Looking at my own digital dependency and comparing it to people I know, although being personally more of a tech geek than most, I find my dependency of technology lower.
Hardware wise, I tend to run everything I buy until it is rendered completely unuseable or it breaks down. This obviously ties with my preference towards FOSS but I think it is more of a tangent.
Services wise, I am a complete outlier. I never subscribed to a streaming service, I was quick to leave mainstream social media behind, I never boarded fads around wearables. Most applications that inhabit my acquaintances smartphones don’t find a way to mine (Whatsapp, Amazon, Aliexpress, Uber, UberEats, etc).
This is the most extreme part of my behaviour but I have refused services that do not have a means of contact/interaction besides an application.
And I do not feel inconvinienced in my day to day life by this.
There is definitely a chunk of services I’m dependent on because of need. The most important is probably a password manager. I know they can be self-hosted. And while I’m technically inclined enough to be able to do it, I don’t trust myself to be able to maintain it, so I rely on the provider’s service.
Another would be maps and navigation, because traffic in my city is so unpredictable that I always use navigation even on familiar routes in case of an accident or road closure and I need to divert.
The wants on the other hand (i.e. streaming services) are more for convenience rather than dependency.
If I was to consider myself dependent to anything, I would say I’m more of an analog dependency kind of guy than a digital one.
I mean, I have a computer and a phone (and a tablet) and I know how to use them, but I also don’t feel much excitement building up thinking about using them, at all. On the other hand, I enjoy doing analog and IRL activities.
I love my digital devices like my computer and the stuff attached to it, my ebook or my phone. But I have very little dependence for any of them, the only thing I’m dependent on is the contact list on my phone.
