I wrote this post as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore. It was inspired by the prompt for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival: second person birds.

When I was ten or twelve, Dad had a brief interest in keeping birds. This post is about the ducks incident.

(Honestly, they could’ve been geese. I can’t say for sure now. I’m going to go with ducks.)

On my parents’ wedding anniversary one year, Dad called home from work and told the entire family that he had something special planned for Mom. This was a time before cellphones, so this was all the information we got out of him before he hung up his office landline.

The whole family—me, my brother, Mom, and our grandparents—spent the rest of the day waiting eagerly for him to come home. He got back just as the sun was setting and parked our old Maruti 800 in the verandah. We sensed his excitement as he asked everyone to come outside and gather around the back of the car.

When we were all outside and had displayed the appropriate level of enthusiasm, he opened the boot of the car with the air of a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat. Out stepped two ducks.

I don’t know what any of us was expecting, but it was definitely not this. Mom was so bewildered by the giant white birds now pecking at things in the verandah that she forgot to be angry at Dad. My grandparents just shook their heads, while me and my brother were thrilled with this new addition to the family.

There were questions. Like: where will the ducks live? Or: don’t ducks need a lot of water to survive? Or, most importantly: who the fuck told you that ducks made for good anniversary gifts?

I’m sure my parents had some, uh, disagreements about the presence of the birds in our lives, but we had them and we couldn’t just let them loose in the city. So we had to figure out a way to keep them healthy and happy.

We made a haphazard coop for them on the rooftop using bits of old furniture. Dad bought the biggest plastic tub they would sell him and filled it with fresh water every few days. In the morning, we’d let the ducks out of the coop and dad would spray them with water from a hose. We’d let them walk around the rooftop in the daytime, where they’d peck at the bird feed we’d scattered around and stick their necks out of the railing at the edge of the rooftop to watch people passing by.

There were honks. Loud ones. They echoed across a neighborhood that was otherwise distinctly lacking in waterfowl. Soon enough, everyone figured out where the ducks lived, and we were known as that family that had ducks on the rooftop for some reason. In the evening, mothers would bring around their kids so they could look at the birds. Many kids got pecked that summer.

At night, the task of getting the ducks back into their enclosure fell to me and my brother. We were young at the time, and these ducks were not small. Every night, we’d spend half an hour trying to herd them into the coop, and get pecked, smacked, and pooped on in the process. Did you know birds can smack you with their wings? I didn’t, but then I got smacked.

After six months, Dad decided he’d had enough. I don’t know if it was the upkeep, the parade of children and their parents ringing our doorbell at all times, the bruises, or the noise, but he decided to let the ducks go.

One Sunday morning, me, my brother, and our parents went to a nearby lake, where we let the ducks go. We were concerned that that they wouldn’t be able to survive in the wild, but they seemed to do okay.

For a few months, we visited the lake to check if our birds were doing well. They had found a family with another group of ducks that lived in the same lake.

And that’s end end of the ducks incident.

I’m a happy user of a number of apps that can be classified under the nebulous category of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) software:

• Obsidian (note taking)
• Things (task management)
• Drafts (quick capture)
• Readwise Reader (RSS and read-later)
• Raindrop (bookmarking and archiving)

These apps allow me to work with vast amounts of digital information. They let me:

• Quickly capture information from my computer or physical environment
• Organize captured data using categories and/or tags
• Connect related information using bidirectional linking
• Annotate information (by e.g. highlighting parts of web pages, PDFs, or EPUBs)
• Quickly capture my own fleeting thoughts as I engage with the information (or the world in general)
• Synthesize what I’ve learned by writing my own notes, potentially creating new knowledge in the process

But something crucial is missing from modern PKM apps: they do a poor job of helping me re-engage with information that I’ve already captured but forgotten about. None of them can automatically resurface relevant material from my system based on my current context.

For example, if I’m using Obsidian to write a journal entry about my exercise routine, I want the app to show me every other journal entry about the same topic. I could pull them up manually, but that would require searching for multiple keywords and wading through more than a decade of writing. In 2025, even a tiny on-device embeddings model could find them instantly.

Resurfacing information doesn’t even have to rely on complex AI algorithms. I want my todo list app to show me every task that was created more than six months ago, which can be easily accomplished using a simple database query. This feature would save me a ton of time and energy by allowing me to prune outdated tasks from my system without having to manually read through each one.

With their current abilities, most PKM apps feel like inert stores of data, no different from the old paper notebooks I’ve stashed away in my desk drawer. There’s a ton of useful information in there, but there’s no way to find it unless I arduously flip through the pages.

Why is this useful?

I personally want to re-engage with the information stored in my PKM apps so that I can:

• Remember what already exists in my system: PKM tools remove friction from the process of capturing information, which means I sometimes forget what I captured. It’s good to be reminded.
• Prune stale data: sometimes I need to remove outdated or irrelevant items from the system. Manually sifting through them can be an overwhelming task, but it’s easy to progressively delete them as the app resurfaces them over time.
• Reduce paralysis of choice: looking at a list of hundreds of documents or articles can be paralyzing. Having an algorithm automatically select a subset of them eases the process of choosing what to engage with.
• Observe patterns: if I’m constantly reacquainted with information I captured at different points in my life, I can begin to see patterns in what I read and write.
• Create serendipity: sometimes the mere act of placing two unrelated notes together can spark new ideas.

