It has been a long time coming. This post comes after one of the busiest weeks of the year — a full summer in clinic, meetings with the Vocations Committee, holy hours, changing phone systems, decluttering, waiting for the kids to get back from their grandparents'. It's been packed. I'm trying to balance a desire to do more — more at work, more at church, more with my family, more for my health, more for the people I love. It's a whirlwind.
So I write this mostly to commemorate an incredibly busy week, and a small victory over technology. Back in high school and college, building computers and writing my first webpages in a WYSIWYG editor on Linux, hosted on my own Apache server, I remember thinking: hey, I can do this.
Nowadays, Web 1.0 is something corporations and e-commerce businesses use. Everyday people ditched it for their phones — Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Squarespace. But deep down, those of us who grew up analog and became technology natives anyway know the difference. You don't own your Facebook. You don't own your Instagram. Squarespace is a landing page, but it isn't yours. Geocities felt like yours. A Yahoo! page felt like yours. They were a neighborhood of sites, the same way any neighborhood in the real world is a neighborhood — built by the people who lived there.
Things have become both more accessible and less accessible to the average computer user at the same time. We have more ways to connect than ever, and those connections feel less connected than ever.
In the same vein, consumerism and smartphone addiction are at an all-time peak. Minimalism, in the way it was meant, feels dead. But minimalism as an aesthetic, or decluttering just to declutter, was never the point to begin with. We want our lives to have more meaning. We want more analog lives, and we keep clinging to the digital anyway — because it's what we know, and it's easier.
They say if you add twenty seconds of friction to anything, most people won't bother doing it. Our phones live in our pockets. Unlocking one takes a fraction of a second — nowhere near twenty. I'd say most of our days are just a string of small frustrations, each one relieved instantly by the rectangle in our pocket before we've even had time to sit with it.
When was the last time you left your phone at home for more than fifteen or twenty minutes? The last time you didn't check it after work, or during a meal, or on a date? We presume we need to be hyperconnected. We don't.
Today I listened to a CD. I cleaned out my office. I wrote this in VS Code. I did it because I wanted to — because I wanted to disconnect from the apps and the notifications for a while. I wanted to get myself ready to write my letters to the seminarians again. I'm getting ready to meet my friends at the coast in less than a week. I'm getting ready to spend the rest of the weekend with my kids.
They say good writing is good editing. But some writing, done earnestly, doesn't need much editing at all — it just comes straight from the heart. This is one of those.
A start.