February theme: Tend

Sometimes life, the universe, leads you to where you’re supposed to be. The beginning of 2026 has been filled with chatter of analogue living, lowering screen times and 90s nostalgia. But why?

We’re quite aware that high tech living isn’t going anywhere. I toyed with the idea of getting a ‘dumb phone’, I even had daydreamed about this barbie pink flip phone and how it would solve all of my feelings of overwhelm and impending doom and dread. I could have this phone in my hand by the weekend, even quicker if I paid for express shipping, one click and it would be whisked away to be processed and packaged. Arriving ready to be unboxed, delivering a hit of dopamine along with the ideology of the ‘dumb phone’ freedom, creativity and more time in reality.

Of course I didn’t buy the phone. First of all, I actually need a smart phone for everyday life. Second of all, no item is capable of changing the digital mindset that I’ve been training myself to adopt for the past decade. Of course it’s not just me, it’s everyone. Society has changed and evolved with the rise of technology, the internet used to be an inherently low stakes place to exist which seems a crazy thing to say in 2026

In 2003 I finally had my first taste of the internet. To me it was like a secret club, it was chat rooms, funny videos and trying to navigate the multitude of independent websites. The internet was long form media. Social media hadn’t been born, the internet was an anonymous experience in which its users were united in their desire for connection based on common interests. 

My parents bought a dial up internet and our package allowed for 20 hours per month of usage which seemed more than enough. I would set an egg timer for an hour and go online. Within a couple of months I had racked up a higher internet bill from spending 100s of hours online. When my parents finally made the switch to broadband, unlimited internet, it became a hub of creativity for me. This early and unrestricted access to the internet shaped my outlook on life, it was transcendence from being a teenager in the early 2000s in Ireland. It was a magic portal in discovering the multitude of music, movies, and anything else that might appeal to a teenage girl. Please remember that we didn’t have smartphones, or massive companies that claimed monopoly ownership over certain areas that would use an algorithm to suggest your next book, band or hobby. We manually aggregated all of the information we consumed. We carefully tended to our online identity. It was a time when online blogs became increasingly popular, it was the sense that nobody from your small (or big) town would log onto the internet and read your thoughts. Posting online wasn’t for traction or virality's sake, it was a means of shouting into the void and maybe connecting with one like minded person if you were lucky.

In my opinion the internet will forever be a creative hangout space, we just need to revisit and reshape our relationship with it. Even as that internet obsessed teenager I don't recall ever dreaming of having 24/7 access to the internet. I was perfectly happy with my Argos desk, logging onto my dell desktop PC after I completed my homework, spending a couple of joyful hours logged onto the internet, and then logging off. Perhaps it was less addicting, perhaps there was less to consume, but either way my personal peak period of the internet was during the era where it had a designated space and logging on was a conscious act. 

I would describe most of us as being perennially online. There is little to no barrier to entry in terms of the technology, passwords are autosaved, passcodes are biometric data and payment methods are one tap away. Before we have the time to mentally think through a problem we’ve shopped it away, scrolled it away and numbed out before it’s onto the next.

Sitting and truly thinking of the implications of being truly chronically online has fueled my desire to bring more intentionality to how I spend my time, how much time I spend gazing into a little screen, and where my time and everything is going overall.

To say the internet is good, or bad, is reductive. The internet just ‘is’. Yes it’s been engineered to be highly addictive, probably more so than sugar especially for young kids. Yes there are many people posting picture perfect illusions whilst hiding their reality. However much like my days of using my parent’s egg timer to track my internet usage hours, it’s on us to really track and manage how our time is being spent and where our energy is going. 

The theme of this month’s curriculum is Tend.  Tending to my life, tending to my routines, my goals and where my energy flows. Tending my mind is much like pruning a plant, cutting away what’s too much to allow for true growth to take place. It would be remiss of me to enter into my month of Tend without addressing the elephant in the room, social media, screen times and the use and abuse of digital devices. 

Algorithms are the fast food version of curation. More is more, there’s no time to consider what’s been consumed, it's onto the next. The type of content that you can consume and consume but never quite leaves you feeling full, and always craving more.

The word analogue has a different connotation in 2026. It means unhooking ourselves from 24/7 social media scrolling, checking in with ourselves about where we truly want our time and attention being focused and going back to basics. 

I hope to spend my February 2026 doing just that, slowly tending to my goals, my needs and enjoying the slow process of doing so.