A possible solution

I love Spotify’s Home tab. It does a great job of resurfacing music I’ve already listened to or saved in my library. Right now, it shows me:

• The eight most recent albums, playlists, or artists I listened to
• A selection of mixes created from music in my library
• A set of recommended albums based on my recent listening activity
• A set of albums featuring songs I’ve added to my playlists
• A list my favorite artists, based on recent listening
• A list of new releases from artists I like
• Recommended playlists based on genre and mood

If I ignore the algorithmic recommendations—as I usually do—there’s a lot on this list that nudges me towards re-engaging with music I already love dearly. This is exactly what I want my PKM apps to do for me.

A magical far-future version of Obsidian could start with a homepage containing:

• My most recently created and edited notes
• A “This Day in History” section, listing notes created on today’s date a year ago, two years ago, and so on
• Notes similar to the notes I’ve recently created and edited
• Notes I haven’t opened in a long time
• My most frequently accessed notes
• Notes grouped by sentiment or some other algorithmic criteria

Of course, this is only one possible solution that applies to one specific kind of app. I’m including it here in the hopes that it can serve as a starting point that can be further iterated upon.

Plugging the gap myself

I’ve built a few (admittedly very simple) tools to surface data automatically from the apps I use regularly:

• I use a function on Val Town to take me to a random bookmark stored in my Raindrop account. I call it StumbleDrop, an homage to the beloved Web 1.0 service StumbleUpon.
• Another function on Val Town takes me to a random article in my Readwise Reader account. Of course, I call it StumbleWise.
• I’ve created custom views¹ in Readwise Reader to show me stale RSS feed items, stale read-later items, and items with a certain combination of tags.
• Every few days, I Command + click the Open random note button in Obsidian eleventy billion times and read whatever comes up.
• I use the Similar Notes plugin in Obsidian to show me notes similar to the one I’m editing in a sidebar².

These tools have improved my experience of using my PKM apps, but there’s only so much functionality I can hack together with scripting and extensions³. I want these features built into my software, not haphazardly pasted-on using third-party extensions and services.

Whoever solves this problem will have my heart forever

If I’m not careful, my PKM apps become black holes where information goes to die. I end up with thousands of notes, tasks, bookmarks, and read-later items that just sit there, completely inert and useless, making me anxious.

I could be more disciplined about what I collect, but why do difficult thing when have computer? What’s the point of using a computer for knowledge work if it can’t amplify my cognitive abilities?

If you’re building a PKM app today, I urge you to consider building features that allow your users to periodically re-engage with the information they collect. Your users will appreciate it, and I will love you forever.

Some people believe it’s difficult to avoid writing. That if you have a story to tell, it will burst forth from the tips of your finger and leap onto the page at the slightest encouragement.

I’m here to prove those people wrong. I’m here to prove that it’s possible to defer your most precious dream for years, decades, your entire working life, until it’s far too late to do anything about it.

I have personally managed to avoid writing for more than half my life already, and I’m here to tell you how you can do the same. If you follow my simple advice, you too can avoid doing the one thing that fills you with joy and vitality!

Blame your environment

Your first line of defense against writing is to blame your environment.

Complain about your chair, the height of your desk, the quality of your keyboard. If its loud, complain about the noise; if it’s quiet, complain about the lack thereof. Complain that the air conditioning is too hot or too cold, that there is too much or too little natural light in your workspace. When your friends invite you out to dinner, complain about having too many social obligations; if you don’t have friends, complain about being lonely.

You will never have the ideal conditions to write. Turn this fact to your advantage. Turn every minor discomfort into a reason for not doing your life’s work.

Blame your tools

The next technique is as versatile as it is enjoyable: blame your tools for your inability to write.

Tell yourself that you can’t possibly write that novel until you find a writing app that feels just right, an app with just the right features. Try as many apps as you get your hands on, then draw up comparison tables to ostensibly help you choose the correct one. Every time you find an app that meet your needs, find something to be annoyed about: an animation that feels “off”, a feature that doesn’t work on your smart fridge, lack of support for a file format from 1998 that you might want to use.

Never mind that Jane Austen wrote on sheets of coarse paper that she stitched together herself, making marks on it using a quill pen that was made with goose feathers and had to be periodically dipped in cheap ink. Who cares about Jane Austen? She wasn’t that good anyway. The moment you find the perfect writing app, the world will forget Jane Austen even existed.

The best thing about blaming your tools as an excuse is the sheer mileage you can get out of it. Not having the right software is just the beginning, you can continue to avoid work by endlessly tweaking the tools you already have. Change the font, try different window layouts, download endless plugins and extensions, spend an entire Tuesday learning a new programming language just so you can add a new button to the user interface.

If you’re clever, nobody will call you out on it. Everyone will congratulate you for being so dedicated to your craft. The internet is full of people who only ever write about writing apps. You, too, can be one of them.

Blame your writing process

When you’ve exhausted all excuses around tools, you can move on to the question of writing process, a series of perfectly calibrated mechanical actions that will take you from blank page to published work without taxing your brain. Wait, what’s that? You don’t have a writing process? Well, then you must take the time to develop one! Preferably by reading as much as you can about writing without doing any writing yourself.

An easy place to start is to read about the work habits of other writers. This is best done on the internet, where those habits will be presented without context, completely disconnected from the work those habits were developed to serve.

Once you’ve exhausted this near-infinite well of low-calorie information, move on to reading books about the craft of writing. Writers love to give advice about writing, especially when that advice is useless to everyone but the advice-giver. These books should keep you busy for a few years without bringing you any closer to writing anything worth reading.

