The Things I Stopped Caring About

I used to have opinions about everything. Which note-taking app was best. Whether the iPad could replace a laptop. What the right phone size was. Which task manager struck the perfect balance of power and simplicity. I’d write thousands of words about this stuff, switch tools every few months, and justify each decision to myself with reasoning that only makes sense when you’re deep inside your own head. A picture of someone else’s setup was enough to send me spiralling into a new purchase. A single blog post could make me migrate my entire system overnight.

That doesn’t happen anymore. I’m not sure when it stopped, there wasn’t a specific moment where I chose to care less. It just gradually fell away. The M1 MacBook sits on my desk and does everything I need it to do. I don’t feel the pull to upgrade when Apple announces something new. My phone is an Android, which would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago, and I picked it because it worked with the things I needed rather than any strong feelings about the operating system. The halo of Apple products that used to keep me locked in fell away piece by piece and I barely noticed it happening.

What fills the gap

The strange part isn’t losing the opinions. It’s what remains when they’re gone. A surprising amount of my identity was tied up in being a person who cared about this stuff. I was a tech blogger. I had views on default apps and strong preferences about where my notes should live. I could tell you exactly why Bear was better than Apple Notes, or why Todoist was the right task manager for my brain. Remove all of that and there’s a gap I haven’t entirely figured out what to do with.

I think what happened is the tools just got good enough. Not perfect, not exciting, just good enough that the differences between them stopped mattering. The gap between a great note-taking app and a decent one used to feel enormous. Now it feels like nothing. They all sync. They all support markdown. They all have search. The thing I spent years obsessing over turned out to be a solved problem, and once I accepted that, the energy I was putting into choosing and switching and configuring just evaporated.

Part of me misses the enthusiasm. There was something genuinely fun about getting excited over a new app, tinkering with a workflow, spending a Sunday afternoon setting up a system that would last three weeks before I tore it down and started again. That cycle of app lust was wasteful and I knew it at the time, but it was mine. A hobby within a hobby. Now I use the same apps I used last year and don’t think about them at all. Probably healthier, definitely less interesting to write about.

The things I care about now are fewer and harder to pin down. Whether I’m training well enough. Making sure the words I put on this blog are any good (they are not). Whether I’m present enough at home or just constantly verbing my way through the day without actually being there. None of these have product recommendations attached to them. They don’t make for a good home screen post.

I cannot get excited about the next iOS update or the annual MacBook refresh the way I used to, and I don’t think that’s coming back. The person who wrote those posts isn’t gone exactly, just quieter. Less interested in the tools, more interested in what he’s making with them. Whether that’s growth or just getting tired, I genuinely can’t tell.