You Don’t Need Less Technology

You Need a Life That Holds Your Attention

2026 is the year we go analog, breakup with Instagram for good, use the brick to block our screen time and only type on distraction free ipads—yes! I love the analog life. Less scrolling, more baking. I love reclaiming attention so that we can get into our tech and get out with limited impact on our real life hours. And, I have a mind that doesn’t quite feel settled accepting these kinds of tools as the solution. I don’t want to outsource my self-control I want to own it.

So here’s what I propose instead…..can we learn to use technology as the tool that it is, without being addicted to it? Without it replacing our social lives and stealing our presence? Can we have instagram and a feed that we love without spending 4 hours a day on it? Can we stay on one tab writing something that matters while the other 9 are still open?

Maybe we don’t need to break up with technology.

Maybe what we’re all really longing for is a life that feels more compelling than the scroll. Maybe we’ve all forgotten that we have control over our own attention and that it’s not the fault of our open tabs that we keep task-switching — it’s a habit we have allowed ourselves to strengthen and that we have every ability to repattern without another gadget parenting our screentime use.

It’s tempting to believe the answer is restriction—brick phones, analog devices, timers, blocks, rules. Sometimes those supports are helpful. But they aren’t the root of what’s going on and they aren’t the long-term solution.

The deeper work is learning how to be in a relationship with your attention again and with your life again.

An amazing thing happens to me when I pick up a handwork hobby (think baking, knitting, painting, threadwork) — I forget about social media, I stop impulse shopping, I stop wondering if I need to buy the “get rich/skinny/healthy now” course and I start feeling better as a by-product of the activity I’m naturally drawn to. It pulls me IN and my tech use drops off a cliff. (Sometimes to the point where I think I might just close down my business entirely and just open a knitting shop, the urge is REAL!)

But I digress. The impact of allowing something that is creative and tactile and refelctive of a genuine interest of mine to fill my time is that it makes me completely forget about the internet. This is very different than forcing apps to block me out and passing the time sitting on my hands trying to distract myself.

What’s the dynamic at play?

Attention: flow vs force.

Attention is not something to be scheduled or controlled into submission. It’s a living capacity. A muscle. One that weakens when we abandon it and strengthens when we practice choosing where we place it.

When we rely entirely on external barriers, we are giving our agency away (not to mention our money). What we’re really doing is telling ourselves we can’t be trusted with our own time, energy, and life-force. This quiet erosion of self-trust is what we should be concerned about more than our screen-time hours.

We’ve understood the assignment: more time offline. But we’ve misplaced the mechanism with which to achieve that outcome.

What if the invitation isn’t to make distraction impossible—but to make presence more desirable?

What if the work is to do things that naturally gather you into focus? Work that absorbs you. Creation that brings you back into your body. Conversations that wake you up. A life colourful and joyful enough that your attention wants to stay?

An active “crowding out.”

Instead of fixating on submerging the bad habit, you instead fill yourself up with nourishment in every other way that you can so that the void previously filled by the bad habit becomes naturally soothed.

You don’t need to buy simplicity.
You don’t need another tool telling you what you can and can’t do (you’re not 5 anymore, waiting for your mom to tell you when it’s time to go to bed).

You need to take your agency back and recall your ability to be the leader of your own life — your real life. You need to acknowledge the areas of your life that feel dull and are making you so distractible and vulnerable to the hooks and dopamine hits of the modern online world. You need to acknowledge the pain of abandoning the dream, the craft, the friendship, the hobby, etc. that you numb by seeking quick wins for your selfies and an endless string of nights where you let Netflix “play what’s next” and essentially decide how your time is spent for you.

At the risk of being oversimplistic and too harsh — addiction is nuanced, of course — a lot of us need to grow up and flex the muscles of our own agency in our lives again. This involves: waking up to all the places we’ve given it away, having a direct but loving conversation with ourselves, and, deciding to make some changes.

You can begin now—call out the pattern for what it is. Call out the gadgets for the crutch they are. Choose again and again to place your attention where your aliveness lives.

It’s less comfortable at first. There’s friction. There’s restlessness. There’s pain in acknowledging the hours (let’s be honest, it adds up to months or even years) of time scrolling when you could be watching sunsets or making beautiful art.

But on the other side of that discomfort, you are building something steadier than any tool or external time-management system can give you: self-leadership.

Taking your life back doesn’t come from removing temptation.
It comes from remembering that your attention and your life are and always have been yours to give away — and to reclaim.