When You're Offline
Historically, when people had more leisure time, they used to engage in quality activities or community engagements like hobbies, or non-professional intellectual pursuits like poetry and novels.
What hobby might bring you more joy or pride? When you know the answer, it will be much easier to curb your tech use.
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Research shows 70% of your happiness comes from quality relationships with your family, friends, co-workers, and neighbors.
Yet, the biggest factor that interferes with your relationships is your phone. The internet. Social media.
FOMO is the fear of missing out, especially the latest internet hysteria. But FOMO is not the real problem - Reverse FOMO is. By always being online, you are missing out on real life. An overwhelming online presence is replacing all the things that really make a good life.
Tech is only a tool. How you use it can make it good or not so good.
We don't need a lifehack to control our phone. We need values to ensure that technology serves us, and not the other way around.
Find out what you value in life. Then ask how technology supports those values. Set rules that work for them. If you don't, tech will fill that void by default.
Many of us are scared of being alone with our own thoughts. Our phones are our constant companion to eliminate all moments of solitude.
But self-reflection helps us to gain insight into our values, life, and how we want to live. So, go out and take a long walk to think, without the technology that can interrupt you.
Becoming a digital minimalist makes you more invested in real-world conversations. Friendships are deeper than a social media comment on a baby picture.
Try your best not to socialize digitally anymore. Only use texting for logistics to arrange a get together where you do activities together. Play Monopoly or conquer a neighboring village.
RELATED IDEAS
Most of the time we don’t second guess them, and even if we do, they often end up overwhelming us.
Negative feelings are very powerful and harder to question: we identify with them effortlessly. “I feel it, so it must be true” is often our default setting.
They have inflated views of themselves (they think they are better than they actually are).
They make fantastic first impressions. But the stuff that works for narcissists so well in the short term proves lethal in the long term.
In job interviews, narcissists get results, but after three weeks people regard narcissists as untrustworthy. They make awesome first dates, but relationship satisfaction with them shows a big decline after 4 months.
Listen to your thoughts — but don’t necessarily believe them.
They're suggestions, possibilities. But they’re not gospel. You can’t control what thoughts pop up, but you can decide what is helpful and choose not to give the unhelpful thoughts any more attention than they deserve.