Tech bro VS caveman

Something weird is happening in tech.

The people who build the apps, configure the notifications, and automate everything they can — are the same people turning it all off.

I keep seeing it. Senior devs ditching smartphones for dumbphones. DevOps engineers building birdhouses on weekends. The person who automated their entire CI/CD pipeline now drives a manual car with no navigation and calls it "meditation."

And honestly? I get it.

Think about your average Tuesday. You wake up and there are already 14 notifications. Slack. Email. That one app reminding you to drink water as if you're a newly arrived alien. You manage passwords with a password manager that also needs a password. You juggle subscriptions, insurances, logins, two-factor codes, and a calendar that looks like a Tetris board designed by someone who hates you.

Then you go to work.

Stakeholder meetings. Sprint planning. Making sense out of chaos so someone else can ship a feature that adds more notifications to the pile. You write structured content, optimize headings, and think about user journeys so hard your own journey becomes a blur.

At some point, something gives.

For me, it's the sauna. No phone. No screen. No noise. Just heat, steam, and the kind of silence that makes your ears ring because you forgot what silence actually sounds like.

Or cooking. Something slow and intentionally messy, where the worst-case scenario is you oversalt the soup.

Or fixing things around the house. A leaky faucet doesn't need a Jira ticket. You just grab the wrench, figure it out, and move on. No PR review required.

Or — and this is the one that really resets the brain — sitting on the floor with my four-year-old and doing whatever I'm told. Build this tower. No, not like that. Now knock it down. Again.

No strategy. No optimization. No purpose beyond the moment.

There's no standup for playing with blocks.

He doesn't have a system. He doesn't batch his tasks or timebox his play. He just does the thing in front of him, fully, and moves on. Somewhere between learning to crawl and learning to code, we forgot how to do that.

Our brains were built for maybe 50 decisions a day. Hunt or gather. Sleep or stay alert. Now we make 50 decisions before breakfast — most of them about cookies, and not the edible kind.

No wonder the techiest people alive are buying flip phones and building cabins.

The hardware can't keep up with the software update.