I love technology. I always have.

Growing up, I was the one in my family who wanted to know how things worked. Not just use them, but understand them. I built my first computer as a pre-teen and still remember the rush of watching it POST for the first time. I also remember when it caught on fire because I’d routed a wire too close to the GPU, but that’s a different story.

That curiosity shaped everything. I wanted to know how websites were made, so I learned. I wanted to understand how applications worked, so I tinkered. Technology wasn’t just a tool. It was a door to something bigger. The internet, especially, felt like an infinite library staffed entirely by weirdos who were happy to teach you things if you just showed up and asked.

I spent countless nights falling down rabbit holes. Learning about topics I didn’t know existed. Finding communities of people who cared deeply about obscure things. Playing games that let me wander through worlds someone else had imagined into existence. It was formative in a way that’s hard to overstate. The internet made me who I am.

And now I have kids. And I don’t know what to do with any of this.

It’s not that I think technology is bad now. That’s too simple, and honestly, kind of boring as a take. I still love building things. I’m writing this on a website I built myself. I have a 3D printer in my garage that is running constantly. I get genuine joy from making a small app that does one useful thing. Or a bunch of useless ones. The curiosity never left.

But my relationship with technology has gotten complicated in ways I didn’t anticipate. The internet I grew up with and the internet that exists now are not the same place. The rabbit holes are still there, but they’re surrounded by so much noise. So much optimization. So many systems designed to keep you scrolling rather than keep you curious. The weirdos are still out there, but you have to work harder to find them.

I go through phases where I want zero screens in my house. I catch myself doom-scrolling and then feel guilty about it, which is somehow worse than the scrolling itself. I use technology for my job every single day, and I’m genuinely grateful for the career it’s given me. But I also fantasize about a cabin in the woods with no WiFi and only one of those old phones with the curly cord.

Recently, I dipped my toes back into social media. Sort of. I joined Mastodon as part of building out this site, trying to find some of those old corners of the internet that felt good. And I did find some. There are people out there making interesting things, sharing ideas without the performance anxiety of engagement metrics, building their own weird little spaces. It felt like a small version of what I remembered.

But I also felt the other thing almost immediately. The weight. The sense that there’s always more to read, more to respond to, more happening somewhere that you’re missing. Even on a platform specifically designed to be less addictive, the sheer volume of Everything is exhausting. I came looking for community and found it, but I also found that familiar heaviness I was trying to escape.

This is the tension I don’t know how to resolve. I can’t go back to the person I was at sixteen, staying up until 3am because I just learned what Linux was and had to install it immediately. That person didn’t have a mortgage or school pickup or the low-grade awareness that the world is both wonderful and falling apart. But I also don’t want to become someone who writes off all technology as poison. That feels like a betrayal of something real.

So I’m trying to be intentional. That word gets overused, but I don’t have a better one. I’m trying to carve out small spaces that feel good. This website is one of them. A personal corner that isn’t trying to optimize for anything. No algorithms. No growth hacks. A place where I can write things down and build little projects and maybe connect with a few people who find their way here.

I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t know if I’m doing it right. I don’t have advice for anyone else, and I’m definitely not going to tell you to delete your apps or whatever. I’m just one person trying to figure out how to love something that keeps changing shape. Trying to hold onto the wonder without drowning in the noise.

I’m just one person trying to figure out how to love something that keeps changing shape.

Some days it works. Some days I end up scrolling Reddit for forty-five minutes and then feel weird about it. That’s probably just how it’s going to be.

And honestly, I haven’t even gotten into the other part yet. The part where every platform seems to come with a moral asterisk. The part where I feel like I own nothing and just rent my digital life from Google. The part where opting out of the convenient thing is its own kind of labor.

But that’s a different essay. For now, I’m just trying to find the corners that feel good and spend more time there.