September 16, 2026
When at tech-adjacent meetups, I enjoy being obstinate about my lack of computer usage; I do not have Wi-Fi at home and use a hotspot for work & mainly use a 14-year-old Surface tablet for any intensive tasks. My GitHub uploads for this website are mainly done via my phone. It wasn’t always this way! I learned to code at a pretty young age, built my first computer when I was thirteen, and both my research and thesis are about the use cases of machine learning in medicine. I also have a few hundred hours in Stardew Valley, CS:GO, etc. However, these days are past me.
More than anything else, it felt as if my computer usage was a way to avoid interfering with the world. If one does not enjoy their existence in the material plane, current technology makes it quite easy to retreat into the technical realm. It has always been possible to do so; the history of philosophy and academia seems to be that of abstraction of action into thought, but modern computing makes what was once possible primarily through devotion accessible to all. And for many, the material world is painful. Moving through it always requires some application of force to overcome friction, but as the barrier to less material ways of being becomes lower, people increasingly turn away from the physical. Nowadays I quite enjoy being in the world; any technology which allows me to avoid it must offer some positive benefit rather than a simple lack of pain.
What do people use their computers for? Most seem to watch videos, use social media, etc. My friends are also likely to use them for personal coding projects, though it does not seem as if this is the modal use case. For video, I much prefer a walk outside, bouldering, or reading a book to watching a video, not to mention general socializing. As for social media, I mainly use Twitter & I can use my phone for that. In the realm of personal projects, I understand the appeal of coding in that the act of creation is quite satisfying, but the ends of these projects simply seem to be more time spent on the computer. Why would I want that? There are other creative outlets which have much better ends. Designing, painting, writing—all of these have ends in themselves.
This is not a Luddite manifesto; the computer is quite nice for OCR, transcription, editing, and talking to others. But these are all means to an end. My avoidance of tech stems from the fact that it seems to be a time sink which prevents one from existing in the world and that its usage begets its further usage.