And if it happens that you somehow manage to exhaust even this vast resource of non-information, you can always fall back on the one resource that is truly inexhaustible: podcasts and video essays about writing.

Remember: 2x speed is for people who want to do the work. You must live your life at 0.75x.

Take notes

While you’re devising the perfect writing process, take detailed notes on every piece of media you engage with. Did you know that you can double the time spent reading a book if you insist on rewriting everything the author says in your own words on a stack of index cards?

If you’re truly adventurous, build a Zettelkasten. Of all the techniques humanity has invented to prevent actual work from occurring, the Zettelkasten is the most ambitious, the most baroque, and the most effective.

I recommend keeping a copy of How to Take Smart Notes on your desk at all times. It’s a treasure trove of techniques that help create pointless busywork without yielding anything in the way of useful output.

Create busywork for yourself

Talking of busywork, here’s something familiar that’s employed by every schoolchild, bureaucrat, and project manager on the planet. Busywork creates a flurry of activity without resulting in anything worthwhile getting done, perfect for all of us who want to appear important and industrious without being either.

This one is easy: make elaborate plans for work you will never actually do. Make task lists, reorganize your notes, catalog all the books you want to read, clear your email inbox, pay your utility bills, update your operating system, clean up your phone contacts, rearrange your browser tabs, prune your photo gallery, and indulge in any other activity that involves moving information from one location to another.

The trick is to shuffle information around until it feels like it’s vaguely organized, without using it for anything that resembles real work. Type the words “personal knowledge management” into a search engine and watch the possibilities unfold.

Do research

You cannot be expected to write a novel about friendship unless you know everything there is to know about friendship, right? That would be absurd. Draw from personal experience? Pshaw, that’s for amateurs! Does a brain surgeon draw from personal experience? Does a rocket scientist draw from personal experience? Then why should a novelist be expected to draw from their personal experience of normal everyday human emotions?

Novelists must draw from years and years of difficult research and study. Books! Newspaper articles! Blog posts! Scientific papers! Gotta read ‘em all. How else are you going to give your readers a sense of verisimilitude?

The best part about doing research is that you don’t even have to read the material. You can spin your wheels for weeks, even months, doing research about the research you’re planning to do.

Make elaborate lists of everything there is to read about friendship, why you should read it, where to purchase it, which order to read it in, and who recommended it. Collect as much metadata as you possibly can. Make mind maps and spreadsheets, databases and infinite canvases. Don’t read the material, just read the text surrounding the material: reviews, meta-commentary, abstracts, Wikipedia articles, anything but the actual research material.

Stay in the shallows where it’s safe, away from the groping tentacles of success and creative fulfillment.

Journal

There will come a time when looking into the screen with your eyes glazed over will no longer suffice. The usual flurry of busywork will no longer suffice. Shuffling other people’s words from notes app to notes app will no longer suffice. You will want to type words into your computer, using your own ten fingers, produced by your own spongy brain.

There will come a time when you will want to at least feel like you’re writing, but of course without putting in the effort to write. You will want to appear, to any external observer, like you’re producing a great deal of work, but without having to shoulder the burden of producing any work at all.

This is when you begin keeping a diary. Call it something impressive, like morning pages or freewriting. If someone asks why you’re journaling, come up with a reason that makes you sound spiritual and enlightened. Journal every day for hours and hours, far more than is necessary or reasonable. Do this for a year, five years, a whole decade. Document every little minutia of your life. Tell yourself you’re collecting material for future stories. Try to ignore the fact that the only story you’re telling is the story of your refusal to do the work.

Do self-care

If all else fails, take a year long vacation from all your responsibilities, burning through the money you were saving for retirement. If anybody objects, use the magic words: self-care. That will shut everyone up.

At the end of the year, start over with a new creative pursuit, something that “feels more authentic”.

You, too, can successfully avoid writing

If you follow my advice, you can forever put off writing that thing you always wanted to write! Before you know it, you will be old and feeble and close to death, having accomplished nothing, leaving behind hundreds of megabytes of rough notes half-filled with half-thunk half-thoughts.

If you set your mind to it, you can avoid writing forever. Even if it’s the only thing you’ve ever wanted to do.

(This post was written and published as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore.)

My physical space determines the kind of creative work I’m able to do. This is both a blessing and a curse.

For example, the moment I sit down at my dinner table with a cup of chai, my mind automatically shifts into journaling mode. I don’t have to make an effort, it just happens. I can write thousands of words from that specific spot in my house.

Sitting in the comfortable chair in my home office, with my 27” monitor and external keyboard, I get in the mood for writing code. I’ve worked from this particular configuration of this particular desk for nearly a decade. It’s so strongly associated with technical work in my mind that I don’t have to try consciously to think about code when I’m in that space. My mind automatically shifts gears and puts me in the mood for programming.

But having these strong associations with certain spaces in my house means it can be difficult to use them for other tasks. I’ve been trying to write short fiction over the last few months, and the only place in my house that’s comfortable enough for long hours of work is my home office—the same home office that I use for working on my software projects. Every time I try to use this space for creative writing, I have to fight the urge to work on a programming side-project instead.

If I had the space, I’d set up another desk in a different room dedicated to creative writing, but my house is not large enough for that. This desk setup is all I have. I have no option but to change the strong mental association I’ve built with my work desk.

I’ve found one solution that’s yielded positive results: instead of changing the location where I write fiction, what if I change my state of mind instead?

One way to change my state of mind when I sit down at my desk is to change my pre-work ritual. When I’m working on a programming project, I usually begin my day after I’ve taken a bath, had chai and breakfast, and spent some time catching up on news. Changing this ritual should theoretically put me in a different headspace while keeping my workspace exactly the same. This shift might allow me to form new mental associations with my desk.

