Cheap vs. Load-Bearing
This is the whole site in one idea. If you only remember one page, remember this one — because once you’ve got it, you don’t need me. You can look at anything in your digital life and know what to do with it.
Here it is.
Everything that ties you to Big Tech is one of two things. It’s cheap to leave or it’s load-bearing. Your entire job is telling them apart.
You figure out which is which by asking two questions. Not ten. Two.
1. If I lost this tomorrow, what actually breaks?
Not what would annoy you. What breaks. Be honest and be specific. “I’d have to find a new place to watch shows” is an annoyance. “I couldn’t get paid” is a break. “My family couldn’t reach me” is a break. Most things you think are essential turn out to be, at worst, irritating to replace. The stuff that genuinely breaks your life or your livelihood is a much shorter list than it feels like.
2. How hard is it to replace?
Some things swap out in an afternoon — a search engine, a notes app, a place to store photos. Some things have years of your life welded into them and no clean exit. A phone number everyone has. An email address on a thousand accounts. A work login your employer controls.
Run anything through those two questions and it lands in one of two buckets:
Cheap to leave — low breakage, easy to replace. Your search engine. Your browser. Most apps. The “Sign in with Google” habit. This is the stuff you change without a second thought, because there’s no real cost and you get your independence back for free. Leave it. Not because Big Tech is evil — because there’s no reason not to.
Load-bearing — high breakage, hard to replace. Your work account. The ancient email duct-taped to everything. The hardware ecosystem your whole family lives in. This is the stuff that, if you yank it out, something important falls over. Keep it. On purpose. With your eyes open.
That’s it. That’s the philosophy. Leave the cheap stuff, keep the load-bearing stuff, and know which is which.
Now here’s the part that matters, the reason this works when “delete everything” never does.
The enemy was never Big Tech. The enemy is default.
Almost everything wrong with your situation isn’t that you use Google or Apple or Microsoft. It’s that you use them without ever having decided to. By habit. By the chute. Because the phone store handed it to you and you never went back and asked whether it still made sense.
So the goal was never zero. I’m a Microsoft Partner — zero was never on the table for me, and it probably isn’t for you either. The goal is to turn every one of those defaults into a decision. To be able to point at each thing Big Tech holds and say: I know you’ve got this, I know exactly why I’m letting you, and I could leave if I wanted to.
That’s the whole thing. That’s freedom in the only form that’s actually available to a person with a real life. Not purity. Not living in a cabin. Just this: nothing about your digital life is an accident anymore.
Cheap stuff, gone. Load-bearing stuff, kept on purpose. And you, finally, the one holding the keys.
Welcome out of the chute.