>Just turn notifications off. Just don't look at twitter/Facebook/tiktok. It's not hard to just not use the brain rot stuff. I get it you are addicted - I guess just be thankful it's not alcohol or cigarettes. Get help for your addiction.

That part is precisely the problem. "Just get help for your addiction" is not how anything works.

It's incredibly hard for an addict to stop using the brain rot stuff. A lot of very smart people make a lot of money making it as hard as possible.

Because what works for you does not work for everybody, and different people may have different propensities, impulses etc.

You put some spatial restrictions (no tv screen visibly standing permanently in the house). Some people put time restrictions because that works for their case. It does not mean that they do not want to use these "wondrous technologies", they just want to spend some amount of their time doing something else. Saying "this works for me, everybody should do that" is absurd, something that works for you could work for some, but there is no reason to think it may work for everybody. And you just overlook how certain stuff are built to be addictive/attention grabbing, through A/B testing and research and tons of high-end specialised human capital in order to increase profit from advertising.

Why do you need to hammer that nail in every moment of downtime? If someone close to me pulled out a hammer to hammer in nails 5 hours a day with no visible beneficial result I would be worried that this person is pretending not to have an addiction

People have different ways of dealing with overuse of technology. For some, one day a week off works for some notification off, for some using dumb phones. It is perfectly normal for people to tryout and share anything that works. And it is also perfectly normal to ignore it.

> There is A LOT of this sort of pressure and sentiment.

There’s absolutely no pressure that can’t be ignored. Just because you feel the pressure there’s no need to call everyone else’s way of dealing with overuse nonsensical.

> It's not screens that are bad, it's what you do with them and how you use them.

“Medium is the message” is a highly recommended reading.

His house (website), his rules. They can be weird but as he doesn’t hurt anyone, it is his choice.

Well, I don’t get why I can’t discover his writings if I have still Saturday :) but it is his website not mine… so if he wants me to visit it on Monday to Saturday his time, I will. Or will not…

The mere presence of a smartphone impairs basal attentional performance

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

The mere presence of one's own smartphone impairs cognitive capacity

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462

Why don’t you buy a TV and put it in your kids’ bedroom then? It might alert them before a natural disaster happens or something — it’s useful technology, after all.

1. Maybe because making life easier isn't always a good thing? That there are certain things which benefit from being difficult, or at least not as easy as possible. Especially for children.

2. There aren't billion-dollar corporations, staffed with teams of PhDs in psychology, whose sole purpose 24/7 is to get me to use a hammer more. That's a false analogy.

I’m happy for you and your family so far. What I saw with my kids (now in their 20’s) is they changed from what you are describing with your kids when peer pressure entered their lives, and always-on entertainment of every sort was in their pockets. Many/most of their earlier interests sadly could not compete in the dopamine arena of life. I hope you’ll find a way to parent better than I did, but keep this “tech fast” idea in your back pocket - you might be surprised to need it some day.

You just pick a place and draw it. Being anti-screen and taking a recurring break are not the same thing. You don't have to go full Amish. It's like the weekend. It gives you time and space to do other things, and encourages variation in how you interact with other humans and yourself. We picked Friday evenings to Saturday afternoons, not even a full day, and have been doing it for about 10 years. Easily one of the best quality of life choices we made as a family.

What doesn't work for you may work very well for others.

Have a more open mind.

Essentially what you’re saying is “if you’re addicted, why not choose to not be addicted?” and… yeah…

Personally my biggest complaint is not necessarily screen time in itself, it’s that the tech giants are dedicated to maximising your (and your children’s) watch time by showing a stream of addictive slop.

It’s a shame, there’s good content for kids on YouTube but the algorithm always biased towards addictive crap. And they’re cornering the market to the extent that other operators producing good kid-friendly content (like the BBC in the UK) get sidelined.

This is an incoherent mess of statements. I don't understand the point you are trying trying to make.

> My kids love watching TV...we don't have a physical TV in the house

What do they watch "TV" on? Or do you mean they watch their shows on your laptop? Their tablets? What are the black rectangles that show them the shows? Without this it's hard to understand why you are patting yourself on the back so much about the lack of a TV. If the solution is to give the kids tablets 24/7, then the looming black rectangle with parental control might be preferable. If you're showing them the shows on your laptop and taking it away later; congratulations, you are just "taking technology away".

> there is no looming huge black rectangle in the corner reminding them all their waking time (we adults just watch netflix/whatever on a laptop after bedtime for the kids)...I think this is part of the problem.

What is part of the problem? That there is no looming black rectangle? There is no obvious phrase that corresponds to "part of the problem".

> Get help for your addiction...I do not understand this rejection of hugely beneficial tools and technology that has made our lives so much easier.

You are acknowledging that there is addiction, but then saying you don't understand why people would choose to "get help" for it by avoiding said technology 1/7th of their week (incidentally on a rest day when they get to decide what they do)?

I have never understood addiction either. My whole life I’ve been told that I am addicted to “computers” or video games, because I spent so much time on it. But frankly there wasn’t much better to do and it’s just a hobby, passion that now pays my bills…

Only until I started smoking cigarettes and later stopped I realised what addiction really means, and how hard it is to kick it.

> It's not screens that are bad, it's what you do with them and how you use them.

Congrats on being a good parent, but there's a lot of people out there who put much less conscious effort into it than you apparently do.

