Growing Up Means Choosing What Technology You Won’t Use

There’s a kind of maturity nobody talks about — the decision to opt out.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com M on Unsplash

Several years back, I deleted Twitter on a Tuesday afternoon. Not dramatically. I didn’t write a goodbye post or explain myself to anyone. I just held down the icon, tapped delete, and then stood in my kitchen for a moment, half-expecting to feel something seismic.

I felt almost nothing. And then, slowly, something that felt a lot like relief. A growing sense that certain tools weren’t serving me so much as quietly reshaping me into someone I didn’t entirely recognise. X, as it is now, serves only as my place to read some random news.

I’ve been thinking about what to call that process. The closest I’ve come is this, it’s a form of growing up.

The Default Is Always “More”

When we talk about digital literacy, we almost always mean learning to use technology better, faster and smarter. Productivity culture celebrates those who extract the most from their tools. The default cultural position is that new technology is progress and opting out is either fear or laziness dressed up as principle.

But I’m not sure that’s right. Or rather, I think it’s only half the story.

Learning to use something is a skill. But knowing when not to use it — that’s judgement. And judgement, as anyone who’s made enough mistakes will tell you, is what maturity is actually made of.

We make these kinds of judgements all the time in other areas of life. You reach a point where you know alcohol doesn’t agree with you, or that staying up past midnight leaves you wrecked for days, or that certain friendships take more than they give. Nobody calls that weakness. We call it knowing yourself.

Why should our relationship with technology be any different?

What Opting Out Actually Feels Like

I want to be honest here, because the sanitised version of this story is boring and also a little dishonest.

Deleting apps doesn’t feel like freedom at first. It feels like withdrawal. You reach for your phone and the thing you were looking for isn’t there, and for a moment your hands don’t quite know what to do with themselves. That small, restless itch (you know the one that used to send you scrolling through nothing in particular) doesn’t just vanish. It hangs around and waiting to be scratched.

What changes gradually is that you stop scratching it. And then, more slowly still, the itch itself starts to fade.

What grew in its place, for me, was a slightly greater tolerance for being bored. For sitting with a thought long enough to actually develop it. For noticing things in a room rather than retreating from the room entirely. These sound small. They didn’t feel small.

The Question Isn’t “Is This Tool Useful?” It’s “Who Does It Make Me?”

The case for most technology is usually framed in terms of utility. Does it save time? Does it connect you to people? Does it help you do things faster?

These are reasonable questions. But they’re not the only questions.

The more interesting question is simpler and harder: Who am I when I use this?

Am I more curious or less? More patient,or less? Do I feel more like myself after an hour with this thing, or somehow fuzzier, a little depleted, vaguely irritable in a way I can’t quite locate?

This kind of self-observation is uncomfortable precisely because it doesn’t produce clean answers. Most technology isn’t simply good or bad. It depends on how you use it, when you use it, what you were like before you picked it up. But sitting with that discomfort like refusing to let the question be answered for you by marketing or peer pressure or FOMO, that’s the work.

Opting Out Is Not the Same As Opting Away

I want to be clear about something too. I’m not making an argument for disconnection as an end in itself. The people I find most unconvincing in conversations about technology are the ones who wear their abstinence like a badge. Those who treat every smartphone as a moral failing and every deleted account as a spiritual achievement.

That’s just another kind of performance. And performance is not the same as self-knowledge.

The point isn’t to use less technology to prove something to yourself or anyone else. The point is to use technology intentionally , which sometimes means using a great deal of it, and sometimes means walking away from a particular tool that is consistently making you less of who you want to be.

That distinction matters. One is about identity signalling. The other is about paying attention.

What Nobody Tells You About Digital Choices

The decisions I made about what not to use turned out to be more defining than most of the decisions I made about what I would use.

My choice to keep a paper journal, to read books on actual paper, to take walks without earphones, these aren’t the most efficient versions of anything. But they’ve become, in a way I didn’t plan, the “system” of how I think. They shape the pace at which ideas arrive and settle.

There’s a version of adulthood that is simply the accumulation of options as in more tools, more platforms, more capabilities, and more access. And then there’s a version that is subtler and, I think, more interesting. That is the gradual narrowing down to what actually matters to you. Not because the rest is bad, but because your time is finite, your attention is finite, and you are slowly figuring out the shape of the person you’d like to become.

Choosing what technology you won’t use is part of that process. An unglamorous part. But a real one.

The icon is still gone from my phone. The kitchen still looks the same. And I still occasionally feel the old reach. The reflex twitch toward something that isn’t there.

But I’ve learned to find that twitch interesting rather than troubling. It tells me something about what I was using the tool for, and whether that thing deserves a better answer than a scroll.

Usually, it does.