The best way to digital detox, I’ve discovered, is to have a kid. That’s not a tip you’ll find in any wellness app, and I’m not saying a child is a lifestyle hack, because children are not accessories for self-improvement. But it’s the truth: when I spend time with my son, I’m just not on my phone by necessity. There’s no willpower involved, no victory over temptation, no grayscale mode. He simply doesn’t allow me to disappear into a screen. We go hiking and he wants to inspect every rock; we go to the beach and he wants to chase every wave. At the end of those days, I realize my phone hasn’t moved from my pocket, and I can remember exactly what we did, not just what I scrolled past. And I genuinely notice that I’m infinitely happier than on days when I’ve been glued to my phone. Not because parenting is peaceful—it absolutely is not. But because it forces me into the present. There is no moving forward until you’ve dealt with the meltdown over the wrong-colored cup, and there is no better cure for existential dread than a three-year-old demanding you push him on the swing for the fortieth time. So, Zoomers: there’s a reason to have children, if you feel like you need one. It’s not about legacy or tax breaks. It’s about being dragged out of your own head, against your will, into the messy, loud, gorgeous world where other human beings actually live.
Music app: Spotify. I primarily use Spotify, but the data is completely cooked because of the aforementioned three-year-old. When Spotify Wrapped comes out every year, it used to be a fun little mirror of my identity—my top artists, my genres, my listening hours. Now it’s a hostage situation. My Wrapped has been hijacked by Raffi, Elmo, Ms Rachel, and Mickey Mouse. My son is really into Mickey’s Countdown lately, which means I have heard the same numbers song approximately ten thousand times. I would estimate that ninety-nine percent of my listening is atrocious kids’ music, and the remaining one percent is whatever I can squeeze in while he’s asleep. At first, this made me sad. I mourned my old musical self, the person who had a curated playlist for every mood. But I’ve made peace with it. Raffi is the GOAT, by the way. I don’t want to lump him in with some of the others. Raffi stands alone. “Baby Beluga” is genuinely transcendent, and I will not accept slander. The rest of it is tolerable because I’ve realized that sharing music with my son is more meaningful than curating a private soundtrack for my own life. He bops his head, he tries to sing along, and for a few minutes we are both completely delighted by something ridiculously simple. That is worth more than a clean algorithm. Although, I admit, it’s a little embarrassing when I put on headphones at work and realize I’ve been humming “The Wheels on the Bus” for the past hour.
Number of unread emails: zero. This is probably the thing where you’ll learn the most about me. Zero unread emails, and an inbox of ten or under—that’s how I live my life. I do not let communication build up. It’s such an important part of how I work and get things done. For a litany of reasons, I just can’t operate with a pile of unanswered messages hanging over my head. I subscribe to a couple of newsletters, and I won’t archive them until I’ve either read them or at least scanned them. But I can’t get to work until I feel like my mind is clear, and my mind isn’t clear if my inbox isn’t clear. I think I inherited this from my dad, who was an Air Force major. From a very young age, he taught me the importance of to-do lists, and I still abide by them. Sometimes, on a to-do list, I’ll set aside half an hour or whatever to get my inbox back down to sub-10. The same principle applies to texts: unread texts, zero. Same thinking, same discipline, same possible OCD. I know this makes me sound like a robot, but it’s actually the opposite. I clear my inbox so I can be present for the actual human conversations, instead of carrying a constant low-grade dread that someone is waiting on me. That also means my email replies are sometimes a fraction of the length of what I received. People feel social pressure to match an email with a commensurate email—if someone writes a three-paragraph update, you should write one back. To live the Inbox 10 lifestyle, you cannot abide by that pressure. You just can’t. You reply in one sentence, you mark it done, and you move on with your life. The world does not end. I promise.
Last person I FaceTimed: my brother. He’s on vacation with his family in Delaware at the moment. I’m not a big FaceTimer, and candidly, I feel like FaceTiming someone who is outside of your family is insane behavior. But having a child changed how I use technology, I suppose. Video calls are actually a wonderful way for young children to see distant relatives and communicate with them. My son talks to his grandparents on the screen with a level of engagement that I, as an adult, find exhausting. But it matters to them, and it matters to him. The last photo I took was a picture of my son standing next to a tower he built in his room. It’s not a beautiful photo. The lighting is bad, and there are toys strewn all over the floor. But he’s so proud, all smiles, arms spread wide as if he’s just conquered a mountain. At this point, I think ninety-five percent of the photos on my phone are of my son. It’s kind of funny, if you look at my camera roll, you can see the exact point where we had him. It used to be all pictures of my dog, and then it just completely switches to pictures of my son. The dog still gets a few, but she has been dethroned. Some people might find that sad, but I don’t. It’s a love story. It’s the record of a life that suddenly became bigger than myself.
Last thing I googled: “hip thruster tips.” I recently, very late in life, started strength training at a gym for the first time. For my entire life, I’ve only gone to the gym to run on a treadmill, and that’s it. I never touched a weight, never looked at a machine, never learned proper form. Now I’m learning what all these contraptions do and how to use them. I’m like a child in that world. A total neophyte. I have a trainer, which helps, but I’ve also found that the internet is a really encouraging and fun place for this kind of thing. There are people showing you how to do a hip thrust, correcting your posture, cheering you on from their basements. It’s the wholesome corner of the internet. Last screenshot I took: the Adam Levine quote, “Holy fuck, holy fucking fuck, the body of yours is absurd.” I honestly can’t even remember what I was using it as a meme for, but I clearly needed that screenshot for a reason. That’s the thing about our digital lives—the images stay behind, disconnected from the context that made them urgent. We’re all just collecting fragments, trying to translate the absurdity of being alive into memes and inside jokes. Sometimes that means a random screenshot of a pop star being overly enthusiastic about someone’s physique. It doesn’t have to make sense. It just has to capture a feeling you need to send to a friend at exactly the right moment.
Last thing I asked AI: “How to lift a paint stain off of a carpet.” I don’t really use large language models. If I do, it’s for either menial household questions or basic search. And I only use it for search because search has become useless due to AI-generated garbage. I’ve read and listened to a lot of people talk about how these tools have revolutionized their workflow—they’re training agents to make appointments, building elaborate meal plans, generating spreadsheets. To me, that doesn’t sound interesting. It sounds exhausting. There’s a phrase we use in football: “looking for work.” It describes a player on the field who’s not content to let the play come to him, so he goes looking for someone to block, sometimes to his own detriment. I think about that whenever I hear someone describe how AI is helping them optimize every corner of their existence. It just sounds like you’re looking for work. You’re inventing complexity because the machinery demands it. The best technology, I think, is the kind that becomes invisible—like a phone left in your pocket while you watch your kid build a block tower. We don’t need more ways to manage every last minute of our day. We need more reasons to put the phone down. For me, that reason is my son. And when I spend a day with him, hiking or at the beach, and I’m not on my phone, I am infinitely happier at the end of that day than any other day in my life. That’s not a productivity hack. That’s just love.
