Way Out

How do you break the cycle of tech addiction? It's a long row to hoe, but it can be done.

I'm about eight years into this journey (counting from when I deleted my Facebook account in 2018). Here's a rough map based on how it's gone for me. I divide the path into six "stages". These stages are additive and build on each other: in Stage II you keep doing the practices from Stage I, in Stage III you keep doing the practices from I and II, etc.

• Stage I. Personality Security
• Stage II. A Room of One's Own
• Stage III. The Harmless Default Activity
• Stage IV. Meditation
• Stage V. Renunciation
• Stage VI. The Computer as Tool

Stage I. Personality Security

A self is a dangerous thing to lose.

We all know, deep down, how to be happy. The principles are not difficult. Every religion and every kindergarten teacher preaches them, to the point that they are clichés. We know what we should do. But we don't do it. Why?

My theory: it's a combination of several things:

• Manipulation by advertisers, propagandists, influencers, demagogues, and peer pressure. This is the "foot in the door" that gets the problem started.
• Habit. Once we are used to doing something, we're likely to continue doing it without really thinking about it.
• Doubt. The "right thing" doesn't seem plausible. It feels like happiness can't possibly be that simple.
• Our mistaken belief in a persistent self, and the illusion that this self is fully in control of our minds and behaviors. Our egotistical desire to preserve this illusion leads to our intentionally pursuing wrongheaded desires. The train of thought is basically "I chose to do this last time, so I must be the kind of person who does this, therefore I'll do it again."

Stage I of the path is about stopping the "foot in the door", guarding your ego against manipulators.

"Personality Security" is my overarching term for the set of practices that one can use for self-defense against manipulators of the ego. Entire businesses with billions of dollars at their command exist solely for the purpose of getting you to do things that are not in your best interest. You have to fight them.

Technical practices for Stage I

• Use an ad blocker.
  • uBlock Origin for Firefox,
  • AdGuard for Chrome,
  • Orion Browser for macOS, iPhone, and iPad,
  • uBlock DNS or AdGuard DNS on mobile. (Blocks your phone from even looking up the internet addresses of advertising networks. DNS = Domain Name System)
• Delete social media accounts - justdeleteme.xyz
• Use your ad blocker to banish newsfeeds, recommendations, and comments sections (to stop doomscrolling).
• Learn about Dark Patterns in user interface design, and the various ways that software is designed to be addictive.

Personal practices for Stage I

At this stage, work on recognizing the psychological effects of addictive / compulsive internet use. The effects range from extremely obvious and distressing to subtle and mild. Unfortunately, the more obvious an effect is, the later it arrives, and by that time it's too late to do anything about it. It's almost like the subtle effects are the "seeds" that grow into the obvious ones.

In the order they happen, the effects are:

• Craving. This is the feeling of gleeful anticipation that you get when you start doomscrolling, or you're about to click on an article that looks really juicy. It feels good in the moment, but it is the seed that grows into the later, less pleasant effects.
• Lock-in / clinging / tunnel vision. This kind of feels like your mind won't let go of something, won't let you look away from the screen or put down your phone. In its early stages it feels like a knot of tension between your eyes or behind your forehead, almost like a clenched fist.
• Restlessness means wanting to do something but not really knowing what to do. Usually lasts hours or at most a couple days. Physical restlessness shows up as pacing or fidgeting. Mental restlessness manifests as racing thoughts or even talking out loud to yourself.
• Anxiety or depression. These can build up over a period of weeks or months and become totally hellish.

It's important to note that the later and more severe effects are inevitable if you don't stop the earlier ones in their tracks. It can sometimes feel like you might be able to get the "rose without the thorn" — i.e. the dopamine hit from doomscrolling without the anxiety that follows it. But this feeling is a lie; you can never do that.

The good news is that all of these effects are temporary. As you start to get out of the "doom loop," they will become less intense and less frequent.

Also, for what it's worth, these effects are caused by all forms of hedonism (trying to get pleasure or happiness from the world) not just tech-related stuff.

Don't try to forcibly stop these effects — that will just lead to more distress. Instead, just notice them happening. Over time, your subconscious mind will learn the pattern, and you might find yourself doing less of the behaviors that cause these effects.

Stage II. A Room of One's Own

This stage is all about curating your tech experience. The goal is to make computers fun and personal again.

This might seem like a distraction from the rest of the path, but fun is important. Without this stage, the escape from tech addition looks like monkish austerity — bleh! Austerity is not the point. The point is to have a better, happier life.

