Today’s track: Still Young — The Cat Empire — https://youtu.be/9v7RVkPZkls
I found out Taylor Swift got married the way you find out about weather in a city you don’t live in — vaguely, secondhand, and about three times total.
That’s it. Three times. For what I’m told was one of the biggest cultural events of the year.
And I’m not bragging about being above it — I’m telling you it was on purpose, and it was easier than I thought.
Last week I mentioned my screen time was hovering around four and a half hours a day and I wanted to cut back. Not for the usual reasons. I just noticed social media is potato chips. You can eat a whole bag and still be hungry. I wanted more meat and potatoes — the stuff that actually fills you up, the stuff that makes you feel like you did something.
So I did two things.
First, I went through Twitter and blocked words. Not people — words. I sat there during one of my high-screen-time benders and asked myself: what do I keep getting hit with that I don’t actually want in my head? I muted “Iran,” muted “Israel,” muted probably twenty terms total. Stuff I have no control over that just spikes my blood pressure and gives me nothing back.
Second — and I learned this one talking to Claude — I put a red tint on my iPhone. Knocked the color down to a level that’s still usable but a lot less candy-coated. Turns out the phone is engineered to look like a slot machine, and you can turn that off.
Four and a half hours down to three hours and seventeen minutes. In a week. Just from cutting words I didn’t want to deal with and dimming the glow.
Here’s the part nobody tells you. When you stop feeding the feed, the feed gets boring. There’s nothing new to read, so you check it less, so there’s even less new to read. The whole thing quietly deflates. And in the space where the scrolling used to be, other things move in.
I’ve been working on all the usual suspects, plus a neat NIL project with Eric Payne. It’s nice to be able to be bored and create across different spaces again. That’s really all it takes — a nugget of curiosity, and enough room to chase it.
Walden’s been sitting on my table for a long time. I’m not far in. Every paragraph is dense — something to actually chew on. It’ll probably take me another decade to finish. But a few paragraphs of that is a better meal than an hour of the timeline. Think about that trade for a second.
Here’s the bite I chewed on this week:
“In the savage state every family owns a shelter as good as the best, and sufficient for its coarser and simpler wants; but I think that I speak within bounds when I say that, though the birds of the air have their nests, and the foxes their holes, and the savages their wigwams, in modern civilized society not more than one half the families own a shelter. In the large towns and cities, where civilization especially prevails, the number of those who own a shelter is a very small fraction of the whole. The rest pay an annual tax for this outside garment of all, become indispensable summer and winter, which would buy a village of Indian wigwams, but now helps to keep them poor as long as they live.” —Henry David Thoreau, Walden
A realtor reading Thoreau on how few people own their shelter. I know. But he wrote that in 1854 and it still lands, which is the whole point of picking up the old dense stuff instead of the new easy stuff.
And look — in fairness, some of my three hours and seventeen minutes is still bird time on the bird apps. Watching birds. Not the other kind. That time I’m keeping. Time well spent.
Case in point — look at the tail on this guy:
Warmly,
Rob Bergeron
Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist: https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/the-morning-bergeron/pl.u-pMyl2GlSW1N3qv
PS: Try it this weekend — open your phone, mute five words you’re tired of seeing, and turn on the red tint (Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Color Filters). Let me know if your screen time goes down!