The Monolith and the Module: Applying Unix Philosophy to Life

I have spent a significant portion of my life adjacent to code. Even when I’m not the one writing it, I am managing the people who do, or architecting the systems they build. In that world, there is a reverence for the “Unix Philosophy.” Originated by Ken Thompson in the late 1960s, it can be distilled down to a few core tenets, but the most famous is this:

Make each program do one thing well.

It sounds simple. In software, it means you don’t build a massive, monolithic application where the email server is inextricably updating the database while rendering the user interface. You build small, sharp tools. One tool reads the text. Another sorts the text. A third prints the text. Because they are decoupled, they are robust. If the printer fails, the sorter doesn’t crash.

For years, I nodded along to this wisdom in the office, only to go home and live a life that was the exact opposite.

My personal life had become a Monolith. I was relying on devices, services, and habits that tried to do everything, everywhere, all at once. I was prioritising “integration” and “convenience” over quality and focus. The result was a fragile existence, governed by notifications, subscription fatigue, and gadgets that were masters of none.

I was trying to optimise my life like a venture-backed startup scaling for growth. What I actually needed was stability and simplicity.

Over the last year, I have been systematically dismantling the Monolith. In a sense I am applying the Unix philosophy to my pockets, my home, my car, and my mind. I am unbundling my life. Here is what that looks like, and why the friction of “doing one thing well” is actually the path to freedom.

Part I: The Great Unbundling of the Smartphone #

The smartphone is the ultimate violation of the Unix philosophy. It is a miracle device, certainly. I am not a Luddite, but it is a black hole of attention. It bundles a camera, a GPS, a hi-fi system, a cinema, a bank, a post office, and a casino into a single slab of glass.

Because it does everything, it does nothing with intention. When you pick it up to check the time, you see a notification. When you pick it up to change a song, you see a news headline. The context switching is brutal.

I decided to see what would happen if I fired my phone from its various jobs and hired specialists instead.

The Watch: The G-Shock 5610 #

I used to wear a high-end smartwatch. It was a marvel of engineering. It tracked my sleep (successfully), measured my blood oxygen (vaguely), and allowed me to triage emails from my wrist (stressfully).

But it failed at its primary job: being a watch. A watch should be there. Always. My smartwatch was a needy pet that died if I didn’t feed it electricity every 24 hours. It was a screen that needed to wake up and be constantly charged.

I replaced it with a Casio G-Shock 5610. It is the physical embodiment of “do one thing well.”

1. It tells the time.
2. It is solar-powered, so it never dies.
3. It syncs via radio towers (Multi-Band 6), so it is always accurate.

It doesn’t care about my step count. It doesn’t buzz when my team emails me. It sits on my wrist, rugged and indifferent to the chaos of the internet. There is a profound peace in glancing at your wrist and seeing only the time.

The Music: The Return of the DAP #

Music has always been my escape, but streaming services on a smartphone turned that escape into a data-mining operation. Spotify doesn’t want you to listen to an album; it wants to feed you a mood-based playlist to keep you engaged so it can serve you ads or justify your subscription.

Furthermore, listening on a phone is fraught with interruption. A drop in signal cuts the track. An incoming call ducks the volume. The ding of a WhatsApp message pierces the mix.

I went back to a Digital Audio Player (DAP). It’s a dedicated device - essentially a modern Walkman. It has high-quality DAC chips, a MicroSD card slot, and a headphone jack. It has no Wi-Fi. It has no browser.

When I want to listen to music now, I pick up the DAP. I plug in wired IEMs (In-Ear Monitors). I press play. The device does one thing: it decodes audio files and sends electricity to magnets in my ears. The sound floor is silent. The separation is crisp. But more importantly, the experience is isolated. I am not “consuming content”; I am listening to music. It’s intentional.

The Camera: Seeing vs. Capturing #

Smartphone cameras are incredible computational photography engines. But they are arguably poor cameras. When you take a photo with a phone, you are holding a computer. You are looking at a screen, not through a viewfinder. You are often thinking about where to post the photo before you’ve even taken it.

I bought a dedicated compact camera. It fits in my pocket. It has a sensor ten times the size of my phone’s.

