Localhost: What Happened When I Cancelled Everything

Three years ago, I sat down with my bank statement and a red pen. I didn’t just want to save money. I wanted to see who actually owned my life.

The list was long. Spotify leased me my music. Netflix leased me my films. Adobe leased me my creative tools. Microsoft leased me my storage. Apple leased me my memories. I was paying a monthly rent to exist in the digital world. I was a tenant in my own home, surrounded by things that would vanish the moment my credit card expired.

So I cancelled them. All of them.

I didn’t do it as a short-term detox. I did it as a permanent infrastructure migration. As an engineer, I looked at the architecture of my life and realised it had a critical dependency flaw. It relied 100% on external servers I did not control.

Now, sitting here today, my life runs on “Localhost.” I own my data. I own my media. I own my tools. And most importantly, I own my attention.

However, there was one critical design constraint in this migration which I could not violate. I am not a monk living alone in a cell. I am a husband with a family. My family did not sign up for a radical lifestyle experiment. They just want to watch a movie and turn the lights on without reading a manual.

If my quest for digital sovereignty made their lives harder, then the project would be a failure. Good engineering does not expose the end-user to the complexity of the backend.

It has been a profound shift. I expected to feel isolated or inconvenienced. Instead, I feel a sense of solidity that I hadn’t realised I was missing. Here is what life looks like on the other side of the subscription economy.

Part I: The Solidity of Ownership #

The most immediate change is visual. My living room has changed. Where there used to be empty minimalism and a smart TV waiting to stream content, there are now shelves.

I went back to physical media. It started as a reaction to a movie disappearing from my digital library due to a licensing dispute. Now, it is my standard operating procedure.

The Library of Reality #

I have a collection of Blu-rays and DVDs. I have a shelf of CDs. I have a library of paper books.

When guests come over, they often look at the collection with a mix of nostalgia and confusion. They ask why I bother with discs when streaming is so convenient.

I tell them when I want to watch a movie, I walk to the shelf. I scan the spines. I pick a case. I feel the weight of it. I put the disc in the player. It plays instantly. There is no buffering. There are no ads. There is no algorithm suggesting I watch Still Game for the fiftieth time.

But the real value is psychological. I possess this culture. If the internet goes down, my library remains. If Amazon goes bankrupt, my books do not vanish. This creates a sense of permanence in my home. These objects are not temporary files cached in a browser; they are fixtures of my life.

The Digital Archive #

For the things that must remain digital, I have moved from the cloud to local storage. I no longer rely on iCloud or Google Drive.

I have a NAS (Network Attached Storage) sitting quietly in a cupboard. It contains my photos, my documents, and my ripped music library. It is backed up to external hard drives and encrypted off-site storage nightly.

I am the system administrator. I know exactly where my data is. It is on a spinning platter of magnetic rust in the living room. It is not in a server farm. This sovereignty feels like adulthood. I am no longer asking a corporation for permission to look at my own wedding photos.

Part II: The Family Interface Protocol #

The biggest risk in “de-googling” or “un-clouding” your life is that you become the annoying IT guy in your own home. We have all heard stories of the tech enthusiast who sets up a complex home server that requires a command line interface just to play a cartoon.

That is bad engineering.

My rule for this transition was simple. The new system had to be better than the old one for my family, even if I was the one taking on the friction of maintenance.

The “Dumb” Smart Home #

I run Home Assistant to automate our lights and heating, but I strictly follow the “Physical Fallback” rule.

If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, my wife must be able to operate the house without needing my password or a GitHub tutorial.

Every smart light has a physical switch on the wall. The heating has a physical dial. The door has a physical key. The automation is a layer on top, not a barrier in between.

For my family, the house just works. The lights turn on when they walk in. The heating turns off when we leave. They get the convenience of a smart home without the privacy invasion of Amazon listening to our conversations, and without the frustration of an app crashing.

Part III: The Silence of the Dumb Phone #

My smart phone still exists, but it has been lobotomised.

I realised that the problem wasn’t the device itself, but the software ecosystem that lived on it. I stripped it down.

• No Social Media: Deleted.
• No News: Deleted.

My phone is now a utility. It is a phone. It is a map. It is a weather station. It is a WhatsApp terminal for family coordination.