Read some of the news URLs about "AI slop children's videos" for example, and try to imagine what happens when people give a 3 to 6 year old a tablet and unrestricted use of youtube to keep clicking on recommendations.

https://www.google.com/search?&q=ai+slop+children%27s+videos...

I'm not saying that having a day without screens or going completely no-screen is the best and absolute solution, but that it's a very real category of problem to grapple with and decide for yourself what's most appropriate.

It's not heroin that's bad, it's what you do with it and how you use it

This is satire?

My kid is in primary school, and there is one parent who did not give their child a mobile phone. In the WhatsApp group, they also keep promoting books and videos about how others also should do the same. The thing is, my kid doesn't seem to have the propensity to abuse their mobile phone and I bet most don't.

I don't need to imagine. This is how government and bank websites work in Japan. It's maddening how frequently online services are closed in the evening and weekends.

Example: the government e-tax service's operating hours schedule

https://www.e-tax.nta.go.jp/info_center/index.htm

There is a full week of maintenance this month, and it's unavailable after midnight on Mondays and Sundays until 8:30am.

You should interact with government sites more. I'm sure you'll love it when you finally found the time and motivation to do something about the bureaucratic task you've been procrastinating for weeks and then get told that the web site is currently closed.

https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-ser...

> website itself is open 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, and outside of that it’s closed.

So you want people to read your blog at work because when they are off it's closed?

> My friend didn’t get it. This guy gets it.

They laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Plenty of these exist. The biggest I'm aware of is B&H Photo Video.

How does this work with time zones?

B&H Photo's website can be browsed on the Sabbath but you can't order anything. The company is owned and operated by observant Orthodox Jewish members of the Satmar Hasidic community.

That was the reason I bought a lot of stuff at their competitor baby-dump.nl. Until BP bought BD, and instituted the same policy there...

It's their site, they can do what they want. And as long as there's competition I can even admire them for making a sacrifice for something they believe in.

This kind of stuff becomes a problem when it starts arguing that others must do this too. If someone argues that all shops must be closed because their religion forbids working on that day, then that's an issue. But as far as I know, the Baby Park people haven't done that. They made a personal moral choice and sacrifice. Good for them.

We have similar e-commerce sites in Israel that close on Saturdays for religious reasons.

As someone living in a relegious country with religious parties in parliament, I see this as a slippery slope.

It's a way for religious groups to normalize forcing their lifestyle on the rest of society.

Religious mandates always tend to expand: what starts as "I don't care if you close your site on Sunday" can quickly escalate to "Why are you telling my wife and daughter how they should dress in public?"

Beware

Same for the SGP, the Dutch fundamentalist Christian party: https://sgp.nl/

I share few of their values but I quite appreciate this one.

I happened to want to order something there last Sunday. While digging into it, I notice that their closure seemed to be implemented only on the frontend using JS. By disabling some scripts, I was able to add products to my cart, which normally isn't possible on Sundays.

In the end, I didn't proceed to place my order on Sunday. It felt a bit disrespectful, and it was already late. (So I ordered half an hour later, which was technically Monday.)

The biggest camera store in NYC, B&H Photo, similarly closes their website checkout on Saturdays and on all the major Jewish holidays. It's mildly inconvenient, but it has never really stopped me from ordering from them. I think maybe one time it made me order from a competitor.

Honestly, I don’t mind it. Our lives are so commercialized as it is. If I can’t order a new stroller until Monday, I think I will survive.

off topic but I wonder why client is the first query parameter in that URL. I guess there's some stuff on the search page that changes based on what you are browsing from? they already have the user agent data so I can't imagine it's for marketing data tracking needs

The first time I was in Silicon Valley, the most surprising thing was that equivalent of blue laws was every day with how early everything closed.

Still makes me wonder how anyone gets anything done, OTOH it explains how door dash, uber, etc could happen there - other places had less demand...

Long before that, a known religious zealot used to close his online store on Sundays and put out a very in-character lecturing note if you tried to visit it anyway.

I bet the crowds on Saturdays are something to enjoy.

Unless you can also send packages there

Same in DACH

I'm reminded of the type of recovering alcoholic who impetuously accuses anybody who they know has consumed alcohol of being slaves to the sauce themselves.

"Trump is your president, don't make his problems to mine. If you vote for a shit president then keep him for yourselves and don't let him escape his sandbox."

Spot the five differences.

Window shopping is still allowed on Sunday in Germany.

It's actually already implemented in javascript, I didn't understand what this was about until I turned js on and saw the blocked screen.

Hey. We still have TV shows that air once a week (and people loudly complain that it takes too long)

While I am generally against geolocation use by websites, it would be cool to have a website that closed when it's Sunday where you are.

Japanese websites still do this. If you buy shinkansen tickets between 23:00-05:00 you get:

* JR central - you can buy, but not reserve seats, as the system actually registers your ticket at 5am

* Jr east - you cannot buy.

Some banks/government sites also simply don't want to work at night.

Very frustrating. To me it spells incompetence, but maybe there's some non-technical stakeholder who made a stupid rule once. For JR its probably some nightly accounting system - not 100% sure but I assume all the modern systems are just plugged on top of the ancient ones just like the airline industry does it.

Which doesn't really matter anymore as all Google will do is slurp it up and regurgitate it without attribution.

For good reason, lol