Technical practices for Stage II

Some things I've done to make my tech experiences better:

• Made a Firefox theme
• Made a lil website (not as hard as you might think! E.g. my sister made her website with no prior experience and only a small amount of coaching from me.) Good starting places are Neocities or Nekoweb.
• Installed New Tab Override so my browser would open my web portal page on each new tab.
• Switched to Linux.
• Started a community of personal websites. At the start, this involved cold-emailing people and asking them to join, which was pretty scary! What I learned from this experience is that people who have websites are really nice and tend to love hearing from a human who genuinely likes their work. (And yes, people will join your webring if you ask nicely.)

Of course, you don't have to do these particular things. I'm sure you can think of much cooler ones.

Personal practices for Stage II

Get involved. Tinker. Mess around. Fail at something. Laugh and try again. Curate your experiences and set a high bar for what you allow into your life.

In addition to being fun, all of these practices will help you develop greater mindfulness, which is crucial for the following stages.

Stage III. The Harmless Default Activity

So far, the journey has been an uphill climb. This stage represents a "peak" of sorts. It's a pivotal moment, a turning point, and the path gets somewhat easier from here on out.

Technical Practices for Stage III

In this stage, you use your enhanced mindfulness and greater control of your technological environment to choose a harmless default activity. The harmless default activity is the thing you do by default when you have that compulsive urge to do something with a computer/phone but don't really know what.

"Harmless" means it doesn't cause the bad psychological symptoms I described in Stage I. It should also be something that's easy to get yourself to do. As a bad example, you could say "my default activity is doing pushups"; realistically, that's not gonna happen every time you feel the urge to reach for your phone. You might have to do a bit of experimentation to find something that is both harmless and effortless.

My Harmless Default Activity is watching Culture Machine. Culture Machine is an app I made that plays a curated set of YouTube videos on shuffle. The experience is that of old-school TV or radio. There's no way to skip a video, pause, or jump backward or forward. It's just you and a stream of images and sounds that runs at its own pace.

The videos themselves are... eclectic? Weird? Oddly calming? There's not a whiff of clickbait. No one talking in Podcaster Voice. Instead you get foraging videos from an experimental archaeologist, archival Welsh TV footage, Old English grammar and nature videography, ASMR guitar repair, and model trains. Among many other things.

There's also some "normal nerd stuff" like classical music concerts and Adam Savage making movie prop replicas in his San Francisco "Cave" and Max Miller's show "Tasting History".

The point is, all this stuff is pleasant and restorative, but not something I'm unable to tear myself away from.

It's like nature. It heals me, but it doesn't need me. It demands nothing and gives everything.

Personal practices for Stage III

In this stage, the goal is to remove aspects of your tech experience that cause psychological lock-in, restlessness, anxiety, and depression, and replace them with the Harmless Default Activity. This takes a little bit of mindfulness and willpower, but if you remind yourself of the bad effects you're avoiding, it's not too hard.

Don't get too attached to the harmless default activity, because it too will eventually fall away once it's no longer needed.

Another practice that can help at this stage is maintaining a regular schedule or daily routine. Having something to do reduces the urge to do something, if that makes sense.

Stage IV. Meditation

This is the part where I go out on a limb and talk about something that isn't at all tech-related. But there's no getting around it. This is the map of the journey as I experienced it, and I would be remiss to leave meditation out of the picture. It's been absolutely crucial for me.

Meditation is just the process of calming your mind down.¹ A calm mind can let go of the compulsive craving for pleasure and stimulation, and look at reality with less fear and anxiety. That's helpful for overcoming tech addiction as well as many other problems.

A complete meditation manual is way beyond the scope of this post; you should refer to the other resources I mention below. Still, I can provide a few tips.

First: if you want any significant benefits from meditation, you have to get in the habit of doing it every day. It's like brushing your teeth: once or twice a week isn't going to do much of anything. It doesn't have to take a lot of time, but it needs to be every day. Start with 5 or 10 minute sits at a consistent time in the morning or evening. As you practice more, the duration of your sits will naturally, gradually increase.

When you first sit to meditate (and for a long time after), your mind won't calm down, and you won't be able to make it calm down. Don't worry about that; it's normal. Don't try to make your mind do anything in particular. Just stay aware of what it's doing, and let it run until it runs out of steam. This may take a long time — weeks or months of daily practice.

The mind is like a mill: everything you put in will eventually, inevitably, come out the other side. If you want stuff to stop coming out, you have to stop putting stuff in. That is why meditation generally involves sitting still with your eyes closed, and why people associate meditation with seclusion and long retreats.

