To be able to live well, to avoid anxiety and depression, it’s not that easy anymore in 2025. Everything is designed to grab our attention, and our attention span is declining and disallowing people to think and learn. Algorithms know more about us than our spouses while grabbing our attention constantly.

This is bad for our health. Bad for our spirit. Bad for our well-being. We need a strong foundation that keeps us grounded, not bringing us on the wrong track. The internet, a connected web of websites as it was originally designed, is no more.

Today everyone uses a handful of websites, a couple of algorithm-dominated pages that are hitting our brain with dopamine as much as possible. So how can we stay sane in a large tech-dominated world? How do we get quality time when everyone is distracted, fighting for the attention of our friends and families against their phones? That’s why we most often default to just using our phone.

I’m currently staying in the Philippines, and the algorithm-dominated web and big tech dependency is even more apparent. People have to use their products such as Facebook Messenger, which is the default for communication and calling. Businesses make sales on Facebook pages, or sell and buy products there.

This essay investigates the ground pillars for a well-lived life, and how the open web can help us with that.

The Groundwork for Life and Well Being

We as individuals have lots of distractions besides the obvious. We are often greedy, egoistic, longing for a lot of money, a big career. And then we try to grind, we try to get a lot of followers on social media, trying to fulfill a Vanity Metric, we try to get more money, a bigger career, a bigger house.

The Pillars of Life: Health, Family and Self-Contentment

Health, a non-greedy life, knowing when we have enough, and family are the three pillars. We need to recognize them. We cannot do it ourselves.

A non-greedy life can be anything like being spiritual, doing ice baths, praying, or doing anything slowly, going inwards. Anything that takes us out of our egocentric way.

Health is a prerequisite. As long as we are healthy, we don’t think too much about it. Only when we get sick, we learn that everything is dependent on it. It can help us to get out of an egocentric life too. If we are sick, we need to accept help from friends and loved ones. We learn that we need family to help us in difficult times.

Some don’t grow up with a family, so this is a hard one to fill. But family can be your cousins, your stepdad, friends, or anyone who truly cares for you. But without family, or that surrounding bond, it’s easier to fall into the wrong path and get bad habits of drinking, drugs, or similar. If we don’t have it, a helpful foundation, one that has held our society for the past centuries, is the church.

Everyone is welcome, no stereotypes or prejudice. You just come and receive love and friendship. A community to participate in, to receive (first), and submit to and give the longer you are part of it.

Purpose of Life

I wrote a long article «Why are we here on Earth», where I elaborate on my journey of purpose, life, and some of the foundations. As I discuss there as well, principles is another way to navigate life and have a healthy lifestyle once you find your true principles to live for. It’s like a compass guiding your life. With them set in place, you will have an easier time deciding and when to say no.

Bad Mood: Not Being Present

Getting out of ourselves, being asleep as Anthony de Mello writes, most of us are asleep our whole lives. He says that the key to waking up and being aware is learning something new, being open, and most importantly, being present.

The Evil: A Downward Spiral of Negativity

If the foundation pillars are not met, we will get into bad moods at first. If it happens over a longer period, we might get chronically bad moods. This reflects on other people, who are less likely to spend time with us. We isolate ourselves. If there’s a death or life-changing incident, it’s easy to fall into a deep hole, an evil downward spiral of negativity, potentially into Nihilism.

The Status Game: Greed

Another way of a downward spiral that happens usually in more well-developed countries, where our main pillars are met, but we are just greedy and want more. Better career, more money, anything to get a better status.

What We’re After: Quality Time

The ultimate goal for me is to get quality time with loved ones, people that mean something to us. Giving us happiness as backed by a long-term study from Harvard. It’s a deep happiness compared to just a Shallow Happiness followed to get the outside reputation, signaling to the outside that we are happy. However, deep inside, we might not be.

Not being present is the opposite of quality time. It’s what we lack when we use the phone and social media too much. We get addicted to social media, we break relationships and lose self-confidence, killing the very foundation of well-being and time well spent with our loved ones.

A healthy, deep, meaningful, happy life might actually look boring from the outside. This Boring Life can be an enabler to more happiness I believe, as I write and think more about it.

How Do We Get Out of It?

Soon we approach the new year of 2026. So, how do we get out of this distracted, algorithm-dominated world? To a place where everybody can share and be in control, not big tech?

I feel that people are fed up with the internet for the first time since its creation. With all the AI-generated content, generating several complete books in a day (the Amazon Kindle limit is 10 per week which is a joke and offensive for any author). At least I am.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell what is written by a person and what is generated. Sometimes I’d rather see the prompt, as this is where the genuineness, the soul and curiosity of the person is. I wrote more on Finding Flow and Escaping Digital Distractions Through Deep Work and Slow Living, but flow is an essential piece of happiness and purpose of us doing something.

With AI, people feel they don’t need to learn programming, writing, or any craft. But I think that’s the wrong conclusion, especially on a personal level. As AI won’t replace human thinking, we will lose the muscle of thinking like we lost the ability to do simple math or remember a phone number as phones and calculators have replaced it.

