August 16, 2025/300 words/2 min read

Staying Curious Without Staying Online

Finding room for tech without drowning in feeds.

This post is more for me than for anyone else.

I spend most of my day in front of a screen. That's the job. Between the meetings and the writing, eight or nine hours disappear into product work. Then I get home and usually keep going, either making something of my own or unwinding in front of another screen. Some nights I barely touch my laptop. Other nights I sink a few more hours into something. Ten to twelve hours of screen time is normal for me.

I enjoy it! I like technology, especially seeing what people are building and which problems they're trying to solve. Somewhere along the way, though, "staying curious" turned into "never logging off" for me.

What an embarrassing realisation! I even got as far as DNS filters after site blockers and timers didn't work. I'd block Twitter, then scroll Reddit. When I blocked Reddit, I ended up on Hacker News. Different tabs, same bullshit.

I stopped trying to quit the internet and found things I wanted to do more. For me, that could be reading a paper book or leaving my phone at home for a short walk. It just had to be something I cared about. A few nights a week, the missus and I also started cooking meals that require actual focus. We have to think about what we're doing and work together. Meal prep takes much less attention.

The shift more or less happened on its own once I had other things going on. I had been falling back on the internet because the alternative was boredom. Once I had something I actually wanted to do, I stopped opening a feed by default.

I still spend plenty of time online and probably always will, but I notice when I'm choosing it now.