The result is that the device is boring. I no longer pull it out in the lift. I no longer check it at work. It sits on the table, screen dark, silent.

This was the hardest change to make, but it has yielded the highest return on investment. The “twitch” is gone. You know the one. The phantom vibration in your pocket. The subconscious urge to scroll. It took about three months for my brain to rewire itself, but the addiction is broken.

I am no longer reachable 24/7. I check messages when I choose to, usually twice a day. The world has not ended. My friends know that if it is an emergency, they must call. If they text, I will reply eventually. This expectation management has reclaimed hours of my day.

More importantly, it has reclaimed my presence with my family. I am not half-glancing at a work email. I am there. The device isn’t competing for my attention anymore.

Part IV: The Return of Boredom (and Creativity) #

The most surprising side effect of this unbundling was the return of boredom.

For a decade, I had successfully eradicated boredom from my life. If I had ten seconds of downtime, I filled it with data. I listened to podcasts while I washed the dishes. I checked headlines while I brushed my teeth.

When I stripped all that away, the silence was deafening. It was uncomfortable. My brain was itching for input.

But then, the fog cleared.

I started having ideas again. Real, original ideas. Not reactions to someone else’s tweet, but synthesis of my own thoughts.

It turns out that boredom is the compilation phase of the brain. You take in information during the day, but you need downtime to compile it into wisdom. By filling every spare second with noise, I was preventing my brain from finishing the build.

Now, I drive in silence. I wash dishes in silence. I sit in the waiting room at the dentist and just stare at the wall. In those quiet moments, I solve problems that have been plaguing me for weeks. I draft blog posts in my head.

I have reclaimed my “Default Mode Network.” I am no longer a reactive node in a global network; I am an active thinker in my own life.

Part V: The Financial and Ethical Clarity #

There is, of course, the money.

I did the maths. I was spending nearly £200 a month on various digital subscriptions, cloud storage, streaming services, and “premium” app upgrades. That is £2,400 a year. £24,000 over a decade.

By cancelling everything and investing in “buy once” hardware and physical media, I have front-loaded my costs. I spent money on the NAS, the Digital Audio Player, and the Blu-rays. But my monthly burn rate has dropped to near zero.

I am no longer bleeding money to Silicon Valley.

But beyond the savings, there is an ethical clarity. I am no longer supporting business models I disagree with.

• I am not supporting the “user as product” ad model.
• I am not supporting the “planned obsolescence” hardware cycle.
• I am not supporting the artist-exploitation model of streaming services.

When I buy a CD directly from a band on Bandcamp, they get the money. When I buy a second-hand book, I am keeping things out of a landfill. My spending is now aligned with my values.

Part VI: The Friction is the Feature #

The most common criticism I get when I explain this lifestyle is that it sounds like hard work.

“You have to rip your own CDs?” “You have to manually sync your files?” “You look up directions before you drive?”

Yes. It is friction.

But I have come to realise that friction is a feature, not a bug.

Modern UI/UX design is obsessed with removing friction. They want “one-click” buying. They want “autoplay” videos. They want to grease the chute so you slide effortlessly into consumption.

By reintroducing friction, I have introduced intent.

I have to decide to listen to music. I have to decide to watch a movie. I have to decide to take a photo.

This friction acts as a filter. It filters out the mindless, the mediocre, and the unnecessary. If I am not willing to walk to the shelf and pick out the disc, then I probably didn’t really want to watch the movie. I was just looking for a way to numb myself.

The friction forces me to be present. It forces me to make a choice. And in a world that wants to make all our choices for us, that is the ultimate act of freedom.

Conclusion: The View from the Other Side #

I am not living in a cave. I still work in technology. I still use the internet. But the relationship has changed.

The internet is no longer my home; it is a utility I use. It is a library I visit, not a drip-feed attached to my arm.

I have ownership of my things. I have choice in my actions. I have the capacity to be bored, and therefore, the capacity to think. And I have a family who enjoys the benefits of a calm, private, and stable home environment without having to worry about the technical details.

It was scary to cut the cord. There was a fear of missing out. There was a fear of irrelevance. But on the other side, there is just quiet. There is time. There is a sense that my life is finally, truly, my own. And let me tell you, the system uptime is incredible.