I’ve thought about eliminating technology from my life. Not all of it, because that would be impossible. I work on the computer, I communicate through my phone, we watch movies together. But yes, that part of technology that distracts me instead of helping me. The part I open out of habit, without thinking, without really needing it.
I’ve been mulling this over for years. I’ve deleted social media from my phone, then I look for it on the computer. Now I have it blocked there too. It’s a strange dance between wanting to disconnect and not knowing how. Between recognizing the problem and not finding a way to solve it. There’s always an excuse, always something that makes me come back.
The TV
A few weeks ago the TV stopped working. It simply wouldn’t turn on. I postponed calling the technician for almost a month, though it looks like it’ll be covered under warranty. During those weeks, all I felt was peace. I no longer wasted time sitting there, browsing YouTube aimlessly, letting the algorithm decide what to watch. My wife felt it more because she loves watching series, and it’s the only TV we have in the house. But for me it was a relief. As if someone had turned off background noise I didn’t even know was there.
That accidental disconnection showed me something important: I can let go of these devices and do something different. I don’t need to always have something on, something playing, something moving on a screen. And right in that moment of silence I started asking myself what I could do instead.
Going analog
That’s when I started finding many recommendations about returning to analog. Journals in notebooks, handwritten lists, old digital cameras. People who documented how they stopped depending so much on their phones and started using simpler tools. Like going back to the 2000s, when technology was an extra for doing interesting things, not a tool designed to optimize every second of your existence. When things didn’t have to be perfect, they just had to exist.
I like that idea. It’s been running through my head all the time. It feels increasingly closer, more achievable.
The manga
I decided to try. I recently bought the first volume of the One Piece manga and I’m fascinated. Seeing the author’s notes in the margins, the drawings in detail, feeling the paper between my fingers. There’s something tactile there I can’t quite explain. Although I love audiovisual media for how music conveys feelings that paper can’t replicate, for those moments when a song hits you just when it should, there’s something special about carrying the manga in my bag and reading it during dead time. When I’m waiting for Kathia to finish something, when I have five minutes between one thing and another. Those moments I used to fill with my phone.
It’s curious how a physical object anchors you to the moment. You can’t scroll infinitely through a manga. It ends. You close the book and that’s it. I like that.
The manga made me think about other things I could make physical. I was writing my journal a year ago in Notion. Supposedly so I’d never lose it, so I could reread it someday from any device. The cloud would give me that eternal security. But now I think that if I write it in notebooks, fill them and keep them in a drawer or on a shelf, it’s the same. And even more valuable because it’s physical, it’s my handwriting that changes over the years, it’s my way of thinking captured in ink that can’t be edited later. There’s no way to cheat and change what you felt in that moment.
Permanence
That used to stop me. That I couldn’t erase it, that I couldn’t move it, reorganize it, make it look professional. I spent more time thinking about how it should look than actually writing it. But the reality is that I’ll probably be the only one reading it. Just by existing it already has the value it needs. Just by having written it, it’s already fulfilled its purpose.
The same thing happened with drawing. I have a sketchbook I almost never use. I bought it with every intention of filling it, of drawing anything, without pressure. But I didn’t do it because analog doesn’t forgive. A stroke stays there. There’s no ctrl+z. And that paralyzed me. As if it had to be worthy of showing from the first attempt. But in the end, I’m the one who gives it value. No one else has to see them. No one else has to approve them.
I think that fear of permanence had pushed me away from all this. I’ve spent so much time in the digital realm where everything can be undone, edited, perfected, that I forgot the freedom of simply making things. Imperfect things, half-finished things, things that simply exist because they do. And that’s exactly what I want to recover.
I’m going to start having more analog things. Returning to this blog also feels good, even though it sounds contradictory to talk about disconnecting while writing on the internet. But this space is different. It’s not a social network where I compete for attention. It’s just a place to put ideas. I had it abandoned because I was “busy” with things that really only consumed my time in a bad way. Time that went to scrolling, to short videos, to nothing worth remembering.
Returning to analog in many things seems like a good idea. I don’t need my work to-do list on my phone all the time. In fact, I think having it there makes me ignore it more easily. It’s too accessible, too easy to open and close without doing anything. A paper list is different. You see it. It’s there. You can’t swipe the notification away and forget about it.
I want to enjoy that feeling of filling notebooks. Of finishing one and starting another. Of watching them accumulate over time, full of ideas, bad drawings, lists, whatever. Maybe that’s my purpose for 2026: more physical books on the shelf, more notebooks to scribble in without fear of making mistakes. Recovering those spaces where technology doesn’t decide for me what to do.
I don’t know if I’ll achieve it completely. Probably not. But I want to try. I want to at least recover some of that time that slips away on screens without me noticing. I want my hands to do something more than scroll.