To test my theory, I’ve been following a different schedule for the last few days: I wake up earlier than usual, make myself a cup of chai, and immediately begin my first writing session of the day. I do this before checking the news, responding to texts, or letting the world intrude on my thoughts in any other way. So far, this has been working well. I’ve been able to write about five hundred words a day for the past few days, which is an uncharacteristically large amount of writing for me.

I’ve only been doing this for a few days now, so it might just be the novelty that’s keeping me going. But I don’t want to jinx myself by questioning a process that’s producing results. I’ve almost finished writing a short story I’ve been struggling to finish for a few months, and that counts for something. Right?

Nothing can save us forever, but a lot of things can save us right now. When my new strategy stops working, I’ll try something else.

(This post was written and published as an exercise during a meeting of IndieWebClub Bangalore.)

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve followed the same process for writing pretty much anything:

1. Decide what I want to write about
2. Dump all my thoughts about that topic into a new document
3. Reorganize my braindump into a coherent outline in the form of bullet points, making sure there’s a logical progression of ideas from start to end
4. Turn the bullet point outline into readable prose
5. Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone
6. Publish

This is how I was taught to write essays at school, and this is the writing process taught by most writing books and workshops. On the surface it looks pretty reasonable: first you collect all the raw material, then you arrange it so that your audience can logically follow the progression of your argument, and finally you flesh out your prose so that your writing is enjoyable and memorable. What’s not to like?

For me personally, this process just does not work for most kinds of writing I’m interested in. Or rather, it works to the extent that it allows me to produce something that looks like writing, but it makes the process of committing words to paper feel robotic and utilitarian. It works on the assumption that all I need to do to produce a piece of good writing is get the facts out of my head and rearrange them to make them palatable to my readers. It ignores that fact that I might not know what I want to say, or that there might not be any real “facts” involved in what I want to write.

I’ve found this process to be perfect for producing technical writing or persuasive articles, but it hasn’t served me well for writing fiction, poetry, song lyrics, or personal essays. That’s because with all these kinds of writing, I don’t always know what to say. In fact, when I’m writing something that could be considered more “creative” than a blog post about JavaScript, I’m often looking to surprise myself. I’m writing not to communicate or persuade using the knowledge I already have in my head, but to allow my subconscious to surprise me by coming up with connections I could never have made by creating a bulleted list of facts.

So, for most of the creative writing I’ve done this year, I’ve followed a different process:

1. Set a timer for 45 minutes
2. Open a blank document and start typing
3. Wrote a good thing? Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone. Then publish.
4. Wrote a bad thing? Move document to a Graveyard folder and try again.

I’ve found that this is not an easy process to follow. Writing without the security of a plan or an outline is nerve wracking. It’s a bit like walking on a tightrope. You never know what’s going to happen, you just react to the words you’re typing in real time, listening to your heart and mind, steering your work gently without trying to push it towards a preconceived goal with force.

But it’s exhiliarating. And incredibly fulfilling. When I follow this process, I end up surprising myself every single time. The results are never what I would’ve produced if I had started with an outline and a specific goal. Writing without a plan has made me realize that my mind is capable of making surprising connections in the moment if I allow it to react to the work I’m doing rather than follow a script I’ve written beforehand.

This blog post was written using the same process. It might not be my best work, but I feel it turned out alright.

In my last post, I talked about how social media is a threat to my psychological sovereignty. But while social media is the biggest cognitive hazard I’m exposed to when I use digital technology, it’s far from the only one. There are so many other pollutants in our information ecosystem that fracture our attention and manipulate our emotions for profit: news media in all its different forms, notifications from the apps on our phones and computers, telemarketing calls, addictive video games, and perhaps the most sinister pollutant: advertising.

I want to live my life intentionally and mindfully, with full agency over how I direct my attention. I don’t want to be distracted or manipulated for somebody’s financial or political gain. To that end, I take steps to ensure that my devices can only deliver information to me when I’m ready and willing to receive it, and that I’m never exposed to harmful information unless I deliberately seek it out.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of how I use my phone and computer to ensure that they answer to me, rather than me answering to them:

1. I browse the internet with an ad-blocker enabled. If a website asks me to disable my ad blocker to access their content, I close the browser tab and never visit that website again.
2. Whenever possible, I pay for ad-free versions of the apps and services I use. If a service does not offer a paid ad-free tier, I don’t use that service.
3. I use browser extensions to block out the most harmful parts of certain websites I can’t choose not to engage with. For example, I block comments, chat, and suggested videos on YouTube so that the only UI element I see on a video page is the video player itself. Additionally, I pay for YouTube Premium so I never have to see ads.
4. Wherever possible, I disable algorithmic feeds on the apps and services I engage with regularly. For example, I keep my YouTube watch history disabled so my YouTube homepage doesn’t show me any video suggestions.
5. I disable notifications from nearly all apps on my phone, with the exception of messaging apps. But even with messaging apps, I mute all notifications from groups and communities.
6. I only allow notifications from work-related apps (such as Slack and Linear) during work hours. Outside of work hours, I ensure that I can only be contacted via phone calls.
7. I use Freedom to block all social media, news websites, and major tech/gaming websites. If I find myself checking a website or app too often during moments of distraction, I add it to my Freedom blocklist.
8. If I get a phone call from an unknown number, I let it go to voicemail (unless I’m expecting a courier to call me for a delivery I’m awaiting).
9. When I’m sleeping, I enable Apple’s Sleep Focus on my phone to make sure I’m not woken up by notifications or phone calls.
10. At night, I charge my phone in the kitchen instead of the bedroom so that I’m not tempted to check it right after waking up (or worse, in the middle of the night). I have a HomePod in my bedroom to serve as an alarm clock, but otherwise my bedroom is free of electronic devices.
11. I don’t watch broadcast TV or radio. I pay for ad-free tiers of music and video streaming services. When streaming services (inevitably) start showing ads to paying customers, I will begrudgingly pay extra for the ad-free tiers, if available. If that’s not possible, I will resort to piracy.
12. I don’t read or watch the news in any form. If a news story is important enough, my friends and family tell me about it. If people neglect to tell me about something that happened, it’s probably not important enough.
13. I don’t play games on my phone or computer, and stay especially far away from addictive games that require daily checkins or have gacha mechanics. I do all my gaming on dedicated devices (Switch, Steam Deck, and previously a custom PC).
14. When I’m working, I enable Apple’s Work Focus on all my devices. This only allows my devices to receive notifications from a small set of work-related apps. Depending on how demanding my work is on any given day, I can spend between an hour to three hours completely disconnected from notifications while I’m writing or programming.
15. Focus modes are sacred. Only my immediate family and exactly one close friend are allowed to get through my focus modes.

These are workflows and habits I’ve built over fifteen years of computer and phone use. Like many others my age, I’ve lived through an era where my devices were pinging with a cacophony of notifications all the time, leaving my attention and mental health in tatters. Only after observing the effects of constant distraction and emotional agitation on my mind did I begin making slow, gradual changes to what I allow on my devices, ending up with the list you see above.

At first glance, this list might suggest that I live a quiet, dour, austere life. That’s not true—I watch TV and online video, listen to music, play video games, and engage with all the same media that other people in my life engage with. The only differences are:

1. I don’t see algorithmically recommended content, advertisements, or inflammatory content, and
2. I don’t have a constant stream of notifications jostling for my attention on my devices

I go through all this trouble not just to maintain my psychological sovereignty, but also to create space in my life for self-care, friendships, relationships, work, exercise, and daydreaming. If my thoughts are constantly being waylaid by distractions, if my mind is always saturated with some horrific news story of the day, I can’t possibly focus on the work, people, communities, and nature around me.

My relationship with my digital devices these days is partly adversarial. I sometimes think of them as hazardous materials. It’s sad that things have to be this way, but that’s the world we’ve built. If I want to continue reaping the benefits of modern technology, I have no choice but to actively minimize the harm it causes. Silicon Valley isn’t going to grow a conscience overnight, but I as a computer user still have a smidgeon of agency over at least a small part of my computing experience.

And as long as I have that agency, I will exercise it and protect myself. After that? Who knows. Maybe I’ll learn to fix typewriters.

I publish new posts on this blog on Wednesdays and Fridays. After a post goes live, I open a private browsing session and log into Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky. On each of those websites, I post a link to my new post along with a short summary of what I wrote about and why. I never look at what other people are posting, and I mark most of my mentions and DMs as read without responding to them. Then I log out and close the private browsing session.

That’s been the extent of my interaction with social media for the last six months. As of this writing, I haven’t participated in any of the online communities I used to frequent until last year: Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Hacker News, Lobsters, Reddit, and YouTube. To prevent myself from accidentally falling into a black hole of doomscrolling, I use Freedom to block all social websites and apps on all my devices.

It’s no secret that I have a whole barbecue full of beefs with social media. Out of all those beefs, what concerns me most is the threat these services pose to my psychological sovereignty.

Psychological sovereignty is not a well-defined term, nor does it appear to be in common use anywhere on the web or in print. I first came across it in a blog post by Cortrinkau titled The Right to Psychological Sovereignty. I reckon they coined this term in order to give a name to an idea that has probably been swirling around in the public consciousness for a few years now, something that has been written about extensively but doesn’t have catchy shorthand name yet.

This is how I personally understand the idea of psychological sovereignty:

• My mind is my own. I have full sovereignty over my thoughts, perceptions, and consciousness.
• I have the right to decide what information enters into my mind. Only I get to dictate what I watch, read, hear, or experience. Nobody should be able to force me to interact with information I do not wish to interact with.
• I have the right to choose what I pay attention to. Nobody should be able hijack my attention, whether through coercion or psychological manipulation.
• I have the right to make my own decisions. Nobody should be able to manipulate my choices through deceptive or coercive psychological tactics.
• Definitely a lot more I’m missing here?? Idk, I’m not in the business of coining words, I’m just some guy.

I’m actually surprised there isn’t a widely-accepted term for this idea, especially in a world where states, corporations, and Twitter sleazebags are constantly trying to manipulate our attention and behavior. The closest ideas I’ve been able to find are freedom of thought, attention theft, and maybe cognitive liberty if you squint a little and ignore the fact that it’s about technology that doesn’t exist yet. But none of them get close to what I and Cortrinkau are trying to get at.

By now, the harms caused by social media are well understood. From undermining democracy to enabling genocide to causing mental health issues in teens, we have incontrovertible proof that social media is not good for our societies.

But I’m less concerned about these society-level harms than the immediate harms these technologies pose to my own personal psyche. Maybe I’m being selfish when I say that these days I’m primarily concerned with maintaining my own peace of mind, my own mental health, my own psychological sovereignty. I can’t change society, or convince billions of internet users to give up their favorite distractions, but I can change my own behavior and refuse to participate.

