As I strip down and simplify my online life, cutting out the services that aren’t doing anything for me, I’ve run across more than a few sites and apps that make it a complete pain to extract yourself from them. Not only is this not a new issue, but there’s a whole site, justdelete.me dedicated to showing you how to delete your accounts on sites, and telling you how difficult it is. Any product with a yellow, red, or black banner on justdelete.me should be ashamed of themselves.

I find sites that require you to email a customer service person to delete an account to be the most obnoxious. Whatever magic a customer service person has to do on the backend can be triggered by a button and confirmation prompt on the front end by me. I should know—I deleted a number of accounts through the backend when I worked for the startup company. Eventually they added a user-facing account deletion option. I don’t buy technical excuses about how user data is tied in across services. There are ways to remove a user and their data without destroying database integrity. It’s more work, true, but anything is more work than not allowing a user to delete their account.

Why make it so hard to delete accounts? My theory is that it’s about numbers and growth. If a company can point to a chart that says user accounts this quarter are so x higher than they were last quarter, they have a better chance of more funding. By making it harder to delete your account, the company makes sure that rate of growth stays high. Of course, the better measure of a service is active accounts. It’s much better to allow users who don’t want to be there to delete their accounts rather than go idle—your active percentage increases.

It should be as easy to quit a service as it is to join one. When a user wants out, they should be allowed to get it. So much effort is spent streamlining and improving the “onboarding” process for apps and services. The same amount of effort should also go into “offboarding.” It should be simple, painless, and—above all—permanent. No “shadow profiles” or retaining data forever, just the option to download all the data we put into the service, and then that’s it. Don’t even keep our email address on file to send messages trying to invite me back. (This means you, Carbonite.) When someone is walking to the door, just let them go. If you love your users, set them free.

While preparing for my Social Media Sabbatical, not only did I purge my iPhone of the apps for all my social media streams, I also took the time to nuke apps I was either not using, or were simply redundant. With my Facebook account deactivated, I could no longer use Facebook Messenger, but also found myself unable to use TimeHop, an app that presents my social media posts for that day in the past. While it’s a nice nostalgia trip, keeping a journal will give me a better sense of where I was in the past than Tweets and Facebook statuses. I already keep one digitally and analog. Deleted.

I also noticed a surfeit of fitness apps on my phone. There’s FitBit, myFitnessPal, RunKeeper, Couch-to–5K, and Fitocracy. FitBit was the first to go. Having lost two FitBit trackers in the space of six months, I decided to use the FitBit app’s MobileTrack feature to stay in their ecosystem. Yet, step tracking seems to be the hot feature to add in apps, and before I knew it, several apps on my phone were tracking my motion data. When myFitnessPal added it, FitBit’s days were numbered. Why bother with two apps that do the same thing? It’s easier on my battery, at least. Deleted.

Tracking my exercise is a good way to not only see my progress, but motivate me to keep going. Many of these apps also integrate, so my runs in RunKeeper appear in myFitnessPal, and in Fitocracy. But, why do they need to be in all these places? So people can applaud my efforts and support me? Maybe if people I knew actually used the darn apps, this would happen. In myFitnessPal, the only social fitness app I’m keeping, I have four friends. Of these, only one has touched the app within the last two weeks. I’m keeping it around, as it’s the best food tracker I’ve used. Couch-to–5K is staying until I finish the program. The rest. Deleted.

Then there’s the bevy of utility apps I wanted to keep in my phone “just in case” I needed them. Apps like PDFPen Scan+, DeGeo (to remove location data from my photos), a few photography apps, such as Hueless (for black and white photos), my Google Voice client, PDFPen Scan+, and various apps I use for local services once in a blue moon. With these apps, there’s no point in keeping them around, as I never have cause to use them. When I do, I’m just a few taps and a fingerprint (if that) from downloading them again. Deleted.

Enough, Patrick Rhone’s former podcast, had a recurring feature called “How Bare is Your Air?” where guests try to see if they could live within the confines of a 64GB MacBook Air, paring down their apps to the bare essentials to get their work done. It’s useful to think this way about an iPhone, too. What’s the bare minimum I need to do my work? Thinking that way, I could also toss the various apps I use to replace the built-in ones: Mailbox, Fantastical, Dark Sky, SmartPlayer, Overcast… None of these are essential, but I do prefer them to the built-in apps.