I started meditating daily-ish in July or August of 2022 — within a month of when I started building Culture Machine. A friend had given me a copy of The Mind Illuminated, and this became my first textbook.²

At first I couldn't meditate for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. My mind would get restless, I'd forget myself, and my eyes would open of their own accord. (Again: normal! But I didn't know that.) I tried sitting on the floor so my physical posture would be a reminder of what I was doing, but I couldn't sit for more than 5 minutes without acute pain. I am not very flexible.

Gradually, by practicing almost every day, I was able to increase the time to 20 minutes. I could do 30, but it seemed like an eternity. Meditation timers with "intervals" (bells every 5 minutes) helped me sit for 30 minutes without feeling like I had been sucked into a timeless void. Getting to that point took two years.

Then, in 2024, I discovered OnThatPath's YouTube series³, and everything changed for the better. I highly recommend his videos. Suddenly, meditation was restful instead of a struggle. I found that I could ditch the timer and still sit for thirty minutes. The limiting factor was now physical pain again. Over the following two years, the pain diminished, and now I can sit for 50 minutes to an hour, twice a day.

I say all this to illustrate that meditation can be difficult at first. The path is rough and you may have to take some detours. However, it is so worth it.

My emotional state is now a lot more resilient than it used to be. I used to fall into depressive moods for days or weeks at a time when something disturbed me. Now I bounce back in an hour or two. I don't get upset as easily. I'm less anxious generally.

And those voices in my head that used to narrate my life and my thoughts? They're all but gone. They stay quiet until I call them up.

Turns out that voice in your head isn't you. It's a fictional character (or several fictional characters) — a made-up simulation of a person you were taught to believe was you. It often says things you wouldn't endorse. And you can think just fine without it.

This freedom from language is like a return to the garden of Eden. Even the ur-technology of humanity can become just another tool that you put down when you no longer need it.

Stage V. Renunciation

At this point, you can clearly distinguish good tech experiences from the bad ones that harm your mental state. You can often resist the temptation to doomscroll. However, it's not consistent. Sometimes you give in to temptation.

Technological practices for Stage V

In this stage, you can use your moments of strength to prepare for moments of weakness. Adjust your tech environment so you don't need as much willpower.

One tool that I have found useful for warding off harmful distractions is LeechBlock. This is a very configurable browser extension that can block websites or simply make them less tempting. I've configured it to impose a 20-second delay before visiting any site I haven't explicitly allowlisted. That's just what's worked for me, though, and your mileage may vary. Other options include blurring blocked sites to make them harder to read, reducing them to black and white, or redirecting to a different site.

At this point, you may be able to trade your smartphone for a dumbphone. Perhaps r/dumbphones can advise. Or try making your Android phone into an almost-dumb phone.

(note: I have never owned a smartphone, so I can't offer very specific advice on how to quit them. Sorry.)

Personal practices for Stage V

It may be painful to realize that some of the things you enjoy doing are, in fact, psychologically harming you. For me, one example is Heroes of Might and Magic IV. This is an old game (made in 2002) that I absolutely adore. It's a campy high-fantasy pastiche that draws heavily from D&D. The art is (mostly) gorgeous, and I can never get tired of the soundtrack. And yet, as much as I love playing it, I realized that trying to play optimally and win was causing mental lock-in that would leave me restless and slightly anxious for hours afterward.

I would love to be able to be all Zen about it, assume a beginner's mind, and play the game in the loose, emotional way that I did as a kid. But I'm not able to detach myself from the egotistical part of my mind that wants to be smart and strategic. At least, not yet.

Someday, I'll go back to playing Heroes IV, probably on an easier difficulty setting, but for now I'm on a strict diet.

Stage VI. The computer as tool

Gradually, over a period of perhaps years, you will find that you rely on the computer less and less. You will begin to see that the set of apps and websites you really need, to live your life and be happy, is very small. You will use those apps, gladly, and let the rest fall away.

In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

—Dào Dé Jīng

At some point, the computer will be fully "toolified" for you. Its enchanting pull will be gone, its siren song forever silent. It will be something you pick up to do a task and put down when you're finished, like a screwdriver.

If you've kept up with your meditation practice, your mind will also be pliant: ready to work whenever you tell it to, ready to rest whenever you tell it to. You will have a steady and almost inexhaustible supply of energy.

A whole new world awaits: the "real" (or, at least, non-tech-mediated) world beyond the screen. It has its good and bad points, to be sure. But in any case, it's the world we're all stuck with, so we might as well make the best of it.