2024 Year in Review

Reflecting on the past year at Techno Sapiens

Welcome to Techno Sapiens! I’m Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist and professor at Brown University, co-founder of Tech Without Stress, and mom of two young kids. If you like Techno Sapiens, please consider sharing it with a friend today. Thanks for your support!

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5 min read

We’re nearing the end of 2024, and you know what that means! Time for my annual Spotify Wrapped-inspired existential spiral.

I used to be a person with hobbies. With taste, even. A person with her own musical preferences.

Now, I have children. One with a highly specific interest in Celtic folk music and sea shanties.¹² I am now a person who bribes her three-year-old to climb into his carseat by promising she’ll play Belle of Belfast City on the drive.

What have I become?

Life comes at you fast.

Anyway, before time marches on to 2025, careening us toward an uncertain future of untold musical genres, I’d like to reflect on this past year here at Techno Sapiens.

So please, come join me! Take a seat. Grab a cup of coffee. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane.

I’ll supply the music.

Techno Sapiens 2024 Milestones

This was Year 3 of Techno Sapiens, and I’m so proud of how far we’ve come.

• Our community crossed 33,000 readers! This is very cool, but as they say, quality over quantity. And—don’t tell any other newsletters—techno sapiens are the highest quality readers out there. I know this because of your emails and comments, and also your general willingness to tolerate (and even celebrate) nerdy academic humor and stories about my children’s musical preferences. You all are the best!

• Techno Sapiens was featured in the Substack Originals series. I got to record some fun videos talking about what this newsletter means to me. See:

• We hit the big leagues, with Techno Sapiens posts featured in mainstream outlets like The Washington Post and Scientific American. We also made appearances in other top newsletters, like Emily Oster’s ParentData and Jonathan Haidt’s After Babel.

• I’m incredibly grateful to the generous sapiens who supported Techno Sapiens financially through our second year of paid subscriptions. We launched fun new perks for paying subscribers this year, including exclusive Q&As, research roundups, and discounted access to my online tech parenting course with Dr. Emily Weinstein.

The most popular post of 2024

We covered a lot of ground this year, with posts on everything from school cell phone bans to my thoughts on Daniel Tiger, but the number one, most popular post was [drum roll]...

67 screen-free activities for kids

You, techno sapiens, were apparently as desperate as I was to figure out what to do all day with your children when it’s dark and cold outside. For those interested, the most-clicked links in this post were: my kids’ favorite PlasmaCar, kids’ headlamp, kids’ flashlights, and this surprisingly fun gear toy.

I have been referencing this list often. As evidence, here’s a recent photo of my children enjoying #30 (“build a fort or play area out of couch cushions”).

It’s the face plant for me.

Other top posts of 2024

New study: What actually matters for kids and screens

A feeling I can't quite name

New study: How to be happy

Making sense of The Anxious Generation

Looking ahead

When I got back to writing after my second child was born, it was roughly one year ago. Looking to the year ahead, I felt excited, of course, but also scared. Overwhelmed. How am I going to do this?! I thought, a pile of unwashed baby bottles mounting in the sink, and an even larger pile of emails mounting in my inbox. Will I really be able to keep this up?

For me, the most meaningful milestone of year may also be the simplest: I showed up every week (sometimes twice!), and you all greeted me with open arms and email inboxes. Thank you for showing up this year, for supporting Techno Sapiens, and for making it possible for me to do this thing I love so much.

We’ve got big things coming in the future, including exciting new perks for paying subscribers (stay tuned!), a site refresh, and plans to keep growing and improving.³ Thanks for being along for this ride, sapiens. I cannot wait to see what next year brings.

We’ll be taking next week off for holiday celebrations⁴ and extensive couch cushion-related play, so I’ll see you in January. Happy holidays, sapiens!

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A quick survey

What did you think of this week’s Techno Sapiens? Your feedback helps me make this better. Thanks!

The Best | Great | Good | Meh | The Worst

1. The worst part about my children overhauling my Spotify listening patterns is that my husband and I have started to come around on it? At first, my three-year-old would yell “Alexa! Play Belle of Belfast City by the Irish Rovers!” and we’d look at each other, quietly groan, and shake our heads. At one point a few months ago, my husband tentatively offered, “Is it just me, or are these songs kind of catchy?” Now, I’ll find myself totally alone, happily humming Irish folk tunes while going about my day.

2. How concerned, theoretically, should one be that her child will sing “Drunken Sailor” for his teachers at preschool?

3. If you have ideas for Techno Sapiens next year, please send them my way! Suggestions, ways to improve, things to definitely stop doing, things to definitely start doing, ideas for new features or paid subscriber perks, topics to cover, sea shanties to listen to—you name it. Just reply directly to this email.

4. I think we could all use a little break, no? For me, personally, this past week saw a family stomach bug of epic proportions, unfortunately paired with a lot of last-minute holiday prep. During the course of writing this post, I abruptly stopped multiple times to panic-order items I suddenly remembered (e.g., last-minute gifts, wrapping paper, a double travel stroller for our upcoming trip…). Onward to 2025!