You think you love your favorite game site or your phone or the store where you buy your boots because they work better than the rest and you tell yourself that you are a smart buyer who picks the best thing on the shelf. You believe your choices are the result of a clear head and a sharp eye for value and you think you are being logical when you tell your friends to switch to what you use.

You are wrong and you are likely lying to yourself about why you stay. People do not pick things because they are the best and they pick things because they want to feel like they belong to a pack and they want a badge to show the world who they are. The site or the tool becomes a piece of your skin and when someone says the tool is bad you feel like they are saying you are bad.

The Bricks are Rotten, but the Memory is Strong

I have spent 16 years as a chimney inspector and I have climbed onto 2,482 roofs and I have looked down into the dark guts of houses where people live and sleep. I have learned that people will defend a crumbling fireplace until the very moment the house fills with thick grey smoke and they will tell me the smoke is just a sign of a good fire and they will get angry if I suggest the bricks are rotten.

They are not defending the bricks and they are defending their choice to sit by that fire for ten years and they are defending the way they see themselves as a person who knows how to keep a home. This is exactly how we treat the sites we visit and the apps we download. We turn a tool into a tribe and then we fight to the death to keep the tribe’s name clean even when the tribe is just a bunch of code on a server far away.

Last Tuesday I found myself in a heated talk with a man about a specific way to track work hours and he was almost shouting because I said the app he liked was slow and hard to use. He did not own the app and he did not make any money from the app but he acted like I had insulted his mother or his dog.

He had spent 418 days using that app and it had become part of his day and part of his work and part of his name. If the app was bad then his choice was bad and if his choice was bad then he was a man who made bad choices. He could not let that happen so he built a wall of words to protect a piece of software that did not even know he existed.

We see this everywhere in the digital world and it is a trap that keeps us from finding things that actually work. We look for a sign that we are in the right place and we look for other people who like the same things and we form a circle and we point our spears outward at anyone who uses a different tool.

The Elite Club of the Leaky Roof

The companies know we do this and they build their sites to make us feel like we are part of an elite club or a secret family. They give us badges and they give us levels and they make the colors feel like home so that we never want to leave even if the roof starts to leak and the floorboards start to rot.

I spent three hours this morning practicing my signature on a stack of yellow work orders and I noticed how I try to make the S in my name look like a hook that could catch a fish. I do this because I want my mark to mean something and I want people to see my name and think of a man who knows his way around a flue.

We do the same thing with our digital lives and we sign our names to these platforms and we hope the platform makes us look better or stronger or smarter. But a platform is just a tool and it should be like a hammer or a wrench. If the hammer breaks you should throw it away and get a new one and you should not hold a funeral for the hammer or write a poem about how the hammer was your best friend.

There is a big difference between holding fast to something because it is good and holding fast because you are afraid to be alone. Most brand loyalty is just fear in a fancy suit and it is the fear that we are just numbers in a book and that we do not matter if we are not part of a group.

We buy the shirt and we use the site and we defend the brand because we want to feel like we are on the winning team. We stop looking at how the site actually works and we stop caring if the service is fast or if the rules are fair. We only care that the badge on our chest matches the badge on the screen.

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The Tool vs. The Religion

When I look at a site like rca77 I see a place that is trying to be a tool and not a religion. It is built for speed and it is built for safety and it is built for people who want to get things done without joining a cult.

This is the way things should be and we should look for tools that do the job and then get out of the way. We do not need our entertainment to tell us who we are and we do not need a login screen to be our family. We need a place that handles our money with care and shows us the truth and lets us go back to our lives when the work is done.

I remember a woman in a small house near the edge of town who had a fireplace that was leaking gas into her living room and she told me she loved that fireplace because her father had built it.

“I told her that her father would not want her to die of gas breath and I told her that a fireplace is for heat and not for ghosts.”

She cried a little bit but then she let me fix the pipe. We are all like that woman and we are all holding onto gas-leaking tools because our hearts are tied to the memories of when we first found them. We forget that the world moves on and that 365 days a year there are new and better ways to do things.

Paying Rent to the King

The industry wants you to feel like your choice is your identity because it makes you a slave to the brand and it makes you do their marketing for them for free. You go on the internet and you fight with strangers about which site is better and you think you are being a hero but you are just a tool for a company that wants your data and your time.

You are defending a castle that you do not own and you are paying rent to the king while you stand on the wall and take arrows for him. It is a strange way to live and it is a hard way to find any real joy.

I have made my own mistakes with this and I once spent 122 dollars on a specific kind of flashlight just because a group of guys I admired said it was the best one ever made. The flashlight was heavy and the battery died in 20 minutes and the button stuck every time I used it in the cold but I told everyone it was a masterpiece of design.

I was not lying to them as much as I was lying to myself and I wanted to be the kind of man who owned the best flashlight. I had to drop it down a 30-foot chimney and watch it shatter on the hearth before I was willing to admit it was a piece of junk.

We need to learn how to see the soot for what it is and we need to stop letting the creosote build up until the whole system catches fire. A good service should be invisible and it should be like the air in a room or the water in a pipe. You should only notice it when it stops working and you should never feel the need to write a long post about how it changed your life.

If you find yourself getting angry because someone said a bad thing about a website you use then you should take a long walk and ask yourself why you care. The website does not love you back and it will not come to your funeral and it will not help you move your couch on a Saturday morning.

The soot hides the bricks but the chimney only works if the path stays clear.

Collars Called Badges of Honor

We are currently living in a time where everyone wants to be a part of something and that makes us easy targets for people who want to sell us a sense of belonging. They wrap a boring service in a flag and they tell us that only the cool people use it and we fall for it every single time.

We pay our money and we give our loyalty and we act like we have found the holy grail but we have really just found a new way to be told what to do. I have seen it in the way people talk about their banks and their grocery stores and their game sites. It is all the same pattern of looking for a home in a place made of glass and steel.

I think about the 15th of every month when I have to file my reports and I think about how I use a very simple pen to do it. The pen is blue and it costs about 45 cents and I do not care if anyone else likes the pen. If the pen runs out of ink I throw it in the trash and I grab another one.

I do not belong to a pen club and I do not defend the pen on the internet. This is how I want to live my digital life too and I want to use what works and I want to be able to walk away without feeling like I lost a limb.

We should be looking for the quiet ones and the sites that do not need to scream about how great they are. We should look for the places that just do the work and keep the records straight and stay out of the tribal wars. When we find a place like that we should use it for as long as it works and then we should move on if it stops. That is the only way to be free in a world that is trying to put a collar on us and call it a badge of honor.

Take Off the Costume

Your loyalty is a gift that you should give very sparingly and you should never give it to a company that is just trying to use your ego to fill their bank account. Look at the bricks and look at the mortar and look at the way the smoke rises. If the chimney is clean and the fire is warm then stay for a while but do not ever forget that you are the one who built the fire and you are the one who can walk away whenever you want.

The badge is just a piece of plastic or a row of pixels and it does not define who you are or what you are worth. You are more than the sum of your logins and you are more than the tribe you chose to join last year.

Look at the tools for what they really are. If they do not serve you then they do not deserve you and that is the only logic that matters in the end.