I’m Done Renting My Entire Life

A 2026 Plan for Self Hosting, Open Source, and Digital Self Reliance

This year I’m making a hard shift. I want to disconnect from big tech as much as I realistically can, self host everything I do online, use open source software wherever possible, and become digitally self reliant. Not as a stunt, not as a weekend detox, and not as a personality. I mean a real change in how I communicate, store my data, and publish my work.

This is not a rage quit. It is a decision to stop building my life on systems I do not control. Convenience is fine; dependency is not. I want tools that work for me, not tools that train me. I’m tired of everything important being one policy update, one account lock, or one invisible algorithm tweak away from being disrupted.

The core issue is power, not apps. Big tech is not dangerous because it makes software. It is dangerous because it centralizes key parts of modern life. When a small handful of companies sit between you and your communication, your files, your photos, your calendar, your visibility, and your ability to reach people, that is not just a product ecosystem. It becomes a form of soft governance. Even if nobody is sitting in a room plotting, the incentives still run the show. The business model rewards surveillance, attention capture, and lock in. That structure shapes behavior over time, whether people notice it or not.

A lot of my worldview comes back to agency. If you can’t opt out, you are not free. If you cannot move your data, you are not the customer. You are the inventory. That may sound dramatic, but it’s how the modern internet works. And once you accept that, the idea of building your entire life inside a closed ecosystem starts to feel less like convenience and more like a trap you walked into willingly.

Integrity matters too. I don’t like outsourcing core pieces of my life to institutions that don’t share my values. I’m not saying every company is evil. I’m saying the incentives are not aligned with my best interest. If a platform exists to extract attention and data so it can sell ads or influence behavior, then I should not be surprised when it does exactly that. The more essential the service, the more suspicious I get about being trapped inside it.

Resilience is the practical side of all this. Single points of failure are not just technical problems, they are life problems. If my digital identity can be crippled by a password reset email or a platform policy shift, then I don’t actually own my digital life. I’m not interested in living like that. If I’m going to be serious about independence, it has to extend into the digital world too.

Digital self reliance is not nostalgia. It is control and optionality. It means my domain anchors my identity, my email is not a corporate leash, and my data lives in systems I can export and rebuild. It means the important parts of my life are not held hostage by “login with” single sign-on dependencies and opaque rules. It also means I take responsibility for the adult side of independence: backups, security, documentation, and the ability to recover when something breaks. If I want sovereignty, I have to earn it.

That is why self hosting matters, but it is not the end goal by itself. Self hosting is the mechanism. The goal is independence without fragility. I want my own stack to be stable, portable, and resilient. I want to be able to move services, rebuild them, and restore data without begging permission or waiting for customer support to decide my fate.

So I’m approaching this like a real migration instead of an aesthetic. First come the foundations. My domain and DNS are the anchor. My email is next, because email is the skeleton key to the entire internet. Whoever controls your email controls your account recovery, which means they control your identity. After that comes authentication and password discipline, because self reliance without basic security is just self sabotage. Then comes storage and backups, with actual redundancy and tested restores.

Once the foundations are solid, then I move into the services layer. Photos and media. Calendar and contacts. Notes and knowledge management. Video calls and recordings. Publishing. RSS. Small utilities like link shorteners and analytics. The point is not to replace everything overnight. The point is to build a system I can live on and trust.

The social layer comes last, because that is where network effects live. This is also where people get stuck. Social platforms are designed to make you feel like you do not exist without them. I’m not naive about that. But my answer is simple: my website becomes the home base. Everything else is optional distribution. If I use social platforms at all, they are mirrors, not foundations. If a platform is hostile to users, I don’t build my life inside it.

There is also a mental and spiritual side to this that people tend to ignore. A lot of modern anxiety is not just screen time. It is the constant low grade sense of being watched, measured, nudged, and shaped. When incentives are manipulated, priorities drift. When attention is harvested, your inner life gets noisier. When everything becomes a feed, you stop thinking in terms of truth and start thinking in terms of engagement. That does something to people, and I don’t think it’s healthy.

That is why open source matters to me. Open source is not just cheaper software. It is a philosophy that says tools should be inspectable, modifiable, and accountable to the people who use them. It is a system that assumes human beings should have the right to understand and control the tools they depend on. That aligns a lot better with how I want to live.

I’m not pretending this will be free. I will give up convenience. Some things will take longer. Some stuff will break. Some replacements will be imperfect. Self reliance costs effort, and it charges you up front. But the payoff is real. Privacy becomes structural instead of promised. My risk drops because I have fewer dependencies and more portability. I gain skills, clarity, and the confidence that my digital life can survive platform drama.

This is the same logic as learning to cook, fix things, and navigate without being helpless. It is not anti modern. It is anti dependency. It is choosing competence over comfort when comfort comes with strings attached.

I’m not trying to be a purity monk about this. I’m trying to be deliberate. If an open source replacement meets my needs, I will use it. If it does not, I will minimize dependency and keep an exit plan. If a service is critical, it must be portable. If it stores my data, I need clean exports. If it is free, I assume I am the product until proven otherwise.

I’m saying this out loud because it keeps me accountable. It also signals what I care about. I think more people feel this itch than they admit, because a lot of us are tired of being treated like passive endpoints in someone else’s system. I’m done renting my digital life.

This year I’m building a digital homestead. It will not be perfect, but it will be mine. If you are doing something similar, or you have solid tool recommendations, I want to hear them. And if you are not ready to go all in, start with the basics. Own your domain, own your email, back up your data, and stop tying your identity to platforms that can turn you off. That is how it starts.