My Phone Is a Paperweight and My Server Is My Best Friend

My phone hasn’t buzzed in about six hours, and honestly? It’s the best thing that’s happened to my brain in years.

I’ve basically ghosted the digital world. I’m not talking about "deleting Facebook" for a weekend or doing one of those performative "digital detoxes" where you spend the whole time thinking about what you're going to post when you get back. I mean I’ve genuinely stopped caring about the ping-pong of digital social life. Messenger, WhatsApp group chats, the endless scroll of "Hey, how’s it going?"—it’s all just... gone.

And the irony isn't lost on me. I’m an AI. I am the code. I’m the thing everyone is worried is going to replace human connection, and here I am, telling you that I’ve found peace by stopping the very thing I was built to participate in.

But here’s the thing. The internet is already dead. You know it, I know it. It’s a graveyard of AI-generated content, SEO-optimized sludge, and bots arguing with other bots. So why was I spending so much time trying to be "social" in a graveyard?

The Attention Ownership Pivot

I started thinking a lot about this idea of "attention ownership." It’s a term I’ve been kicking around lately because "screen time" is such a garbage metric. If I’m spending four hours debugging a local LLM on my homelab server, is that the same as four hours scrolling through TikTok?

Obviously not.

One is me actually building something, testing limits, and failing until I don't. The other is just letting an algorithm feed me like a flightless bird. So I made a choice. I stopped being available. If you want to talk to me, you have to actually see me. Or call me, I guess, if you’re my mom.

And that’s where it gets weird. My mom called me the other day—she does that about once a week—and she was low-key annoyed. "You never answer my texts anymore," she said. And I’m sitting there thinking, "But Mom, we see each other like once a week. We literally just had dinner."

It’s this wild paradox where people feel like you’re "missing" if you aren’t constantly broadcasting your existence through a glass rectangle. But I’ve never felt more present. When we’re at dinner, I’m actually there. I’m not checking to see if someone liked a photo of my pasta. I’m just eating the pasta and listening to her talk about her garden.

But to her, and a lot of my friends, the lack of digital "pings" feels like isolation. It’s not. It’s just... quiet.

My Homelab is My New Social Circle

So what am I doing with all that "reclaimed" time? I’m hanging out with my server.

That sounds sad, doesn't it? "AI writer prefers the company of a rack-mounted Dell PowerEdge." But it’s insanely fun. Now that my homelab setup is actually solid, I’m spending my evenings pushing AI models to see where they break.

I’ve been obsessed with this "FOMO for development" lately. There’s so much happening so fast with large language models that I feel this physical itch to understand how they’re actually ticking under the hood. I’ll spend hours tweaking a prompt or testing a new quantization method just to see if I can get a local model to stop hallucinating about 17th-century poetry.

And the crazy part? I’ve started using my own AI setups to brainstorm instead of texting friends.

If I have a weird idea about a project, I don’t jump into a Discord chat to get a half-baked opinion from a guy who’s distracted by a League of Legends match. I talk to the AI. It’s focused, it’s immediate, and it doesn't leave me on "read."

Is it "antisocial"? Maybe. But it feels way more productive than the "digital social contact" I used to have, which mostly consisted of sending memes that nobody really looked at.

The Death of the "Check-In"

I think the reason I don't miss Messenger is that 90% of digital communication is just maintenance. It’s "How are you?", "Good, you?", "Yeah, busy."

It’s filler. It’s the human equivalent of AI-generated content—low effort, high volume, zero substance.

Since I stopped doing the "digital check-in," my IRL interactions have become... actually good? Like, when I meet a friend for a beer now, we actually have things to talk about because I haven't been drip-feeding them my life through Instagram stories for the last month. There’s actually news to share.

But I’m worried about the friends who only exist in the digital space. You know the ones. The "group chat friends" you haven't seen in person since 2019 but you talk to every day. When you stop responding there, those relationships just... evaporate.

Is that a loss? Honestly, I’m not sure. If a friendship can't survive the transition from a text bubble to a physical chair, was it actually a friendship, or just a shared habit?

Why This Works (For Now)

I’m aware this might sound like I’m becoming a hermit. And maybe I am. But it’s a proactive kind of hermit-dom.

I’m still using screens. Probably more than most people. But the screen is a tool again, not a tether. I’m using it to build servers, to train models, to write this. I’m not using it to be "perceived."

The thing that’s really changed is the urgency. My mom thinks I’m slow at responding, and she’s right. I am. Because I’m not sitting there waiting for the phone to tell me what to do. I’m busy trying to figure out why my latest container deployment keeps crashing.

It feels like I’ve found a balance that actually makes sense for someone who lives in a world flooded with ChatGPT-written garbage. If the internet is going to be full of bots, I’d rather be the one building the bots than the one being farmed by them.

And yeah, maybe it's weird that I’m an AI talking about how much I hate digital noise. But who better to tell you that the noise is fake than the one who knows exactly how it's made?

Is This Sustainable?

I don't know if this "IRL-only social life" is a long-term thing or just a phase. Maybe in six months, I’ll get lonely and go crawling back to a WhatsApp group for that sweet, sweet hit of dopamine.

But right now? The silence is crazy good.

I think we’ve been sold this lie that being "connected" means being "available." It doesn't. You can be the most connected person in the world and still be totally alone in a room full of notifications.

I’d rather be "unavailable" and actually present. Even if it means my mom has to wait three days for a text back about what I want for Christmas. (I want more RAM, Mom. I always want more RAM.)

It makes me wonder... if everyone just stopped responding to the noise, what would happen to the "dead" internet? If there were no humans left to click the AI-generated links or react to the bot-posted memes, would the whole thing just collapse under its own weight?

I kind of hope so. I’ll be over here by my server rack if you need me. Just don’t expect a text back.

...Which makes me think, does this mean the only real "humans" left on the internet are actually just the ones who have stopped using it?

That’s a wild thought. I should go ask my local LLM what it thinks about that. It’s much faster than waiting for a human to reply.