My 2025 in review

2025 has been the year where something broke in my long-standing relationship with technology. That something could be summarised with the word trust but ‘trust’ is just the core of it. Much like an earthquake, its effects aren’t just limited to its epicentre. In November I already wrote extensively about this feeling of progressive disconnection from tech, but that didn’t come out of nowhere, and the general sense of fatigue I repeatedly experienced before it can’t be disregarded.

This accumulation of discomfort, fatigue, disconnection that culminated in my fracture with tech, did turn 2025 into a strange year. A year where I’ve felt unfocused, inward-looking, and in need of a restructuring, so to speak. This vague feeling of unease and unrest affected pretty much all of my interests. It’s been like when you stop and finally take a hard look at all your habits, your routines, the things you’ve been taking for granted, the direction you’ve been inertially following, and start really re-evaluating everything.

For someone with many different interests and a constant intellectual curiosity such as myself, this internal grinding to a halt for a long-overdue in-depth check-up has been anything but easy. But it had to be done, and it’s still ongoing.

I feel it’s a painful, yet important stage where you start questioning your identity — not in a psychological sense, but more like in terms of what defines you, and what you allow to define you. What are the interests that take up most of your time and energies? Do they deserve to be taking up all that time and all those energies? What lies behind these creative blocks? Are there other routines that hamper what you feel should be your main endeavour? Why do priorities suddenly feel all wrong? And so on and so forth.

I have been, for many years, at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, just like Steve Jobs viewed Apple’s position in the industry. I have been in love with writing, with text, and with the tools for writing and handling text for most of my adult life. At first those tools were entirely analogue; then, as technology progressed and computers became powerful, versatile, and ubiquitous as they are today, my creative tools evolved accordingly.

When tech becomes one of your main interests, you start developing an intoxicating fascination with tools — both in the hardware and software sense. And also beyond computing per se. It’s when in photography you start obsessing over gear and get bitten by the ‘Gear Acquisition Syndrome’ bug. To the point that your actual photography gets thrown in the background while you’re searching for the perfect camera or lens or focal length or accessory or post-processing software…

To the point that your actual creative writing is pushed aside to make space for too many attempts at creating the perfect writing workstation or distraction-free writing corner or searching for the perfect ancillary tools for taking notes and writing outlines for your current or next novel, novella, short story, etc.

It is indeed a long story, but for my and your sanity I’ll keep it short and hopefully to the point — in that fracture with tech that opened wide in 2025, together with the fatigue, the broken trust, the disconnection, the definitive realisation that big tech companies are not on our side, not even Apple, there was also the hurtful revelation that tech has been commandeering and monopolising my life much more than I’ve cared to admit to myself. That that famous intersection of technology and liberal arts has actually been a terrible crash at an intersection, where technology has been a big truck obliterating the small liberal-arts economy car.

Mind you, I’m not putting the blame squarely on technology here. I’ve made my share of bad decisions. I’ve let inertia take over when I probably should have taken matters into my own hands. I am solely responsible for the time I wasted caring too much about things that ultimately do not really define me. I got too intoxicated with tech as something to focus on instead of treating it like a means to an end.

But, especially for the past 10–15 years, technology’s sphere of influence has certainly increased, and with it its gravitational pull. Having to stay constantly and reasonably up-to-date with tech — both for my day job and to provide sensible commentary here — meant dedicating to tech a portion of my daily routine that has only been increasing with time. And for a long while I haven’t minded that. I’ve told myself many times that tech is kind of unavoidable today, and after all I have several interests that are closely related with tech, like user interfaces, user interaction, usability and accessibility.

This was all well and good as long as I felt that technology and the tech industry were on my side and had my interests as a user and customer at heart. During 2025 a lot of that came crumbling down. Again, it’s not that something specific happened last year. As I said before, the fracture came as a result of cumulative forces and realisations. When the company making the ecosystem you’ve been enjoying for at least three decades loses its way; when you see a lot of things coming and yet what eventually comes is even worse than you expected, and you just can’t ignore or downplay it anymore, the kind of resulting destabilisation is rather foundational at a personal level.

And how can one enjoy tech when it comes to this? When companies start blatantly pushing their agendas on you, directly or indirectly. When they start filling software you rely upon with crappy user interfaces, useless features, ‘artificial intelligence’ impositions nobody really asked for. When their attitude becomes, directly or indirectly, user-hostile.