When I log on to Bluesky or Instagram or whatever, I find that everyone is trying to influence me in one way or another, to grab and keep my attention by posting the most controversial, hateful, and infuriating content they can get away with. There are the usual suspects, of course—ads, influencers, brands, activists, and politicians—but even normal everyday people behave in perverse ways when given access to a text box on a microblogging service.

Every user on Twitter, Mastodon, or Bluesky acts like they’re running for political office, or engaged in a moral crusade that will decide the fate of the world. Their pet causes, no matter how trivial, are the most important things in the world. Anybody who is not talking about the exact thing they care about today is willfully being literally Hitler. They take it upon themselves to try and change the minds of anybody who will listen, and to berate anybody who holds even slightly different beliefs, resorting to ever more extreme tactics in order to make their point.

The result is that if I spend just ten minutes scrolling through my Mastodon feed, I walk away furious about issues that don’t affect my life a single bit. Why was that one guy at that PTA meeting in Sweden so rude to that other lady? Who the fuck does he think he is? And before I know it, I’ve spent the morning livid about something that happened halfway across the world, something I have no control over. Instead of spending the time exercising, writing, or talking to a friend, I’ve wasted it scrolling through replies and reposts, hot takes and dunks.

I don’t want random people on the internet deciding what I get to think about. I don’t want to be manipulated into paying attention to other people’s politics. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with those politics or not, I just want to engage with them on my own terms, to decide when I engage with them and to what degree. Most online comment sections leave me feeling angry, powerless, frustrated, and frazzled to the point that I can’t focus on anything that requires cognitive energy. That’s why I’ve taken steps to ensure I never end up on a social media website unless I truly intend to be there.

Of course, it’s impossible and undesirable to have perfect and complete psychological sovereignty. I’m always being influenced by my physical environment, my friends and family, the political and economic climate in my country, the culture I’m part of, my communities. It’s impossible for me to create a firewall around my mind, to prevent every undesirable idea from entering my brain. It’s not healthy, either. The mutual exchange of ideas is part of living in a society. If I cut myself off from everyone but myself, how will I ever learn and grow?

The point of psychological sovereignty is not to filter every single idea or piece of information that I’m exposed to, but to engage with ideas mindfully and intentionally, to engage with them when I’m ready, to engage with them in a nuanced and considered manner, and to engage with them in a way that strong emotion and rhetoric doesn’t cloud my judgement.

The core design of social media does not allow me to be intentional or mindful about any information I engage with. This is by design, and no amount of tweaking or muting or blocking or browser extensions will fix it. We need to burn the idea of the microblog, the reel, the photo carousel, and the short-form scrolling video to the ground. I’d go as far as to say that we need to legislate away the very idea of modern social media, or at least regulate it heavily in the same way we regulate cigarettes and gambling.

Further, we need to figure out a way to socialize with each other online that does not exploit our basest instincts for somebody else’s profit. Maybe that way looks like the old-school web of blogs and personal websites, or maybe we have to come up with something entirely new.

In the meantime, please stop texting me links to Instagram reels. I’m not going to watch them.

For most of my life, I’ve been what job descriptions on LinkedIn breathlessly call a results-oriented person. That is to say, it’s been in my nature to focus primarily on the outcomes of my actions and not on the means by which I get there.

To be more precise, I’ve had a tendency to set clear, specific goals for whatever activity I’ve been engaged in, and then find the best, most efficient, most well-trodden path in the direction of those goals.

For example, when I wanted to learn to play the piano—nearly ten years ago now—I scoured the internet for the most effective piano courses available, purchased a set of exercise books that were most recommended by music teachers and other pianists, and set about working through them for ninety minutes every day.

It didn’t matter to me that the workbooks focused on Western classical music, a tradition I knew nothing about and was indifferent to. It didn’t matter that the lessons were tedious to the point that I felt a sense of relief rather than accomplishment after mastering any one of them. It didn’t matter that I had to psych myself up every morning in front of the mirror so I could muster up the motivation to sit at the piano and plink out a child’s playground song from nineteenth century England. All that mattered was my goal of becoming a pianist.

It was a miserable way to go about learning a musical instrument. Why did I stick to it for nine grueling months? Because the internet promised me that I’d be a pianist if I managed to get through those workbooks from beginning to end. I’d be able to sight read and play any piece of music I wanted. I never questioned the fact that following the advice I’d received from the internet would have me feeling miserable for years before I developed the skills I wanted. I believed that was just how things worked: first you didn’t know how to play an instrument, then you were miserable for five to seven years, then you were able play your instrument and finally be allowed to enjoy yourself.

This singular focus on producing results has served me well in my career as a software developer. When I’m working with a client, I’m very good at going from knowing nothing about their codebase to making a meaningful contribution to their software within the span of one or two weeks.

However, my focus on output over process has been disastrous when it comes to my creative life. I burned out so badly while learning the piano that the mere idea of learning a musical instrument today fills me with dread. And music is not the only creative endeavor I’ve burned out on.

And so, when I started taking my writing practice more seriously last year, I decided to approach it differently. Instead of focusing on the output from my writing sessions, I decided to focus on the process of writing and make it as enjoyable for myself as possible. I figured if I could turn writing into a fun activity, I’d be eager to spend more time noodling around with it. And if I spent more time noodling around with it, I’d automatically end up producing something interesting.

