If you are often doomscrolling on the toilet, this one’s for you.
Presence may be the most important idea for any parent in the 21st century.
This is my best effort at understanding presence.
It takes about an hour to read.
It’s long but it may change how you connect with your family forever.
As a tech dad, I will try to solve presence as an engineering problem. I’ll do it publicly and for that I’m launching a new project:
The Screenless Dad.
David Szabo-Stuban
You have a relationship with technology but you didn't decide what that looks like.
You only have two options to choose from. I'm working on a third.
Over 50% of our awake time is spent looking at screens. We're stuck in a rectangle shaped prison of 10k LED lights. The default setting is the "always online".
Comes with doomscrolling, Youtube, social media, smart everything, interconnectedness, which screws up your brain in countless ways.
The alternative option is equally nuclear: "offline". But this is a luxury not many can afford. We live, earn, spend in the digital world. You can't just simply unplug unless you're rich enough to hire someone who will *screw up their brain for you*.
So as I was experimenting with Alfred, I asked myself: what would a screenless life look like? not offline, but also not always online.
Something that would allow me to keep the benefits of our convenient digital life but also protect me from getting sucked in.
In our household we have a TV, 2 macbooks, a PC, 3 smartphones, a tablet and 2 apple watches. How would I still access all the technology I use today if I couldn't use any of these things the way I do today?
Humans weren't built to stare at screens. We were built to be present with our loved ones, do cool stuff and move our bodies. To me, that's the real promise of AI agents. To be our proxies in the digital world, do all the stuff I'm doing today for me.
So I don't have to click clack type type anymore.
I don't know how but I'll build it. Not just for me. For my daughter.
The idea has become so central to my days that I decided it deserves it's own project. So I'm launching the Screenless Dad. On there I will share
- My daily struggle with screen addiction
- Experiments and trials of reducing our screen dependency
- I will move Alfred's build in public logs to the Screenless Dad too
The reason is simple: Alfred was always meant to be our family butler. I did get distracted by trying to make it a universal agent but honestly you can use Manus for that.
I will keep Lumberjack what it always has been: a place for non-technical people to build stuff with no-code and AI.
But if you're a dad who finds himself doomscrolling on the toilet way too often, maybe check out my new blog. If it resonates, let's connect there.
Otherwise, see you soon with no-code and vibe-coding stuff here:)