If I’m being honest, the technology I’d be better off without is the stuff that keeps tricking me into thinking I’m going to get something done. Every day after school, I have this sacred five-to-seven minutes of peace before the next wave of chaos hits. It’s the quiet moment when my room finally stops echoing, the desks stop moving, and Princess isn’t requiring me to separate her from Samantha like I’m officiating a canine version of West Side Story.
And every day, I squander that little slice of heaven by opening my phone “just to check something.” That’s all it takes. One tap. Suddenly, I’m watching a bourbon review from a guy whose entire personality seems to be yelling “HOO-OOO!” while smelling a Glencairn. Or I fall down a rabbit hole of Australian Kelpie videos because I’m still trying to figure out if Samantha is, in fact, a highly intelligent herding dog or just terrified of Princess. Both seem equally plausible.
Even when I’m trying to be productive, technology gets me. I’ll sit down to work on Tumbleweeds, open the document… and then remember I need to quickly check my email. I’ll open Gmail and immediately be hit with a yearbook message, a parent message, a student message, and—because the universe has a sense of humor—an ad for a bourbon I’ve already bought twice. By then, my brain has the same attention span as a toddler with a kazoo.
At school, the comedy continues. My journalism students will spend three class periods debating which font “looks more professional” and then write the actual article in a single burst of panicked typing. Meanwhile, my 8th graders swear they didn’t have time to read last night… yet they somehow managed to watch eleven hours of TikTok recap videos about a book they didn’t read last quarter. Technology giveth, and technology taketh away.
And of course, there’s the great AI betrayal. I ask Sora for a still image, and it says, “No. Today we do video only.” DALL-E sees a bourbon bottle and decides to turn it into an avant-garde lantern. Gemini—bless its heart—keeps mopping the floor with everyone, which is great, except now I’m juggling three AIs the way my students juggle excuses.
The truth is, I’m not anti-technology. I just recognize that some of it is quietly stealing the hours I keep thinking I still have. I don’t need every notification. I don’t need to know what random strangers think about Florida football. And I don’t need my phone reminding me that someone, somewhere, just released a new toasted-maple-double-char-finished bourbon that I cannot possibly live without.
Maybe the answer isn’t going full Amish. Maybe it’s just deciding that a few parts of my day don’t belong to the blinking, buzzing little rectangles that follow me everywhere. I want my attention back—for writing, for my family, for the classroom, for peace, for the shelves of bourbon I swear I’m organizing for “research.” Technology is fine. I just want to use it on purpose… not because it uses me first.
Copyright © 2025 Doug DeBolt.
