I first began to feel uneasy about modern technology when I saw the effects social media was having on people. Not just distraction or wasted time, but something deeper — a quiet erosion of attention, patience, and responsibility. I decided to leave social media entirely. It was neither difficult nor dramatic, and I did not miss it.

Over time, that unease extended beyond social platforms and into technology more broadly. I became frustrated with what felt like a perpetual rat race: replacing devices every few years, chasing marginal improvements, and accepting increasingly locked-down hardware and bloated software as inevitable. Many modern devices are designed in ways that remove control from the user, not because it is necessary, but because it is profitable.

In response, I began moving in the opposite direction. I transitioned to a machine I could fully control and rebuilt my computing environment around simplicity and restraint. I realised that most of what I do on a computer is text-based: writing, reading, and thinking. Everything else is largely secondary.

Modern technology increasingly distances people from an understanding of the tools they depend on. Many users can perform only a narrow set of actions within polished graphical interfaces, with little sense of what the system is actually doing. In this arrangement, the machine and the software dictate behaviour, rather than serving it. Dependency replaces agency.

This loss of understanding is not merely technical; it has moral consequences. When responsibility is abstracted away, so too is accountability. Social media platforms, in particular, encourage behaviour that would be unacceptable in physical presence. They erode empathy, weaken restraint, and normalise speech and actions detached from consequence.

The result is not simply distraction, but a subtle reshaping of character. People become less attentive to one another, more reactive, and increasingly habituated to systems that reward impulsivity while shielding them from responsibility. In many social settings, this manifests plainly: attention fractured, conversation interrupted, presence diluted by a persistent pull toward the device.

By simplifying my tools and taking control back, I gained a sense of freedom. The only real limit is the time I am willing to invest in a project. This website, for example, is hosted on my own machine, configured manually using free software. Even this simple blog post is a small expression of technological independence.

The tools I use are intentionally simple and easy to understand. My attention is on the task itself, not on navigating interfaces or searching for buttons to format text. I maintain my entire system — from network security to configuration files — and in doing so accept full responsibility for how it behaves.

The calm that follows does not come from convenience, but from mastery. Simple tools, well understood, allow work to proceed at the speed of thought. Technological minimalism, for me, is not about rejecting technology, but about using it deliberately — with restraint, responsibility, and respect for the human limits it should serve rather than obscure.