When I take a results-focused approach to my writing practice, I concentrate exclusively on the artifact that I’m producing at the end of a writing session, not on the experience of doing the work. If the artifact turns out well, I’m happy. If it sucks, I get mad at myself. On days I can’t write anything at all, I get frustrated. It doesn’t matter whether I have fun, learn something new, or write a beautiful sentence that just doesn’t have a home yet. All that matters is the artifact, the final Markdown file that needs to be sent out into the world for other people to read.

When I work with this mindset, I deprive myself of the joys of treating my work as an opportunity to allow new and unexpected ideas to emerge, to surprise myself with new insights that have been lurking at the periphery of my consciousness, to mold the half-formed notions in my mind into different shapes and see what works.

When I focus on the artifact, I treat myself like a machine, a widget generator, a mere thing. This is somewhat acceptable to me in the workplace. The contract is clear when I’m working for somebody else: I produce working software, I get paid money in exchange. For better or worse, this is how employment works in the year 2025. You might be a complex, multifaceted person to your colleagues, but to your employer you are an instrument for performing economically fruitful tasks. But that’s not how I want to treat myself when it comes to blogging or storytelling.

When I’m working on a blog post or story, I want to give myself time to pause, reflect, and wonder. I want to daydream, to meander, to find the dangling thread of an idea I didn’t even know I had and pull at it until I find an unexplored new corner of my mind that I was previously unaware of.

I want my creative life to be inefficient. I want to spend five hours working on a single blog post, then throw it away because the voice feels wrong, or the argument falls apart, or the vibes are off. I want to present the same argument in seven different ways, making the same points every single time, just to see which way feels most like myself. I want to let the writing run away from me, morphing into something I never intended for it to be (something that happened with this post).

And while I’m doing all of this messy, slow, inefficient work, I want to discover my tastes. What do I like in my favorite writers’ works? What do I dislike? What are the themes I keep returning to over and over again in my own work? I want to discover who I am, what I sound like on the page, what I want to sound like on the page. I want to write and publish blog posts riddled with spelling and grammar mistakes, arguments with so many holes in them you could use them to strain pasta, stories in which nothing happens. In the process of writing and publishing all this drivel, I want to discover what it is that I actually have to say to the world.

And most importantly, I want to have fun. I’m probably never going to make money from my writing, but I can sure as hell enjoy myself while I’m doing it. The more I focus on getting to the end of my creative journey—if such an end even exists—the less I focus on the delights hidden along the way, the little side-paths filled with secret pleasures.

And so I have been weaning myself off the habit of focusing so much on results, at least when it comes to the work I do for myself rather than my employers. I’ve been successful at this to some degree, but I imagine it will take me years to undo the habits that have been ingrained in me since young adulthood.

This blog post is proof that I’m at least making some progress. It says nothing new that people smarter than myself haven’t said more eloquently before. It doesn’t even say anything I myself have never said before in my previous posts. But I’ve enjoyed writing it, and by sharing it with the world I might learn a thing or two about a thing or two. It’s all part of the process.

And results? Results are just one of the many side effects of doing the work with love and pleasure. I don’t need to go looking for them. If I keep doing the work, the results will follow.

I have complex feelings about large language models. I use them for a narrow set of tasks where they’ve proven to be useful, but I’ve found that their usefulness outisde of those tasks is overstated by the tech industry. It worries me to see LLMs shoehorned into applications they’re not suited for (such as therapy or health advice).

More importantly, I’m concerned that these technologies are being built and sold by people who are either morally bankrupt or lack the humanities education to understand the effect their work has on society. I can’t escape the feeling that LLMs are being forced into my life by tech billionaires and investors who have their own agendas. I find this unacceptable and, frankly, insulting.

But that’s a conversation for another day. In this post, I want to talk about something a bit more nuts-and-bolts: replacing traditional search engines like Kagi or Google with LLMs when looking up information online.

My friends, family, and colleagues have increasingly been turning to ChatGPT when they want to look up information on the internet, entirely bypassing traditional search engines and even the web as a whole. I believe this is a dangerous practice for two reasons.

(My definition of “looking up information on the internet” includes everything from simple factual questions to relationship advice to recipes to searching for news about recent events. Basically, everything you would’ve typed into the Google search box five years ago.)

First, for every question you ask ChatGPT, it confidently presents you with a singular answer and pretends that it’s the only correct answer to your question, some sort of oracular edict handed down from up high. It eliminates nuance and flattens diverse viewpoints into an insipid mulch of caveats and doublespeak. It strips the answer of all context, leaving only raw “facts” that appear to be answer-shaped, but may or may not represent the truth you were looking for.

Second, LLMs can be sycophantic to some degree, despite researchers trying their best to prevent such behavior. They desperately want to please, and in doing so they will happily adjust their output to conform to your personal belief systems. Depending on what it knows about you and how you phrase your prompts, ChatGPT will gleefully lie to you if those lies will make you more likely to keep using the app. This traps you in a bubble where you are never confronted with information that might violate your personal convictions.

Those are my two primary arguments against using ChatGPT or Claude as your main sources of information. When I started writing this blog post, my goal was to present the above arguments and support them with examples of search queries where searching the web using a traditional search engine yielded better results than asking ChatGPT. And as I scoured my search history, I did find several such queries.

However, this is where my arguments started falling apart.

While it’s true that I got more nuanced, more diverse, more human answers when I plugged a set of keywords into a search engine, the process of dredging up those answers involved wading through a garbage heap of SEO content, paywalled journal articles, advertisements, irrelevant social media posts, and straight-up scams.

