Technology Got Bad at Being Finished

I read Terry Godier's The Last Quiet Thing this week and it put words to something I've been circling around in my own posts about AI tools and productivity. The things we own now aren't really finished when we buy them. They arrive as obligations disguised as products, and the more sophisticated they get the more they ask of you — not in obvious ways, but in this slow drip of updates and notifications and account management and subscription renewals that you never consciously signed up for but somehow became your second job.

Godier frames it around a Casio F-91W versus an Apple Watch, and the comparison is almost embarrassingly effective. The Casio does one thing and then shuts up about it forever. The Apple Watch arrives with this entire ecosystem of health tracking and notification management and watch face configuration that you're now responsible for maintaining. If you don't engage with it you feel like you're wasting $400, but if you do engage with it you've just added another layer of cognitive overhead to your day.

I don't have an Apple Watch, but I do have a Garmin, and I've turned off almost all of the smart notifications on it because I couldn't stand it. It's supposed to be a running watch but out of the box it wanted to buzz me about emails and texts and calendar reminders, and at some point I realized I'd just strapped another screen to my wrist that was competing for the same attention as the phone in my pocket.

What got me the most was the part about Screen Time, because I've written about this same pattern with AI tools — the way these systems measure your behavior and then frame the results as a personal failing. Like you're the one with the problem for picking up your phone 96 times a day, not the device that pinged you 96 times. It's the same thing I keep running into with AI-assisted coding, where the tool creates the dependency and then the conversation becomes about your discipline instead of the tool's design.

I don't think the answer is to go buy a Casio and throw your phone in a lake, and Godier doesn't really say that either, which I appreciate. He's careful to point out that the "just own less stuff" crowd is doing the same blame shift in a different direction. The tiredness is real and it's structural, and telling people to be more intentional about it is like telling someone to be more intentional about breathing — you can do it for a while but eventually you're going to go back to automatic, and the system is designed to exploit automatic.

I guess what I keep coming back to is that we've collectively accepted this trade where everything gets smarter and more capable but also more needy, and nobody really asked whether we wanted that. It just happened incrementally until one day your watch is telling you to stand up and your fridge wants a firmware update and your car has a subscription for heated seats, and you're sitting there thinking I just wanted to know what time it is.