I'm thinking that I need to use my tools more. I've made some recent steps to take back control of my digital presence. I've gotten off of Windows and onto Linux, I've deleted all of my social media, I'm taking steps to reduce my reliance on Reddit, I've installed add-ons that outright block the existence of youtube shorts, and I've been learning more. All of this is to say that I believe technology, in the mainstream sense, was hindering me before. The constant bombardment of advertising, tracking, generative AI, dopamine hooks, and general time wasters was overwhelming. I'd sometimes find myself after work doing nothing but watching shorts, too tired to even play games that I previously loved. I felt it, for lack of a better term, slowly suck the life and personality out of me. I yearned to be more mindful about myself, my digital presence, and by extension my future. I put something down originally into midnight pub about this, but I do look at the current iteration of technology not as a black box of learning and adventure, but as a corporate mechanism of self sabotage. It used to be that technology was an avenue of identity, like as a kid it was a hobby for learning, a social marker that you were a tinkerer, and a means of meeting new people and learning new things. Now though, it just feels different, it feels insidious - I don't like it. That might be one of the reasons I'm trying to journal more, or utilizing the smolweb more - or do any of the other things I'm trying to do. I found that if I don't act deliberately towards my tech that it will happily take advantage of my passivity and allow corporations to act deliberately towards me. I fear that the cyberpunk dystopia is upon us and it's nowhere near as interesting as we thought.