u/Former-Signature1180

I rent an apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows. Great light and view. Also, great exposure…

The street is close. People walk by. They look in. I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl and I can’t walk around in my pajamas or naked. I can’t leave dishes in the sink and I can’t just exist without feeling watched.

I wanted to apply window tint. Not dark limo tint. You know.. just something subtle or something that gives me a little privacy without blocking the light. I asked my landlord. He said no. He said the facade has to be uniform. He said tint would ruin the building’s appeal. He said if I do it, I’ll have to pay to remove it and might lose my deposit

I talked to a lawyer. He said the landlord is within his rights and the building is his. So the exterior is his, which means that I can’t modify it without permission

So I’m stuck. I don’t want to move. I like this place. I just don’t like feeling exposed

Someone suggested smart glass. I’ve never heard of it. Apparently you can apply a film that turns cloudy when you flip a switch? Or it’s built into the glass itself? I don’t understand. Can you retrofit it? Does it work on existing windows? Is it expensive?

I’m also looking at other options. Peel-and-stick privacy film? But that’s the same as tint. He’ll say no. Temporary curtains? I don’t want to block the light. Sheer curtains? Maybe... But they still change the look from outside. Would he even notice?

What about plants? A tall screen? A room divider? I just don’t want to break my lease or lose my deposit. And I don’t want to live in a cave

i started noticing how often other people were on theirs.

not in a judgmental way.

just because once you stop filling every quiet moment with your own screen, you suddenly have a lot more time to look around

waiting rooms. coffee shops. public transport. people standing outside talking while half the group is looking down.

it made me realize how normal constant phone checking had become

now i notice it mostly when nobody is doing anything wrong. there’s just a five-second pause in a conversation and everyone immediately reaches for a screen.

has reducing your own phone use changed what you notice around you?

Deleted TikTok and YouTube Shorts about six weeks ago. Not because I was spending insane hours on them, but because I noticed I was watching them during rest periods at the gym and before morning runs. Just this lowgrade static running in the background of everything.

The gym thing adjusted pretty fast. The trail runs got weird in a way I didn't see coming. For the first two weeks I was genuinely uncomfortable with just the sound of my own breathing and footsteps. Not bored exactly. More like my brain kept reaching for something that wasn't there. I hadn't realized how much I was queuing up clips the night before runs as a kind of preview hype ritual.

By week three something shifted. The runs started feeling longer in a good way. Like actual thinking was happening again instead of just replaying whatever I'd watched. A problem I'd been circling at work for two months got solved on a Wednesday 8miler and I didn't even notice it happening until I was back at the car.

The silence stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like the actual point. Which sounds obvious written out, but it wasn't obvious before I cut the feed.

Curious if anyone else had a physical hobby that changed after they quit. Not productivity stuff, actual movement.

Deleted TikTok and YouTube Shorts about six weeks ago. Not because I was spending insane hours on them, but because I noticed I was watching them during rest periods at the gym and before morning runs. Just this lowgrade static running in the background of everything.

The gym thing adjusted pretty fast. The trail runs got weird in a way I didn't see coming. For the first two weeks I was genuinely uncomfortable with just the sound of my own breathing and footsteps. Not bored exactly. More like my brain kept reaching for something that wasn't there. I hadn't realized how much I was queuing up clips the night before runs as a kind of preview hype ritual.

By week three something shifted. The runs started feeling longer in a good way. Like actual thinking was happening again instead of just replaying whatever I'd watched. A problem I'd been circling at work for two months got solved on a Wednesday 8miler and I didn't even notice it happening until I was back at the car.

The silence stopped feeling like absence and started feeling like the actual point. Which sounds obvious written out, but it wasn't obvious before I cut the feed.

Curious if anyone else had a physical hobby that changed after they quit. Not productivity stuff, actual movement.

My schedule runs pretty hard most days and the one thing I keep coming back to is that my winddown routine is inconsistent, which wrecks sleep quality more than anything else. So I started trying to get the house to do the work instead of relying on willpower at 10pm when I'm already cooked.

What I have right now is a scene that triggers at a set time, dims everything down, cuts the overhead lights in the bedroom, and drops the thermostat a couple degrees. It works fine when I'm actually home and actually going to bed at that time, which is maybe three nights a week realistically.

The other nights I'm either still working, still eating, or just not ready, and the automation fires anyway and I end up overriding everything manually. So I've basically built a reminder I ignore.

I've been thinking about using a combination of phone idle state and the TV turning off as a proxy for actually winding down, but I haven't set it up yet and I'm not sure if that's going to be reliable or just annoying in a different way.

Curious if anyone has cracked a recovery or sleep routine that actually adapts to when you're ready rather than just a fixed time trigger. What signals are you using and does it hold up day to day, or is it more of a works sometimes situation.

My home gym is in the garage, and lately I've been trying to make the automation adapt to how I actually use the space instead of just running on a schedule. My training times change constantly depending on what I'm programming that week, so a fixed 6:00 AM routine ends up being wrong as often as it's right.

Right now I use my phone's location together with a contact sensor on the garage door. When both conditions are met, the space heater turns on, the lights go to full brightness, and a fan starts on a timer. It works surprisingly well, but it also feels a little fragile because it depends on my phone entering the geofence before I actually walk into the garage. The part I haven't figured out is the cooldown. After a heavy session I'd like the lights to dim and a white noise machine to start while I stretch, but I still trigger that manually.

My first thought was using a motion sensor and treating a few minutes of low movement as cooldown, but I'm not convinced it wouldn't end up triggering in the middle of a workout between sets. Has anyone built automations that react to activity state rather than just time or presence? I'd be interested in hearing what sensors or logic ended up being reliable.

The light switch rule is real and I learned it the hard way. Spent a weekend wiring up smart switches throughout the house and my wife spent the next two weeks frustrated because the physical switches felt unresponsive compared to just flipping a regular switch. She's not interested in the app, not interested in voice commands, just wants the lights to work when she touches the wall.

What actually saved things was setting up automations that run completely in the background so she never has to think about them. Motionbased lights in the hallway and bathroom, the porch light tied to sunset, stuff like that. She went from tolerating the whole setup to genuinely liking it because it just works without requiring anything from her.

The stuff she can see and interact with, though, had to feel at least as fast and reliable as before or it was a problem. Latency killed my first few attempts more than anything else.

Curious how others have handled this. Did you build everything around one person in the house being the only one who actually manages it, or did you find a way to get the rest of your household on board without making them learn anything?