Clearing out the redundancies and unused apps, however, frees space on my phone and in my head. It also makes my phone’s battery a lot happier. I’m not about to turn my iPhone back into a dumbphone, but clearing out the crap and cruft sure feels a lot better. Now, I need to do the same to my iPad, and to my Mac. I don’t think the effects of clearing out either will be as dramatic, but it will still feel good to be getting by with what I need instead of wishfully thinking about apps I should use. It’s better for our devices, and it’s better for our heads.

The quiet scares me. So, I make my own noise, plugging little smooth white plastic buds into my ears to listen to podcasts, audiobooks, and loud music. It helps me work, I tell my coworkers. It keeps me sane, I tell myself. It keeps the silence away. Well, the near-silence of whirring air conditioners, and the dull clacking of people typing on cheap Dell keyboards. Hearing Dan and Merlin chat is much more comforting.

As a lifetime city dweller, and current denizen of one of, if not the loudest city in America, I have an odd relationship to noise. It’s been a constant in my life, with cars driving past my windows, planes flying overhead, kids playing in the street, and the various noises of household appliances and computer hardware. If I ever want to shut out the din, and take control of my sonic environment, I have those little white buds in my pocket, ready to be plugged into infinity. At home, I have the option of big, heavy cans to clamp around my ears, not only blasting sound in, but keeping outside sound out.

Which is why it’s taken a conscious act of will to keep the white buds out of my ears for a chunk of my day. I’d already opted to stop blasting my own noise into my ears on the subway, after being attacked for my phone one Christmas Eve in Philadelphia. (The kid didn’t get it, but ended up breaking a pair of $80 Apple In-Ear Headphones in the process.) When I go for my long walks, I often don’t have the buds in as well. It keeps me more in tune with my environment, which is to say it keeps me from getting hit by cars when crossing the street. Now, at work, once my morning podcasts are done, I’ll take the buds out and try to face the silence there.

I figure it’ll make my co-workers think that I’m not trying to avoid them. Maybe it’ll make me more present as I take orders by email, process them through the black box of brain and fingers, and put the product out into the world. At the very least, working in the silence will teach me to live with the silence. I may never accept it, but perhaps the silence and I can reach a détente. It exists, I exist, and we’re both going to have to be okay with that. Until then, I’ll still pop in the white buds when I need to. I do need to know what happens next in my audio book of Operation Mincemeat, after all.

In April, I started the Couch to 5K training program. As I write this, I’m in week 7, having missed some time due to travel, injury, and other issues. I run because I want to be in better shape. I want to lose weight, and stave off an early death from a life spent sitting. I do not run because I like it. In fact, I hate running. Even this deep into the training program, I keep it up because I hate it less than I hate lifting heavy things and putting them down. I hate running less than yoga, than swimming, team sports, or most other forms of physical fitness.

Truth is, I’m a walker. I’ll walk all over. I would walk 500 miles, and I would walk 500 more. I’m also a fast walker. This comes from being a city person—streets are crowded, and everyone has somewhere to be. So, keep moving and get out of the way. During my lost year, I would routinely take late night walks from my apartment in West Philadelphia at 45th Street, over to the banks of the Delaware river, and sometimes back. I walk most weekends down Queens Boulevard, around Forest Hills, and back. When I take lunch at work, I get in a good walk around Chelsea, most days. When I still wore a FitBit, I rarely missed my 10,000 step goal in a day. If I ever did, I made it up in spades on the weekend.

I find walking to be an almost meditative activity. It’s just me, my thoughts, and the ambient noise of the city. Running isn’t an activity that allows for thought. It’s just pumping and pounding—and sweating. The only way I can make it tolerable is to blast loud, rhythmic music into my ears as I go. I prefer DEVO and Daft Punk, trying to time my footfalls to the beat. This is not what I expected to experience, having read Haruki Murakami’s book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. The book is a memoir of both his craft as a novelist, and as a runner. It made me want to take up running then, in the hopes that maybe some of Murakami’s greatness would rub off on me.

Murakami’s view of running is romantic and freeing, a quiet solitude of motion:

“All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says.”

