Micro-newsletter today because the weekend was crammed and I’ve got about 40 minutes to get this written during nap.
I spend way too much time on my phone.
My average screen time in the last month, on just my phone is over 6 and a half hours. That puts me on track to spend over 14 years of my life on my phone by the time I’m 85.
No one has ever framed it to you like that have they?
Imagine I told you tomorrow I could snap my fingers and make you live a decade longer? Would you do it?
Okay maybe not if it was your marginal decade and you were in poor health but you get years back now.
Of course you would!
All that time you complain that you never have for things? You just got it back.
I’m not saying this is an easy change — I titled the newsletter Technological Umbilical Cords for a reason. That’s how important these things feel to us now. You’re tethered to it. It’s your lifeline for everything. Maybe I’ll write a series on all the ways your phone is ruining your life, we’ve got enough objective data on this now to be meaningful.
You know intuitively that’s kind of how you feel, it’s just so hard to stop it.
There is an army of people larger than the military of at least 135 countries trying to make you addicted to your phone.
In a lot of ways, especially for young people, more of their life takes place on their phone than off it. When people talk about why younger generations aren’t going out in to the real word and doing things it’s because what’s happening on their phones is more real than what isn’t.
Pics or it didn’t happen…
All of this to say, you (and I) should be working a lot harder to sequester our phones to the role of useful tool instead of medical necessity.
Words I Wish I Wrote
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”
Links & Learnings
For anyone with a modicum of spare income I think one of the highest ROI ways to spend it is an Executive Medical Screening. Been mulling it over for us recently, just a little out of our price range, but “dollars” to “potential life improvement” is likely to be insanely high. I know everyone in Canada seems to feel some kind of way about paying for private healthcare options above and beyond standard care, but if I have the opportunity to catch some kind of debilitating illness early I can’t think of a better way to spend my money.
This didn’t work for me fully but here’s an out of the box “cure” for tinnitus.
This seems like one of the studies that absolutely becomes part of the replication crisis, but here's a pretty interesting study on right side sleepers vs left side sleepers. If you’re having nightmares maybe you’re sleeping wrong?
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PHOTW: $20 says your municipality runs a lot of free or nearly free events for children, especially under school age. Do some research and sign up for them.