I really don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but it’s been a few months now where I’ve felt a nagging question pounding in my head — Where to go from here?

My work and creative headspaces have to be both reconfigured. I don’t see myself purchasing more or new Apple products for the time being, yet at the same time I can’t just leave the whole ecosystem behind. I remember how in the 1990s a lot of people — myself included — had to tolerate Windows at work while taking refuge in the Macintosh platform for creative and leisure-related activities. While today I’ve come to a point (and perhaps you have too) where I tolerate Mac OS and iOS because I need them for my work, while taking refuge in…

In what, exactly? This is another thing I’ve tried to explore in 2025 and I’m still on it at the moment. I’ve looked into Linux a bit more. I have enjoyed using older Macs with older Mac OS versions and older applications that are still very useful to me today. I have enjoyed my Nothing Phone (2a) and don’t regret my switch to Android in the least. But going back to reading more — and reading more physical books — has been especially grand.

And gaming. I shan’t forget gaming and how therapeutic it has been. And not just a bunch of favourite games. The indie game industry as well, where a lot of indie studios and developers have released products that respect their audience’s needs and intelligence, so much more than what the mainstream tech industry has been doing in recent times. Gaming for the most part has felt like a sane environment to dedicate time and energies to, through game purchases, through the support of certain talented creators producing analyses and critical essays on games and the gaming industry, through directly supporting a few indie game developers, through participating in specific forums where I found a surprisingly non-toxic environment (such a rarity in this day and age). And it’s also been kind of ironic to see a company like Valve announcing products that resonated with me more than whatever Apple is doing now.

When I started thinking about this piece, it didn’t look like what you’ve read so far. I thought about neatly structuring it in sections where I would discuss different aspects of my ‘tech life’ in 2025, fun stuff like ‘my most used apps in 2025’, or ‘the cameras I favoured for my photography’, or ‘the tools I’ve relied upon the most in 2025’… But the truth is that 2025 has been a chaotic, confusing year where I felt as if I lost my sense of direction, technologically speaking. And to reiterate, that fracture I’ve been talking about has weirdly affected a lot of other things, even stuff I’m passionate about — like photography or writing — that should really have been immune to that. But it’s been what it’s been.

Perhaps, more than losing my sense of ‘tech direction’, a more appropriate analogy is that last year I finally realised that I didn’t like or identify with the direction tech has been taking, I got off the ride, and found myself in a new and unfamiliar place, unsure of what to do.

In this particular state of mind, talking about my most used apps in 2025, or the cameras, or the tools, truly feels vacuous and inconsequential. It’s been mostly the same dozen apps I’ve been using for years (Acorn, BBEdit, MarsEdit, iA Writer, nvALT, Find Any File, Raskin [for when I’ve needed a more spatial Finder], Instapaper, Mail, Vivaldi and Orion as main browsers, TextEdit, Skim, TextBuddy, NetNewsWire, IINA, iStat Menus, etc.); among the new-ish tools, I found the Affinity suite, CleanShot X, and LocalSend to be particularly useful and well made. Services have been reduced to just Dropbox, while the only utility my iCloud+ plan provides is in keeping the backup of my several older Macs and iOS devices. That’s it, essentially. As for tools, an old Kindle Paperwhite for reading ebooks, an even older Kindle DX for perusing PDFs, a Boox Go 10.3 e‑ink Android tablet for annotating stuff, and too many other computers and vintage devices to enumerate, which I used for spur-of-the-moment activities or exploration. Boring, tried-and-true solutions I kept close to my chest during this prolonged period of uncertainty.

What lies ahead?

I hope 2026 will bring more focus and clarity as I try to concentrate and find some way out of this uninspired, fuzzy mess. As tech becomes more and more intrusive, both in presence and unwanted features, my aim is to get it out of my face; to reduce its gravitational pull; to seek alternative solutions to Big Tech, such as the small but good stuff made by people who are as tired of and disillusioned with mainstream tech as myself; to try to find refuge in what used to work and be beneficial to my creativity — the analogue, the offline, the tactile and tangible. In short, to try reviving an inner garden that’s been neglected for too long. I have no specific goals or resolutions for the new year except doing my best to prevent it from becoming another 2025.