Use tools, or they use you

2025-5-9

Use tools, or tools use you

There is a scene in Fight Club (1999) which goes as so:

Tyler Durden and the Narrator sit in a bar after the latter's apartment explodes. He's lost everything. All his Ikea furniture. His fridge which only had condiments inside. His yin-yang rug. All of it. Kaplow.

And as they talk over a pitcher of beer, Durden says to him:

Do you know what a duvet is?

It's a blanket. Just a blanket.

Why do guys like you and I know what a duvet is?

Is this essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense?

No.

What are we, then?

[…]

Consumers.

We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession.

Murder, crime, poverty. These things don't concern me.

What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with infinite channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine. Viagra. Olestra. Martha Stewart.

Fuck Martha Stewart. She's polishing the brass on the Titanic.

It's all going down.

So fuck off with your sofa units and Strinne green stripe patterns.

[…]

But that's me, and I could be wrong. Maybe it's a terrible tragedy.

You did lose a lot of versatile solutions

for modern living.

[…]

The things you own end up owning you.

Now, anyone who has seen the film knows that Durden may or may not take this ideal to its extremity, but nonetheless, his last point about your possessions owning you, can be adapted as follows:

"The tools you use [can] end up using you."

What inspired me to write about this, in all honesty, is the Apple Watch. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with that device.

I've worn one since 2017 almost every day, with some phases of not wearing it since 2022 onwards, instead opting for the all time classic CASIO A163W.

Why did I stop wearing it in the first place?

The watch was wearing me, rather than me wearing the watch.

A common running theme with a lot of modern technology is that it oftentimes ends up using you rather than you using it. A lot of the time, this tends to be by design for engagement (Meta) or for keeping you in a product ecosystem (Apple).

Truly heinous, in my opinion, as many people never really give things that much thought, and just let themselves be guided from this thing to that thing to the other thing as consumers who want shiny-thing-that-makes-other-people-like-them.

But I noticed this when I started to find that the Apple Watch became a thing I had to accommodate for rather than just wear because I gained something from doing so.

It runs out of juice. You have to charge it every day.

The screen is glass. You have to be careful where you move your arm, or it gets scratched and ugly fast.

The notifications ping you all the time. You can never escape your phone's stream of announcements, nor the watch's well-intended but awful "time to breathe!", "you didn't walk today!", or "stand up!" notifications.

Yes, before you say it, I completely agree that this is very much a first world problem.

But my point is this; you can begin using a tool, yet if you end up using it purely for its own sake, it starts to "use" you.

Naturally, the Apple Watch is not the only tool guilty of this.

Of course, another major one is the smartphone, which does the same thing to a greater extent. Social media's entire business model is based on exploiting the device.

You start off opening Instagram because you get a DM. All is well and good. Message is responded to. Done.

You then close the DM page. Where do you end up? The home page.

So naturally, you're going to click one of the nice over saturated pink circles, or maybe even a shiny green Close Friends one, and start looking at stories.

A few seconds later, you get bored because it's all just skies and "donate to XYZ cause", so you scroll down a few posts, and what happens when you get to about the third one?

A perfectly situated set of Reels. Maybe even one that is ultra relatable. Wow. How cool.

What happens next? I think you know.

45 minutes of your life is down the drain, no work is done, and you don't even remember more than maybe two or three of the silly videos you just watched.

Now tell me with a straight face that throughout this process, it was you using Instagram, and not the other way around.

There are teams of designers and psychologists who are in charge of making sure tools like these are "engaging" or "fluid" or "seamless" or a number of other pseudo-words for "make-the-user-use-it-more-and-keep-them-pumping-ad-money-and-data-into-our-pockets!".

But at a certain stage a tool's feedback loops reach a saturation point and reverse in utility, where the utility gained is less than the loss to you and your own autonomy.

I think everyone's saturation point or "limit" for tools are slightly different, some people can tolerate slop better than others, but most definitely in my case, this point is very low. I hate the idea of being "used" by anything.

I think it's humiliating and dishonourable to have to say "oh… I got nothing done today because Instagram Reels hooked my brain", or "I feel overwhelmed because my watch is pushing my brain's buttons".

At the end of the day, if you aren't control of yourself, or at the very least, if you aren't approving or even aware of how you are being controlled… I think it's safe to say that's not exactly a beneficial thing.

Tools like these usually only benefit the people who made the product in the first place. In the casino, the house always wins.

And that's only because it's intentionally designed that way.

As a designer, I assure you anyone doing things properly surely would have it cross their mind. It's why most design process considers first/second/third/fourth/fifth order effects of what your design does and means, and during iteration you evaluate evaluate evaluate.

