You're not printing it
Open a word processor and what do you see? A white rectangle the exact size of an A4 sheet of paper, a blinking cursor, and a ton of buttons you'll probably never click.
And when was the last time you actually printed what you were writing?
This has bothered me for years. MS Word still frames everything you write as something destined for a printer: margins, rulers, page numbers, headers, footers… The whole interface is a monument to a workflow that’s rarely used these days.
But we use it because we always have. We open Word (or Google Docs, same story) and start wrestling with formatting instead of focusing on what we actually want to say.
I've also stopped counting the number of times I've watched people hitting multiple returns instead of inserting a page break, tapping the space bar to centre a title, or manually adding numbers to lists. There are proper tools in Word for all this stuff. But if you're not using them, you probably don't need Word in the first place. A modern text editor, an online collaboration tool, even your computer's notepad might do the job.
Most of what we write today will be read on a screen, maybe even a phone screen. It doesn't need margins or page breaks – it needs to be clear, readable, and well thought out.
And that's one more piece of big tech you can ditch.
Colin