march 2026
🥖 just do it from scratch! + my internet journey 🧑💻
Hello!
from scratch
This is what I want to do, this is what I want to watch, this is what I want to cook.
A theme of this month has been doing things from scratch.
It started with me signing up for a subscription box of produce that gets delivered every week. The company — Odd Bunch — uses produce that would’ve been discarded and ships it to people locally.
What’s fun is that the produce I get is different every week. There’s usually a veggie in there that I’ve never cooked before (or haven’t in a long time).
It means I’m forced to think about how to cook this new stuff into a meal instead of doing my default prep with my default veggies.
It breaks me out of the monotony really. Perhaps the randomness of new veggies is what will make me a better cook.
I’m also making the following food from scratch instead of buying it:
sandwich bread
hummus
mayonnaise
granola
hamburger buns (once)
manual consumption
In a sort of similar way, I’ve found myself behaving differently with my phone.
I’ve been drifting toward consuming things more intentionally. This means:
scrolling through my YouTube subscription tab instead of the recommended page
looking through saved albums on Spotify instead of my Discover Weekly or Daylist
This can be referred to as “avoiding the Home page”.
It’s not like I haven’t wanted to start doing this earlier — I’ve been trying to distance myself from recommendation algorithms for what feels like years.
I think it took hold because I realized that I actually enjoy the things I choose to consume.
Here are two examples:
I discovered the podcast “The Rest is Politics” by searching “iran war podcast” on YouTube1
I found Tourist’s new album on Spotify by scrolling through my saved artists list
In both cases, I found the content instead of relying on recommendations.
To be fair, the Home page shows me good stuff too. I think there’s a lot of unique, special inspiration on the internet that I derive value from — and wouldn’t have found by myself.
The problem for me is that easy access to an infinite scrollable feed (especially on my phone) is a fraught, treacherous thing. I get addicted easily and lose my own thoughts in the process.
Anyways, even though I’m realizing that the algorithm isn’t always better than my own free will, I can also acknowledge that it’s not all bad either. Everything is a bit grey.
on pressure
my job has never failed to exert pressure. in fact, few things in my life have been as consistent.
i don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing. it gives me the motivation to get better. it’s easier to learn when there’s some accountability.
i think pressure is good for a lot of things:
a band might feel pressure to prepare for a performance
an athlete might feel pressure to train for a race
i might feel pressure to cook something good for a dinner party
that doesn’t mean the pressure is wrong — it helps!
but it also distracts.
pressure means there isn’t as much time to be curious. it bumps all the other stuff down the priority list.
kahvi on the internet
I created my Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2012, when I was 14 years old. I created my blog (kahvipatel.com) a couple years later, when I was 16.
I’ve been reflecting on how each of these places has changed.
beginning (2012-2016)
This is what my blog looked like when I first started:
Back then, I was just excited to create stuff that I could put online. Designing the website was rewarding — it felt like a natural evolution after spending a lot of time in Illustrator.
I enjoyed the writing part too. I wrote about my future career, my hair length and many other things. It felt very cool to “publish”2 that work.
At the time, my Facebook and Instagram accounts were way more active. I would post almost daily, usually directed towards friends or classmates.
university (2016-2020)
Once I got to university, the blog became a vessel for me to learn new web technologies. I rebuilt my blog to learn about projects like React and Typescript. I used it to get my first co-op.
At the same time, social media was undergoing a shift in the culture. I think it started with the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal and movies like The Social Dilemma.
Regardless of how it happened, I started to trust Facebook less and stopped posting as much. This was also a trend among my friends.
career (2021-2026)
When I started working full-time, I was put on a team whose focus was building products for the web. This forced me to think more about the calculus of websites like Facebook: Your free consumption comes at the cost of being tracked.
That made it harder for me to justify uploading things to a platform that I didn’t even trust in the first place.
It made it easier to focus on my blog where the incentives were much simpler. I own the content I create there. That’s about when I decided to start this newsletter.
now
Throughout their existence, my website and this newsletter haven’t been well known among my friends. The updates I make often go unnoticed, and things I say here have less reach than they would on a site like Facebook or Instagram.
To me, it makes them feel like a more intimate, private space — one that people must choose to be in. Selfishly, I wish more parts of the internet were like this.
Or like the front page of Hacker News. Just a list of links that get upvoted.
misc
As usual, here’s a handful of unrelated things from this month:
I caught a crab with Mason:
Saw this lede on twitter
Finally, here’s me and Penny (courtesy of Ashley ♥️):
See you next week!
Yes, I realize this is a weird thing to search
No one really looks at the blog, so publish is a bit of a stretch here. Also footnotes are fun!
Assuming I find somewhere to put it 🤔













The guy in the chair is definitely Mr Bean.
I love the newsletter! I find i don't comment often because i have to login and get a code. This small step distracts me! But you make some good points about being intentional with computer/social media use. Thank you for this.
Also, i would like to see more food photos! and photos of odd veggies! So glad that you are cooking more. Loving Spoonful lives on.