It does one thing: it captures light. It turns on in under a second. It has physical dials for aperture and shutter speed. Using it requires a “cost of mastery” - I have to understand exposure triangles. But because of that, the photos I take are intentional. I am looking for light and composition, not just snapping a receipt or a selfie. When I put the camera away, I am done. I don’t swipe up to see what Instagram thinks of my lunch.

The Alarm Clock: Reclaiming the Bedroom #

The most dangerous thing a smartphone does is enter the bedroom. It is the last thing we see at night and the first thing we see in the morning. We doom-scroll ourselves into insomnia and wake up to stress.

I bought a simple Braun analog alarm clock. It has a dial. It has a button to stop the beeping. It does one thing: it wakes me up.

My phone now charges in another room. This simple physical separation of decoupling the communication device from the sleeping environment has done more for my mental clarity than any meditation app ever could.

Part II: The Analog Kitchen and the Dumb Home #

The Unix philosophy isn’t just about digital code; it’s about tools. In the physical world, we have been sold the lie of the “Unitasker” gadget (the avocado slicer, the egg boiler) which is clutter. But we are also sold the lie of the “Smart Appliance,” which is a different kind of clutter.

The Cast Iron Skillet #

In my kitchen, the hero is a cast iron skillet. It is the ultimate Unix tool. It is a single piece of iron, cast in sand. It does one thing: it holds heat.

Because it does this one thing with immense thermal mass and consistency, it is universally composable. I can use it on a gas stove, an induction hob, an oven, or a campfire. It sears steaks, it bakes cornbread, it fries eggs.

Compare this to the “Smart” multi-cooker or the connected air fryer. Those devices are black boxes. They rely on complex circuit boards, sensors, and sometimes even firmware updates. If the board fries, the device is trash. If the app is discontinued, the features vanish.

My skillet will outlive me. It requires maintenance, seasoning, cleaning, drying etc. but that is the relationship of owner and tool. It is transparent. If it’s not working, it’s physics, not software bugs.

The Coffee Ritual #

I have a bean-to-cup machine. It ground the beans, tamps them, brews the coffee, and even froths the milk with one button press. It is convenient, until the grinder jammed. It’s a Monolith.

I unbundled the coffee stack.

1. The Grinder: A standalone burr grinder. It just grinds.
2. The Brewer: An Aeropress. It just filters water through grounds.
3. The Kettle: It boils water.

If the grinder breaks, I can still make coffee using pre-ground beans. If the kettle breaks, I can boil water in a pot. The system is resilient because the components are loosely coupled. Plus, the act of making the coffee is a moment of mindfulness. It is a process I control, not a script I execute.

The “Dumb” Home #

I work in tech, so people assume my house is full of voice assistants and smart bulbs. It is, but it also fully works in “dumb” mode. I am aggressively against “intelligence” from my home infrastructure.

A light switch should be a physical break in an electrical circuit. It works 100% of the time. It provides tactile feedback. It works if the internet is down. It works if a server in AWS crashes.

I recently looked at a “smart” fridge. It had a giant tablet on the door. I asked the salesman, “What happens in five years when the Android version on this fridge is no longer supported?” He didn’t have an answer. I do: you have a fridge that is insecure, slow, and likely to crash.

I want my fridge to keep food cold. I want my thermostat to close a relay when the temperature drops. I want my doorbell to ring a chime, not send a video stream to a cloud server I don’t control.

In the Unix philosophy, we talk about “Clean Interfaces.” The cleanest interface for a light is a toggle switch. The cleanest interface for a door is a handle. Adding software to these interactions adds latency and points of failure.

Part III: Transportation and Mechanical Sympathy #

The automotive industry is currently suffering from a severe case of feature creep. A modern car is less of a vehicle and more of an iPad on wheels.

The Tactile Dashboard #

I previously owned a car where the climate control was buried three menus deep in a touchscreen interface. To change the fan speed, I had to take my eyes off the road, navigate a UI, and tap a glass screen that offered no tactile feedback.

This is bad design. It is dangerous design.

I now drive an older vehicle. It has knobs for the volume. It has dials for the temperature. There’s nothing “smart” about it although it does have a CD player.

These controls do one thing. The volume knob controls the volume. I can operate it by muscle memory without looking. I can feel the “click” of the detent. This is “Mechanical Sympathy” design that respects the human operator’s need for feedback.