Corporations like Apple or Meta with their massive design departments obviously must do it when making their products, and sometimes look past their judgements knowingly (like Apple's internal Slack conversations reveal).

Rigorous analysis of a design's effects is important to make a design truly good in both usage and as an independent thing. It's a long process which requires a significant moral compass to sleep well at night, but it's super important.

Rightfully so, I notice that simpler tools are easier to bake this sense into. For example:

You don't miss using a hammer when you no longer need it. It hits the nail. You put it away. You move on.

You don't miss a fork when you no longer need it. It puts the food in your mouth. You wash it up and put it away. You move on.

You don't miss a coathanger when you no longer need it. It holds your clothes. You take the clothes and put the hanger away. You move on.

And yet, you miss a smartphone, an Apple Watch, your social media network of choice, using the Internet/AI, etc. etc. when you don't have it.

You don't just use it, put it away, and move on. How good would it be to live like that?

My guess is that it is almost like once a tool is sufficiently complex and "integrated into you", it becomes "alive" so to speak and can hijack a person in order to remain in use.

Kind of like an appendage, an exocortex or cyborg implant, perhaps. You end up relying it because it mentally becomes interlinked as part of you.

You become the machine, the machine becomes an organ, the medium is the message, yada yada yada.

Maybe I'm looking too deeply into this, haha.

But this being said, now I have probably put you into a paranoid hyperawareness, what can you really do about it?

At the end of my love/hate relationship, I still wear an Apple Watch mostly.

It's one of those tools that gives you an edge. It makes life easier. It enhances your interactions with other surrounding tech and offers a lot of useful add-ons to what you already do. It truly is a versatile solution to modern living.

Things like unlocking your Mac. Tapping your wrist when navigating. Letting you quickly Shazam a song or check the weather without pulling your phone out.

It truly is a versatile solution to modern living.

However, compared to using it stock as Apple would have you use it, I turned off basically all the cringey fitness notifications and deleted a lot of the default apps, and customised it a little to be a bit more cool and rugged using one of these band/case combinations rather than your average Apple Watch look that everyone else on the street keeps.

Battery remains one of those things, but oh well. It eez what it eez.

For things like Instagram or other social media; they can all just be used in the browser.

I guarantee this will cure your addiction.

Most social media/internet apps are basically just slightly-nicer-designed websites baked into a UI container so people don't have to manage everything in one browser, and they can better spatially organise things in compartmentalised "places" on their device.

But ironically, this is what makes them so addictive. The latency between you and opening it is so low it's almost effortless. You can much more easily suddenly fall down the rabbit whole rather than intentionally climb in by thinking about it first.

The website version of Instagram or X or anything else is a lot slower. It takes a few seconds to load. Scrolling sucks because if you pull too far or along it moves the page and breaks the immersion and short-form trance state.

My point is, you don't need the app installed. You don't need notifications that A or B liked your posts or story or started following you. You also don't need to be checking every second of C or D posted. If it's really important, they'll tell you face to face, or message you about it.

You can route your DMs through something like Beeper (which I love dearly, they are out here doing God's work) so that you don't need to have the cheese-trap of Reels, but can still remain in contact with people, and this saves you a lot of pain and time from having to use DMs on web like I was at one point.

This kind of thing encourages you to talk to people. Which is what the original promise and social contract was all along. You, the user, should in theory be using all this dazzling technology and infrastructure, to enhance your life with the tool. Not resign and become a slave to it.

And look, 0 usage isn't reasonable; if you really need to look at anything, it's one browser search away. But the idea is it's all so janky and not-smooth that you don't want to look at anything for too long. In, out.

Add in some screen time limits, you're good to go. I literally never use Reels anymore. And my life is so free. It's literally this image.

You won't talk to everyone all of the time. But that's ok. We as human beings were never meant to.

Use all this new gained time to do something cool. Something fun. Touch grass. Build a thing that doesn't exist. Write some thoughts. Fix a problem.

In the era of AI, there's 0 excuse to not figure anything you want out now. It's one question away. The barrier is all whether you wish to ask.

These are all examples of quite small optimisations and of how you can reclaim a tool as your own rather than letting it use you entirely.

The way I see it is that most tools are nice to have and unavoidable. No luddite mode is really practical. You have to use tools whether you like to or not to get an edge. That's what tools have been about from the first rock being thrown to the AIs of today.

But if you need to use tools to get ahead - you should be using them.

They shouldn't be using you.

REFERENCES:

[1]

Fight Club (1999)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-eEVkKh60

[2]

CASIO A163W - Amazon (not an affiliate link, don't worry) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Casio-Collection-Unisex-Adults-A163WA-1QES/dp/B000KDBJIE

[3]

Tristan Harris Testimony - "It's all by design"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRrguMdzXBw

[4]