Here's the problem with most screen-time tools: the way out is a tap. “Ignore limit for 15 minutes.” One tap. The same thumb, the same motion, the same couch. You were never really locked out — you were politely asked, and the feed asks louder.
A tap is free. And anything free gets spent without thinking. That's the entire mechanic of the scroll: ten thousand free taps a day, each one too cheap to notice, adding up to hours you never agreed to spend.
Steps aren't free. That's the point.
Walking is the smallest unit of real-world effort. You can't do it from the couch. You can't do it while looking at the screen — not well, anyway. To pay thirty steps, you have to stand up, put the phone down or into a pocket, and move your actual body through actual space.
And something happens in those thirty steps. The trance breaks. Blood moves. You notice the room, the window, the hour. The question quietly changes from “what's next in the feed?” to “did I even want this?” Most of the time, the honest answer walks in around step twenty.
We're trying to make stopping easier than continuing.
That's the whole design philosophy. Not shame — you won't find a single guilt-trip graph in LogOut. Not abstinence — your apps come back the moment you've moved. Just friction, placed exactly where the autopilot lives, priced in steps instead of taps.
The scroll loop is a pattern, and patterns survive on smoothness. Interrupt one often enough — with your legs, of all things — and it stops being your default. That's not a moonshot promise. It's just what happens when the easiest path finally points somewhere better.
Walk it off. We'll keep the feed warm.