The Laptop I Gave Away
I'm meeting my sister in two weeks, and I'm going to give her my laptop.
Not because it's broken. Not because I'm upgrading. Because I can't be trusted with it.
This sounds insane. I'm a software engineer at a big tech company. I write code for a living. I debug distributed systems. I ship features that millions of people use. But put a MacBook in my apartment after 5pm, and I turn into a different person entirely.
Let me back up.
Four years ago, I was student government president for fifteen hundred students. I led a church group. I held seven leadership roles simultaneously. I was the kind of person who showed up to things early, remembered what you told me last week, actually listened when you talked.
I didn't have a smartphone. My boarding school didn't allow them.
I had a laptop, but I only used it for actual work. Writing papers. Coding projects. The kind of things you do and then close the computer and go live your life. I was present. Engaged. Alive in a way I didn't even know to appreciate at the time.
Then I graduated. COVID happened. Lockdown. Everyone on Zoom. And I got my first smartphone.
Instagram seemed harmless at first. It was just staying connected, right? Keeping up with people. Seeing what everyone was doing.
Except what everyone was doing was posting the highlight reel version of their lives while I sat in my childhood bedroom in month six of quarantine, scrolling.
The algorithm learned fast. It knew what I wanted to see before I did. Models in exotic locations. Friends from high school doing interesting things. That girl from freshman year who apparently spent the pandemic getting really into fitness and posting about it.
I'd tell myself I was just checking for ten minutes. Then I'd look up and it was 2am.
I tried to stop. Of course I tried to stop.
I set app timers. Deleted and reinstalled Instagram seventeen times. Promised myself "just weekends." Tried every productivity app in the App Store. Read articles about digital minimalism while scrolling Twitter.
Nothing worked. Or it would work for three days, maybe a week if I was really motivated, and then I'd find some excuse. Some "legitimate reason" I needed to check just this once.
Four years of this.
Four years of staying up until 2am watching reels I wouldn't remember in the morning. Four years of waking up exhausted, rushing to get ready, showing up to things half-present because I was thinking about content I'd seen or comparison I was making. Four years of being physically somewhere but mentally scrolling through an infinite feed of other people's curated lives.
I graduated college. Got a great job. Moved to a new city. On paper, everything looked fine.
But I knew what I'd lost. I'd lived the before. I knew what I was capable of when my attention wasn't colonized by apps designed by engineers whose literal job is to keep me scrolling.
The thing about college is that it exhausted me enough that I'd fall asleep anyway. Three classes, two labs, office hours, group projects, walking between buildings. By midnight I was so tired that even Instagram couldn't keep me awake.
Then I started working 9-5.
I'd get home at 5pm. Make dinner. Sit on my couch. And I had... six hours. Six hours before I needed to sleep. Six hours with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be.
In college, I would've filled that time scrolling and then crashed from exhaustion. But now I wasn't exhausted. I was just... bored. Restless. Alone in a city where I didn't know anyone yet.
The phone was right there.
Except I'd deleted Instagram again. And blocked Safari. And set app limits. I'd finally, after four years, built a system strict enough that I couldn't easily break it.
So instead of scrolling, I just sat there. Bored out of my mind.
And boredom, it turns out, is excruciating when you've spent four years medicating it with infinite content.
I lasted three days.
On day four, I found the bypass. There's always a bypass. I'm a software engineer. I know where Apple hides the settings. I know the loopholes in Screen Time. I know exactly how to get around my own restrictions.
I told myself it was just this once. I had a legitimate reason. I needed to test a side project and I needed browser access to do it.
(This was a lie. I could've tested it at work. But the addiction is very good at manufacturing legitimate reasons.)
I unlocked Safari. "Just for this one project," I told myself.
The project never happened. Instead I scrolled Instagram until 3am, woke up at noon, and showed up to work exhausted and hating myself.
This happened six times in two months. Same pattern every time. Build restrictions, hold out for a few days, find a "legitimate reason," unlock everything, spiral for a week, rebuild restrictions, repeat.
I was losing the same battle over and over.
Then something shifted.
I was talking to someone about this, trying to explain why I kept failing, and I said out loud for the first time: "I can't moderate this. My brain doesn't work that way."
Saying it out loud made it real.
I'm not someone who can have "just a little" Instagram. I'm not someone who can use these apps "responsibly." I've spent four years proving this empirically. Every time I give myself flexibility, I abuse it within 48 hours.
This isn't a character flaw. It's just how my brain works with these specific stimuli.
Some people can have a beer and stop. Some people can't. I can have a beer and stop. I cannot have Instagram and stop.
Once I accepted that, the solution became obvious.
Stop trying to moderate. Remove the option entirely.
I rebuilt my phone from scratch.
iOS has parental controls. You can lock a device to only allow apps rated for young children. No social media. No browser. Just calls, texts, maps, banking, the actually-useful-for-modern-life stuff.
The catch is you need a "parent device" to manage the restrictions. Another iPhone or Mac that holds the unlock code.
Most people keep that device accessible. In a drawer. At home. "Just in case."
That's the flaw. "Just in case" becomes "just this once" which becomes "well I already unlocked it so I might as well..."
I gave my parent device to a friend to hold. Told him not to give it back unless it was an actual emergency.
It worked for two weeks. Then I told him I had an actual emergency. He gave it back. I unlocked my phone. The emergency was fake.
So I tried again with a different approach. Put the parent Mac at my office. Left it there. Don't take it home.
Better. Lasted a month. But then I'd get to work and think of a "legitimate reason" I needed to adjust settings, and I'd walk over to my desk and unlock it, and by that evening I'd be scrolling again.
