the best. I've also been calling people more because generally we can arrive at solutions in a minute of talking instead of 10 minutes of half-minded replies.

Sometimes I feel like the best balance of technology/attention was around the early 2000s when things weren't totally vying for our attention. When there was a clear distinction being being online and offline. When you would type "afk", then go do other stuff uninterrupted.

Of course it's easy to romanticize as that's also the era when I personally started surfing the information superhighway.