I am 49 now, and I use a computer almost every day.
I have a main PC, a laptop, and a smartphone.
When I was younger, I never imagined this.
Computers meant nothing to me, and I honestly thought they would never be part of my life.
I have never really cared about gadgets, and even now I only treat them as tools.
My Personal Phone History
In 1997, at twenty one, I bought my first PHS.
It broke the next year, so I replaced it.
That one broke too, and in 1999 I finally switched to a regular cell phone.
So far, that story is normal.
What is not normal is that I did not replace it again for eight years.
It was not attachment.
It was not indecision.
Changing phones felt like noise.
I did not want to spend any more mental energy on anything outside the one thing that mattered to me—painting.
When Painting Is Involved, It Is Different
Only when the phone finally became pure junk did I buy a new one in 2007.
The next replacement was in 2016, and then again in 2019.
That last time, the battery was dying, so I gave up and bought a new device.
Then a friend casually said, “You know you can just replace the battery, right?”
I learned that at forty three.
That is how little I care about gadgets.
But things twist from here.
Websites?
AI?
Those are different.
The reason is simple.
If something extends the reach of my work, I go all in.
It is not because I love technology.
It is because it becomes a tool to send the paintings out into the world.
So I ignore anything that does not touch the core of my practice for years.
And when something does touch it, I dive in with an almost abnormal level of focus.
From the outside, people call me stubborn, extreme, or impossible to understand.
But this is my shape.
My unevenness.
It is simply the way I protect my limited energy for the things that actually matter.