I began to see that the phone-based life, and social media in particular, push us to live in ways that are directly contrary to those recommended by nearly every ancient religious and philosophical tradition. These traditions tell us to be slow to judge and quick to forgive. They offer practices like meditation to quiet the mind and open the heart to deeper truths and greater communion.

A fascinating study of machine gambling in Las Vegas notes that “flow,” that state of being in which someone is so involved in an activity “that nothing else seems to matter,” as Csikszentmihalyi describes it, is precisely the state gamblers seek and attain at the machines, and precisely what machine designers seek to exploit when people initiate play. Yet, while gamblers are experiencing flow, they are not having the kind of optimal long-­term experiences psychologists had in mind when they advocated pursuing activities that put you “in the zone.”

If you ask me, I was solving real, innocent problems. But in hindsight, I was also feeding something else: a compulsion to assert control. Every new tool I built was a sandbox I owned: No weird bugs. No legacy constraints. No decisions I didn’t entirely agree with. Until, of course, I became the legacy.

It starts innocently.

You rename a batch of files with a ten-line Python script, or you alias a common git command to shave off two keystrokes. Maybe you build a small shell function to format JSON from the clipboard.

You’re not even trying to be clever. You’re just solving tiny problems. Making the machine do what it should have done in the first place. And then something happens. You cross a threshold. You look at your tools, your environment, your operating system—even your editor—and suddenly everything is fair game.

You could rebuild that (if you wanted to). You could improve that (if you wanted to).

Then someone challenges you. As banter maybe, perhaps jokingly but also with a dash of hope. Then the air in the room changes.

It suddenly becomes something else. It becomes:

You should.

And from that moment forward, the world is broken in new and specific ways that only you can see.

Kafka once wrote that “a cage went in search of a bird.”

If all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.

Like Camus’ Sisyphus, we are condemned to push the boulder of our own systems uphill—one fix, one refactor, one script at a time. But unlike the story of Sisyphus, the curse is not placed onto you by some god. We built the boulder ourselves. And we keep polishing it on the way up.