My homemade void from running is neither cozy, nor quiet. It is strenuous, and it is painful. At least Murakami didn’t gloss over the painful part:

“If pain weren’t involved, who in the world would ever go to the trouble of taking part in sports like the triathlon or the marathon, which demand such an investment of time and energy? It’s precisely because of the pain, precisely because we want to overcome that pain, that we can get the feeling, through this process, of really being alive—or at least a partial sense of it.”

I can’t romanticize pain. Maybe because i’ve had enough of it in my life already, physical and mental, externally and self-inflicted alike. Sure, it feels good when the pain subsides, when the endorphins kick in and everything feels soft and numb, much like the muscles in my legs after pushing myself on the treadmill. But it always feels good having ran. If I’m going to get into even slightly better shape, I’m going to have to take the pain. I don’t have to like it. As Murakami says, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”

Besides, I already dropped $120 on the fancy fucking running shoes with the arch support I need to avoid shin splints. I’m paying out the nose for the gym membership, so I’d better use it. I’m at the seventh week of a nine week program, and it’s taken me four months to reach it. If I stop now, that’s all a waste, right? The alternative is that there is no alternative, aside from sucking it up and doing something else I don’t like three times a week.

“What exactly do I think about when I’m running? I don’t have a clue,” says Haruki Murakami. What do I think about when I’m running? How soon I can stop.

There’s a sense that the Valley thinks we should run our lives with the same brutal efficiency as a lean startup. Constant work, with an intense focus on quantification. Instead of a hobby, you have a side hustle. If you’re lucky, that side hustle is something you’d like to do anyway, but if you’re into something unprofitable like fiction writing, macrame, or stamp collecting, you can be a Lyft driver or a TaskRabbit. You take the income from your side hustle, and invest it in self-tracking gadgets that help you eat, sleep, and exercise more efficiently. You can experiment on yourself with different diet and fitness regimens for optimum efficiency—or just switch to an all Soylent diet so you don’t have to eat, let alone cook. All the more time to devote to your side hustle(s), and I guess your full-time job, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

Should we be living like this? Is the end goal of our lives to just be efficient machines, churning out our widgets, working at peak productivity, and constantly hustling to monetize everything? I worry when I see the latest new app or service for logging yet another set of numbers that’s supposed to represent something about us. As the American economy stagnates, more people push going into business for yourself. “Make an app,” they say, even if the app gold rush is over. Now, the only people making it rich are the people selling the Kim Kardashian game, or the people selling how-to guides for making smartphone apps. Be a freelancer, or a consultant! How soon before that market becomes saturated, too?

And who benefits from all this efficiency? The quantified app makers, the how-to book sellers, the weirdo who makes Soylent, and advertisers, advertisers, advertisers. Because, of course, our downtime—if we’re lucky enough to have it— can be spent on social media, Netflix, and ordering crap from Amazon to fill up the rooms we’re not renting out on AirBnB. We’re not that far from THX–1138, when you think about it, right down to roommates that just occupy wasted space. “Work hard, increase production, prevent accidents and be happy” could be any “sharing economy” company’s advice to its workers. The better a worker you are, the more your reputation grows, and even that can be quantified. And someone takes a little off the top to keep it all going. If you question it, they’ll tell you that good jobs are gone for good. It’s either be an entrepreneur, work the sharing economy, or to hell with you.

I don’t necessarily believe that good jobs are gone for good. I do believe there are things we can’t do with Big Data and algorithms, that there will always be a place for real human beings to do real human things. What I write above is a worst-case scenario, but it’s important to think about. Can we be human if we’re just constantly working away, whether it’s at our day jobs, our side hustles, our “sharing economy” gig, or all of the above? It’s even possible that we could quantify our social interactions, earning Whuffie for conversing with someone who’s algorithmically determined to be on our wavelength. (Don’t laugh, that’s how Tinder works!) If you’re an awkward geek, that might make interaction easier, but then we lose the human ability to fail and learn from our failures to communicate. The brutal quest for efficiency means that we never get to truly live. Let’s not be afraid to examine the assumptions of the Valley’s ideal of what work will be in the future—at least for non-programmers and CEOs. We have a lot to lose.