My Complicated Relationship With Tech. What About You?

It helped me navigate my teen years and build my career. And, it distracts me and turns on some powerful negative pathways in my brain.

Dec 12, 2024

Thursday :: December 12th, 2024 :: Approx. 7 min read

👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that powers our day-to-day lives.

If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, hit the subscribe button below.

How do you feel about your relationship with technology in your life?

This question runs laps in my brain.

I think about it when I work, often glued to and sitting at a desk, rearranging digital work products for hours on end.

I think about it when I don’t work, sometimes aimlessly devouring social content fed through one or more social networks to my eyes and ears.

And I think about it when I contribute to the internet. That is, when I write and publish something here, or comment on something on Twitter, or like a photo on Instagram, or retweet eloquent prose on Twitter. You get the idea.

I think my answer splinters along those three pathways. I’ll address them opposite how I listed them just now, but in the way that speaks most to their impact.

Internet Contributions

Conclusion: my contributions are dangerous. It’s that simple. They flip my addictive tendency switch on.

Yep,

Andy Adams

, I can.

Writing this newsletter improves my health in all ways. But almost all other contributions chip away at that health in a reliable, predictable way.

I feel like a teenager when I open Instagram. Really. I’m sucked down the hole no matter what. I’m looking at more posts and in the app longer than I need to be. Why? Habit.

And, of course, there is history behind that habit. I signed up many years ago. I don’t have the app on my phone, but it’s not hard to visit the desktop site (and I do). The same physiological impulses overrule disciplined behavior.

There’s nothing much gained by liking posts. Nothing much gained by commenting on stories. Sure, my feed is “better” but only because the platform knows “you like that, I’ll send you more.” I don’t see an objective improvement in non-digital life because of those actions.

LinkedIn draws me to professional content directly about or adjacent to my career, but I often wonder what I’m really doing there.

Do I need to contact someone? Do I need to post something? Did someone publish something I need to read? The answers usually resolve to no. LinkedIn, for better or worse, does play a useful role in my career. But it’s stuffed with all the behavioral nudges that drive engagement across all social networks. It’s not hard to get lost.

I’ll borrow a term from Peter Attia to describe the rest: the Horsemen. He uses the term Horsemen (in Outlive) to group four chronic illnesses (e.g. heart disease) that form the foundation of his research. There are three chronic perpetrators in my memoir: BlueSky, Threads, Twitter.

They’re short-form text broadcast platforms, invented or popularized (at least) by Twitter. People yell into the abyss on these platforms. People promote schemes. People share misinformation. Some people made or continue to make real (offline) friends. Twitter in the earliest days was that facilitator, a layer of connectivity for technorati in the Bay Area and ultimately beyond.

There’s almost nothing redeeming about my contributions. I’m replying to people about, well, what? Anything that matters? The answer is no 99% of the time. One recent interaction stands out in contrast, but similar moments are rare.

State of Being: Not Working

Conclusion: mostly escape, mostly wasted time.

This state intertwines with my contributions in numerous ways. That much is probably obvious. But there are a few differences.

First, I’ll start with TV. I watch TV. Not a lot, at least by my estimation. I almost never watch TV on planes. I don’t have a TV doom scrolling stock prices in front of me during the day. I enjoy a movie just like anyone else but don’t gravitate toward movies over other activities.

The TV I watch is part informative, part absolutely the opposite. I remember walking into a roommate’s bedroom once to find him glued to Gossip Girl. At that moment, I didn’t understand what I was seeing, but now I see it with 20/20 vision: escape.

Not from anything bad, per se. Instead, just from the day. We all go through it one way or another. You resolve (or escape) your day with mindless TV, alcohol, other addictions, and in broad terms - something or things that distract you.

My mindless TV is my distraction, so to speak. I like to turn my brain off at a particular time every evening. I’m quite good at it.

Am I doing so in the most healthy or robust way possible? Probably not. But, I’m comfortable with my TV. Netflix’s Love is Blind isn’t exercising my brain cells. I think I’ll survive another season.

I also have two e-ink devices: a Kindle, and a Remarkable tablet. The latter, at the moment, gathers more and more dust. Via using both, I learned (somewhat recently) something about my technology preferences and habits: I like reading physical books. More than I like highlighting on a Kindle.

Ask this if you also use a Kindle: do you highlight? If so, do you revisit those highlights? What for?

State of Being: Working

Conclusion: ok with my current state.

This section is shorter because I feel good about my professional relationship with technology. I taught myself to code in high school. That occurrence, spread over numerous small decisions, led to a specialized, secure, and stimulating career.

But I ruminate on two things:

[1] Did focusing (some purpose, some accident) on technology pigeon-hole my career? I tend to think yes, despite what others tell me or observe.

My forever-specialist day-to-day (until recently) wanted more generalized work. Today, as I write this newsletter, I bounce back and forth between different descriptions of what I want. Of my positioning. What do I want? What do I offer?

[2] Will AI stunt my career trajectory? I know. You’ve heard me say no as a theme in many posts. The question isn’t destroying my sleep. But technology is moving so much faster than me. It’s hard to prioritize where and how to stay on top of what technology really matters in my career.

Perhaps a more nuanced view is this: will I rely too much on AI (at some point) and lose my “edge” so to speak? I hope not, and again, don’t have an immediate problem.

But, as one counter-example, AI knows more about and can write code faster than me right now.

What does that mean for a career built on writing some code to get the job done? I’m not sure, to be honest.

Instead, these days, I’m embracing and using all the tools. I can’t beat the AI adoption curve so I might as well ride it as a passenger at the very least.

Thanks for reading The Teardown! This post is public so feel free to share it.