For example, while looking for critical essays about Alain Fournier’s novel The Lost Estate, I had to wade through pages upon pages of results from websites that wanted me to pay $9/mo to access summaries of popular books, or offered help with writing high school papers, or wanted to sell me study notes “written by Harvard students”. These were the results I got back from Kagi, a search engine that costs $10/mo to use and is ostensibly designed to cut down on ads and SEO spam. Google’s results were even worse!

In contrast, I was able to ask ChatGPT specific questions about the book and get middling but spam-free answers. I was able to use its Deep Research feature to get the robot to wade through the garbage search results and give me a list of links to high-quality essays. This was a far better experience than manually sorting through hundreds of links myself, and returned the same handful of essays I’d found by sifting through Kagi’s results.

And now, I don’t know how to feel about any of this. Hey Siri, insert Abed Nadir I need help reacting to something GIF here.

I almost didn’t publish this blog post because I’m not sure where I stand on this issue anymore, but I figure I should at least register the dissonance I feel about the state of our digital world in the cursed year 2025.

On the one hand, I still firmly believe that blindly accepting AI generated answers can only end in tears if you actually care about truth, accuracy, or diverse viewpoints. On the other hand, I understand why so many people want to just ask the machine for an answer instead of working to find it themselves. Nobody has hours to waste every day refining search queries, manually filtering out garbage results, and reading the first five hundred words of an article only to find that the rest of it is paywalled.

Our information systems are falling apart. The web is full of spam, malware, scams, ads, popovers, and tracking. High quality sources of information are increasingly behind paywalls. Search engines either don’t care about the garbage clogging up their indexes (Google) or fail to clean them up despite trying their best (Kagi). I can’t blame my friends and family for turning to LLMs to find information when the experience of looking for it on the web is so poor.

I have a feeling the long-term solution to this problem can only be more human curation. What that will look like and how it will be financially sustainable is anybody’s guess. All I can say for sure is that the current state of affairs will push more people to seek out answers from LLMs, which is bad for individuals and bad for society.

I personally use both ChatGPT and Kagi for most of my search queries. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fully trust an AI generated answer without verifying it first. There is simply no telling how the LLM sausage is made. Today the danger might be a hallucinated answer, tomorrow it might be unwanted advertising, but five years from now? I’m not willing to believe that LLMs will be impervious to tampering by nation states who want to rewrite history.

So for as long as I’m able to, I’ll verify everything that comes out of an LLM and keep encouraging people to turn to web search, even if it sucks. But I understand the pain of navigating the web today, so maybe I’ll try being less of a jerk to people when they tell me they get all their information from ChatGPT.

Whenever I’m learning a challenging new skill that requires sustained practice and focus, I like to do it in the company of people who share my goals and are at a similar skill level as me.

For example:

• I’ve always wanted to write fiction, so last year I joined a writing group that focused on creative writing. This has pushed me to understand my writing process, produce more writing, and share my work with people without feeling afraid or embarrassed.
• I don’t like to exercise alone. I currently attend group yoga sessions in my neighborhood, but my notes app contains an ever-growing wishlist of physical activities that I want to do with my friends.
• I recently started an IndieWeb Club in Bangalore with a friend because I want to work on my personal website and blog more often.
• A few weeks ago I wanted to try out vibecoding using Claude, so I got on a call with a friend and we spent three hours working on a small project together (spoiler: the LLM performed poorly compared to what we could’ve done on our own).
• I don’t like to watch movies by myself, so for a few months, I hosted a regular movie night at my place. Watching movies is not exactly a challenging skill for most people, but I’ve never managed to develop the patience and focus to sit in front of my TV for ninety minutes without squirming in my seat. Having people around helped me watch some challenging films I never would’ve watched on my own.

Some (most?) people are solo learners, but I’ve come to realize I do better when I learn in collaboration with others. I love being around people, so I feel motivated to show up and do my best when I combine learning with social activity. The promise of a group hang after a difficult workout or an hour of writing gives me something to look forward to and keeps me going through rough spots.

Even if I wasn’t an extrovert, I would still want to learn and work within a community rather than by myself. For example, my writing group has been beneficial to me in ways that go beyond the camaraderie of a common struggle.

• It has been a safe space for me to try out new ideas, fail, and laugh about it.
• My co-writers have held me accountable for the pieces I’ve promised to write, which has helped me produce more writing than I could’ve done on my own.
• Just by being present and listening to people talk during a meeting, I’ve been exposed to new ideas, diverse viewpoints, and better writing processes. This has resulted in several breakthroughs that have improved my writing or helped me break out of a rut.
• I’ve often written stories or poetry as a response to somebody else in the group. I’ve found this kind of riffing off of my co-writers very generative and very fun.
• Working together with the group has deepened my relationships with people I already knew before joining, and also helped me make new friends.

I’ve only recently started putting this much much stock into the idea that I need to be part of a community to thrive. In my twenties, I wanted to do everything by myself. I had a sheltered childhood, so I spent a large chunk of my young adulthood proving to myself that I could survive in the world on my own.

Only in my early thirties did I begin to realize how much community meant to me. And now, as I approach thirty-five, I sometimes find myself wishing that I’d spent more time working in collaboration with other people through the previous decade of my life.

But maybe the only reason I’m able to rely on other people today is because I feel confident in my own ability to fend for myself? Maybe I had to learn to be myself—really, truly myself—before I was able to weave myself into the social fabric of my city?

It’s difficult to tell what kind of person I would’ve become if I’d made different choices a decade ago. All I know is that I’m glad to be where I am today: part of several communities of people who are striving towards common creative goals.