The Algorithm-Free Internet: An Open Web

To get away from algorithms, away from being locked in and dependent on the platform, away from big tech chasing our attention, back to real connections as opposed to losing our followers with the Death of the Follower. We need open platforms such as Open Social Media and an open web, where the power isn’t in the platform, but in us as the producers. We need to get out of the algorithms, free from big tech, and back to real connections. But how?

The Internet: How It Was Designed

Initially, for a long time, the internet was a nice place to be. You could search for information from AltaVista, Bluewin (in Switzerland) to find information about the Siberian tiger for making a presentation in school. Or you could share your thoughts, usually in forums or personal websites or blogs.

It was interconnected. Each website usually had backlinks to its favorite websites so that people could explore similar websites. It was a web of information, and the algorithm by the people’s recommendations on each website instead of a centralized company or algorithm.

Back to the Producer: Direct Connection

Instead of depending on the algorithm for sharing our content, we need to have direct connections and followers, like we did with the newsletter all along. That’s why Substack¹ and newsletters are so popular, because we get direct connections with our readers.

But we don’t want only to rely on newsletters (emails). We also want a direct connection via links in the World Wide Web. Google is still the place for discovery in my opinion. Nobody goes to ChatGPT for a good essay or a deep moving piece. This is where Google or real blog posts, papers, and websites shine, though not all anymore, as there’s so much spam or even slop with AI.

Compared to algorithms, direct connections let us choose what we want to see. We have the choice, unlike with the Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook algorithms. No surprise people get mad when the algorithms change, as recently with LinkedIn or YouTube many times, making it impossible to reach your audience anymore.

LinkedIn people left for Substack, but it’s only a question of time until Substack changes its algorithm for Notes (Twitter copy) or does something wrong (there is already quite some controversy with people migrating away). The best is still to own your content, have your own website and domain, or use a totally new social media approach called open social media.

Open Web and an Open Social Media

One way is the open web that Dan Abramov is explaining so well in Open Social with the AT Protocol, an open protocol where people own their data (followers, shared data, etc.) and applications can be built on top of that. For example, there is a Twitter called Bluesky that is based on AT Protocol. There’s a HackerNews called Frontpage, Tangled, a git alternative or Instagram, TikTok and many more, all implemented with the same ID and AT Protocol.

You can even host the data on your own server with a so-called Personal Data Server (PDS) and be able to take them offline whenever you want. It’s still unclear if AT Protocol will be fully mainstream, but I’m very confident that people who are tired of being dependent can use this happily as I do daily. With each algorithm change, more will follow and there’s already a 41 million active users.

With the AI slop being promoted on the major social media platform’s algorithm, I believe we will go back to following real humans. Back to followers, where we decide who we want to see.

It takes time and hard work to move to another platform, but if you invest in something else, it should be open and owned by us. That’s why AT Protocol will only get more popular and stronger the longer it exists due to its open foundation.

Bluesky is maturing more and people can share their content (not penalized by sharing links) and even host their own content, integrating it into other applications such as discussed above. For example, I integrated comments on my second brain based on Bluesky. It’s like the early Twitter, open APIs, even the data is fully open and can be fetched by attaching to the Jetstream. With all these features and characteristics, it will be a very long-term thing. Even if you can’t go viral, which is by design, you can reach your followers. As always, it depends on what is most important to you.

And at some point, Bluesky will also implement an algorithm that can make your posts a little more viral. Today they have one called “Discover Feed”, which is not perfect yet, but will be with the hired data scientist to improve it. But again, it will never be the same as Twitter or others, as it’s especially made for people to follow people.

Personal Blogs

I also believe in a comeback of personal blogs. Bringing back uniqueness and soul in times of unification of social media and newsletters. There are still many WordPress pages out there, which are more customized and unique than what we have and had with Medium, Substack and Open Subscription Platforms.

Patreon is another alternative, focusing on direct connections with your followers and audience instead of going viral. I believe this will be the future: real connections, real content, real stories. Unlike artificially generated content just for fame and vanity metrics.

I also hope to see more connected websites, sites like public second brains where visitors can explore content multi-dimensionally instead of single-level. In addition to a traditional blog, providing backlinks and a graph view, diving into the content and life of the creator, finding connections you might not otherwise.

And with personal blogs, there are no artificial algorithms.

Wrapping Up

With the recent investments from governments in Denmark and others to ban social media for kids under fifteen and other measures to regulate social media, I think we are heading in the right direction. Big tech does not have the interest of the people. Instead of helping us, which they did in the beginning, they want to profit more off us and make us more addicted. And as with alcohol and other drugs, these need to be regulated, especially when there’s such a huge monopoly with just a few companies.

This will increase our well-being, and we will have more time to spend on the main pillars of life. We will be less anxious, less negative. We will be happier, more free.

This might not show an immediate effect, but as it’s compounding, it will in the long term of our life and career. Like the Pathless Path and its book by Paul Millerd suggest, following your Instinct more and being open, unexpected things will happen, things we can’t plan ahead of time. Like Steve Jobs already said before about connecting the dots:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Trust in your principles, in the process. Spend more time offline, more time with loved ones, and then good things will happen. Time away from algorithms, and more time being well.