Applying the Unix philosophy to cars means valuing the driving dynamics over the infotainment system. It means preferring a car that is mechanically sound and repairable over one that is software-defined.

I have started keeping a paper road atlas in the car. It sounds archaic, I know. But relying 100% on Google Maps erodes your sense of direction. It turns you into a passive node in the network, following instructions: “Turn left in 300 yards.”

Using a map (or at least previewing the route on one) forces you to understand the geography. You build a mental model of the world. And, like the G-Shock, the map doesn’t run out of battery.

Part IV: The Digital Workspace and the Value of Plain Text #

Even within my actual digital life I have applied this unbundling. We are constantly pushed toward proprietary, all-in-one platforms. Notion, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote they try to be your database, your calendar, your image host, and your publisher.

But what happens when they raise prices? What happens when they change the format? You are trapped.

The Power of Plain Text #

I have moved almost all my writing and note-taking to .txt and .md (Markdown) files.

• The Format: Plain text. It is readable by any computer from the last 50 years and likely the next 50.
• The Storage: Local files on my hard drive (backed up, of course).
• The Editor: I can use Obsidian, Notepad, Vim, or VS Code. It doesn’t matter. The data is decoupled from the tool.

This is pure Unix. The data stream (my thoughts) is separate from the processor (the app). I can pipe my notes into a blog generator (like Hugo). I can grep (search) through them instantly. I own the words.

Email is for Email #

I have stopped using email as a to-do list. I have stopped using it as a file storage system. Email is a transfer protocol. It is for sending messages.

I use a calendar for time. I use a notebook and pen for my todo list for tasks. I use a file system for files.

By forcing these boundaries, I empty my inbox. An email comes in; I extract the task, put it in my notebook, archive the email. The tool does its job and gets out of the way.

Part V: The Philosophy of Ownership and Mastery #

Underpinning all of this - the watch, the skillet, the car, the text files is a shift in how I view ownership.

The modern economy is pushing us toward “Usership” rather than “Ownership.” You don’t own the movie; you subscribe to Netflix. You don’t own the software; you pay a SaaS fee. You don’t really own the John Deere tractor; you license the software to run it.

This model is antithetical to the Unix philosophy. Unix assumes the user is the administrator. The user has root access. The user controls the pipes.

Buying the Disc #

I have started buying DVDs and CDs again. When I buy a movie on Blu-ray, I possess the data. No licensing dispute between a studio and a streaming giant can remove it from my shelf. The player plays the disc. It does not buffer. It does not track my eye movements.

There is an intentionality to walking over to the shelf, selecting a film, and putting it in the tray. It signals to my brain: We are watching a movie. We are not mindlessly scrolling through thumbnails for 45 minutes only to watch Friday Night Dinner again.

The Cost of Mastery #

In a previous post, I wrote about the “Cost of Mastery.” Single-purpose tools often require more skill than multi-purpose automation.

• It takes more skill to drive a manual car than a Tesla.
• It takes more skill to cook on cast iron than in a microwave.
• It takes more skill to take a photo with a manual camera than an iPhone.

But that mastery is where the joy lies. When you let the device do everything, you become a passenger in your own life. You are merely operating the interface. When you unbundle your life, you become the active participant. You have to learn. You have to pay attention.

The G-Shock doesn’t nudge me to move; I have to decide to move. The cast iron doesn’t beep when the steak is done; I have to touch it and know. The DAP doesn’t suggest a playlist; I have to know what I want to hear.

Conclusion: The Quiet Joy of “One Thing Well” #

Since applying these changes, I haven’t become slower or less productive. Quite the opposite. My “uptime” is better. My “latency” is lower.

I am no longer fighting a war of attrition against my own possessions. The tools in my life are silent servants, not noisy masters.

There is a specific, tactile texture to a life built on the Unix philosophy. It feels solid. It feels like closing the heavy door of an older car that satisfying thunk that says, “This is built to last.”

It is easy to get swept up in the current of “Smart” everything, to let our lives become a tangled mess of dependencies, subscriptions, and notifications. But we have the root access to our own lives. We can choose to refactor the code.

We can choose to decouple. We can choose to simplify. We can choose to pick up a tool that does one thing, does it beautifully, and then most importantly, it shuts up and lets us live.