Finding the Technology Sweet Spot

Why I'm looking to return to a time when the tech served my needs (as a writer and as a person) rather than the other way around

I’m going to date myself immediately here as an elder millennial, and I’m okay with it. I was born in the late eighties and grew up in a conservative community outside city limits in the Pacific Northwest. This meant my childhood was far more Gen X than Millennial in the early years, though I lived through the tech revolution that’s moved us, in short order, from floppy disks to generative AI.

As I look around currently, I have to admit: I’m not a fan.

This isn’t a revolutionary standpoint, right? The world feels like it’s on fire and those of us who lived our formative years in the late nineties and early oughts have lived through many “unprecedented” events.¹ With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, I sometimes look around and think I’m raising my sons in the midst of a slightly dystopian sci-fi young adult novel. So much technology all around us, yet people are lost and hurt and hungry and lonely and angry and sad.

How did that happen?

I’m not here to pretend I have all the answers, but I will say thing: our technology ridden world might have something to do with it, because we’ve moved into a place where the technology is managing us rather than us managing it.

A simple example: in my childhood, we had a phone in our home. It rang and we used it to make calls. This was efficient and helpful: we were able to remain in contact with relatives that lived far away or call Mom for a ride when my Saturday job cleaning stalls at a local barn was done.

The tech was helpful. It eased the friction of older communication methods.

Consider that against where we are now, in 2025: I carry around a highly evolved metal rectangle in my pocket that not only rings when someone calls, but it tracks my movement, plays my music, manages my finances, and dings with messages and notifications regularly. It houses audiobooks and ebooks and an app for concert tickets and another for sending money. It provides me with access to videos, information, social media, any time I want, easily and wherever I am.

Sounds good.

Right?

I’m not so sure.

For me, 2025 has been a year of realizing this tech isn’t helpful anymore. It’s erased so much friction so as to send me into a free fall.

Don’t get me wrong, as a writer, embracing technology provides a lot of great benefits: research online, ebooks, easy web searches, better word processing, even tools like AutoCrit to help with self editing. So I’m not longing for a return Jane Austen’s world (well, I might be, but for other reasons), but I do remember a time when my tech felt fun and helpful rather than burdensome and distracting.

My attention span is fractured and shortened compared to where it was a decade ago, and in the past few months, I’ve been working to reclaim it. Most of that work has involved LESS, not more.

Less social media, more intentional consumption of carefully chosen material.

Less noise (literally and figuratively) by stepping back from doom scrolling and turning off the podcasts.

Less blue light by reading paper books and plugging my phone in around 7:30pm at my desk rather than my nightstand and leaving it there until morning.

Less focus on using my phone for everything. Turning music on in the house and allowing it to play softly. Less use of my bluetooth earbuds, because my ears were aching for no apparent reason (spoiler alert: less earbud use has resulted in my ear ache going away).

The more I’ve stepped back and evaluated my use of technology in recent months, the more I feel my soul settling, my mind clearing, and my focus expanding.

What a glorious feeling, particularly because its positively affected my writing.

I’ve busted out more words in the past month than I have in a number of months prior combined, which means I’m giving more of myself to what I love and not wasting my attention span on things that don’t really matter to me.

Ramit Sethi² and Tori Dunlop³, both personal finance advisors, talk a lot about creating a rich life with your money, and to do so, you need to A. Decide what a rich life looks like for you and B. Stop spending money of stuff you don’t care about.

May I suggest that we start applying these two principles to our lives with technology?

Decide what technology I want or need to serve my life and then stop spending my time on tech or content I don’t care about.

I don’t need a lot of technology in my life. A laptop computer, yes.⁴ A phone, for calling and texting, but a lot less apps and such for daily use. I’m not interested in much AI, not a fan of digital reading, and an Alexa or smart home appliances have ZERO interest for me. You’ll find me buying second hand vehicles and appliances to avoid computer chips, and handing my kids a digital camera so they can experience snapping photos not on a phone.

But that’s me and not you. We all have to decide, but that’s the key: it’s a conscious choice we make. So much about this technology ridden life just slips by without notice because it’s easy (at first)

So how do I stop spending my attention on technology and content that doesn’t matter to me?

Whew. This one is tougher, because if you read even a little about how tech companies work, you learn that they are trading in an attention economy. They’re in the business of drawing your eyes to the screen as much for as long as possible without you really noticing (the millionth reason why my kids don’t have screens, as a side note).

For me, this means controlling my social media use as a tool for business and marketing and connection, but not being sucked into doom scrolling. It also means using my computer or another means for playing music (hello, vinyl records!) and stepping away from constantly having headphones in my ears. Working in silence more often and on focus mode (both on my phone and in Scrivener, if I’m writing). I wear an analogue watch (this isn’t a change, but becoming increasingly rare⁵) and carry a hard copy book in my bag almost always (and often from the library).

It means being choosier with what shows I watch and committing to watching them in the evening with my husband, rather than turning them on for “background noise.” I plug my phone in around my boys’ bedtime, on my desk, and leave it there for the rest of the evening. No scrolling during shows anymore, and if I need something to do with my hands, I have a little bag of embroidery projects by the couch (yes, a grandma hobby: another elder millennial give away). Hubs and I are even gravitating back to DVDS rather than streaming, because the convenience of streaming was fun at first, but now it feels as though they have dragged you right back into the land of cable.⁶

Again, this is my list. Make yours fit your life.

I want to spend more time at the keyboard, dashing out all the words that rattle around in my head. And I want to have the creative energy to do that, so I must step back from the distractions that pull me into endless YouTube watching or Instagram scrolling.

The truth of the matter is that we all have to make choices about the technology we use or don’t use, and if we don’t choose, then life tends to choose for us.

And tech companies aren’t really in the business of providing you things to make you more creative or fulfilled or productive or calm or happy: they’re in the business of capturing your attention and prompting you to consume.⁷

Join me in making life more purposeful, creative, peaceful. More analogue and grounded in the real world.

You made it to the end! Thanks for reading.

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1. Y2K, 9/11, the 2008 crash and recession, to name a few. As adults now, we’ve lived through a number of highly contentious presidential cycles, a long war with a disastrous end, a global pandemic, civil unrest, and now whatever fresh hell 2025 is offering. Is it time to retire the phrase “unprecedented times”? If all are unprecedented then none really are.

2. Author of I Will Teach You To Be Rich

3. Author of Financial Feminist Just a heads up: Tori’s brand is irreverent. The money advice is solid. Do with that what you will.

4. I’ve actually been considering a digital typewriter or word processor (as we knew them in the nineties) like FreeWrite for writing, because sometimes I think the laptop is too much.

5. Also, you might consider looking into what your smartwatch company is doing with your health data, because that’s a bell I can’t unring

6. This is a whole other post, which others have written about better than I can. Streaming, at first, was fun and commercial free and easier/cheaper than DVDs or cable. We’ve come full circle though; it’s not longer cheaper or fun or commercial free and with Hulu and Disney bundling, someone really should tell them they have returned to the model of cable.

Check out The Rise and Fall of Streaming TV

7. If you’re interested in this, look up “Planned Obsolescence.” You know how people say “they don’t make them like they used to” about washing machines and dryers and other appliances? Spoiler alert: they don’t. Fair warning: it will increase your blood pressure. You can check out this Popular Mechanics Article from 2010 about products meant to fail.