The parent device couldn't be accessible to me at all. Not at home. Not at work. Not anywhere I could reach it in a weak moment.
My sister lives in another state.
This is where the story gets weird.
I'm meeting her in two weeks. I'm going to hand her my MacBook. The one with the randomly-generated password I don't know. The one that controls my phone's restrictions.
She thinks this is hilarious. "You're a software engineer and you're giving me your computer because you can't stop looking at Instagram?"
Yes. Exactly. That's exactly what I'm doing.
Because I finally understand something: I'm not fighting a discipline problem. I'm fighting a design problem.
Instagram is designed by some of the smartest engineers in the world to be as addictive as possible. They A/B test every pixel. They optimize every swipe. They employ PhDs in behavioral psychology to figure out exactly what content will keep me scrolling.
And I'm supposed to out-discipline that with willpower?
I can't. I've tried. Four years of data says I can't.
But I can out-architect it.
If the parent device is a thousand miles away, I can't unlock my phone in a weak moment. I can't manufacture a "legitimate reason" and give myself access. The option is simply gone.
Problem solved.
Except... I'm a software engineer. I need to code. I need to test things. I need flexibility to work on projects.
That's the rationalization that killed every previous attempt. "I need browser access for this project" turns into scrolling Instagram at 2am.
Here's the genius part. Or the insane part. Probably both.
I spun up a server on AWS. A tiny Linux machine in the cloud. Costs me eight dollars a month.
I SSH into it from my iPad.
Full development environment. Git, Docker, Python, Node, whatever I need. I even have Claude Code running on it for AI pair programming.
But it's all terminal-based. No GUI. No browser. No Instagram. No way to accidentally fall into a scroll-hole while "just checking one thing."
I can code. I can build. I can learn. I can do everything I need to do as a software engineer.
But I can't scroll.
The rationalization is gone. I don't need to unlock my phone for projects. I have a full dev environment via SSH. The "legitimate reason" excuse doesn't work anymore.
It's been a few months now.
My life looks different.
I go to the gym. My rent includes it. For the first time since moving here, I'm actually using it. Three times a week. Not because I'm disciplined. Because I'm bored at home and the gym is something to do that isn't scrolling.
I sleep eight hours. Consistently. I don't stay up until 2am anymore because there's nothing to stay up for. No infinite feed pulling me in.
I call people. Actual phone calls. I FaceTime friends from college. I text people "want to grab coffee?" instead of just liking their posts.
I'm building real community here. Slowly. A climbing gym where I see the same people. A church group. Coworkers I've actually hung out with outside of work.
And the weird thing? I'm not fighting it anymore.
For four years, every day was a battle. Should I scroll or shouldn't I? Should I check or not? Should I give myself access or hold the line?
Exhausting.
Now there's no battle. The option doesn't exist. My phone is locked. The parent device is with my sister. I can't break the system even if I want to.
So I don't want to. The wanting goes away when the option goes away.
I told a coworker about this setup last week. The locked phone. The SSH server. The laptop with my sister.
He laughed. "Dude, that's extreme."
Maybe. But you know what else is extreme?
Losing four years of your twenties to apps designed to addict you. Missing real people around you because you're fixating on people in other states who you'll never meet. Being too exhausted for actual life because you stayed up watching fifteen-second videos you won't remember tomorrow.
That's extreme.
I'm just building infrastructure.
There's this quote I heard recently: "The way we spend our days is how we spend our lives."
I spent four years spending my days scrolling.
Adding that up, that's... I don't even want to do the math. Thousands of hours. Maybe tens of thousands. Gone. Converted into advertising revenue for Meta.
I can't get those hours back. But I can stop the bleeding.
Every day now is different. I'm tired at the end of the day, but it's the good kind of tired. The kind from doing things, not from being drained by screens. I'm building something. Habits. Relationships. Skills. A life I don't need to escape from.
The boarding school version of me—the one who led fifteen hundred students, the one who showed up early and listened when people talked—I'm starting to recognize him again.
Not fully. Not yet. But he's coming back.
My sister asked me the other day, "How long are you planning to do this? The locked phone thing?"
I don't know. Maybe forever.
Or maybe at some point my life will be so full and real and engaging that I won't need the strict boundaries anymore. Maybe I'll have built enough real community and real habits that Instagram won't be tempting.
But I'm not betting on that.
What I know is this: the system works. My life is measurably better in every dimension. Sleep. Health. Relationships. Work. Presence.
And the system only works because I can't break it.
The laptop has to stay with my sister.
I've been thinking about writing this down for a while. Not as a how-to guide or a productivity hack or whatever. Just as the story of what happened.
Because I think there are a lot of people fighting this same battle. Software engineers especially. People who are smart enough to know they have a problem and smart enough to bypass every solution they try.
People who think it's a discipline issue when it's actually a design issue.
You can't out-discipline billion-dollar algorithms built by teams of engineers whose job is to exploit your dopamine system. That's not a fair fight.
But you can out-architect it.
You can remove the option. Make the right choice automatic. Build infrastructure that makes your best self the default.
That's what I did.
Locked phone. EC2 server. Laptop with my sister.
It sounds insane when I say it out loud.
But it works.
And four years from now, when I look back, I won't regret the years I spent present and engaged and building something real.
I'll regret the four years I already lost.
But I won't lose any more.
The server is running right now. Port 3000. SSH only. Terminal interface.
I'm writing this in Vim, on a machine in the cloud, through an iPad that can't install Instagram.
My sister has my laptop.
And I'm finally, after four years, getting my life back.
One boring evening at a time.