What It Takes To Put Your Phone Away

Excerpt from this article in the New Yorker (which I say in case it eats into your allotment of free monthly articles):

Every week, it seems, a journalist will proclaim, on Twitter, that he is leaving Twitter, or will write an op-ed about how he’s stepping away from social media—a style of essay so common that it was parodied, last month, in the Wall Street Journal.

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Nearly three-quarters of Americans have taken steps to distance themselves from Facebook. Entire families try to observe a “digital Sabbath.” Parents seek screen-time alternatives to the Jungian horrorscape that is children’s YouTube.

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[Georgetown computer-science professor Cal Newport] defines a digital minimalist as someone who drops “low-quality activities like mindless phone swiping and halfhearted binge watching” in favor of high-value leisure activities such as board games, CrossFit, book clubs, and learning to “fix or build something every week.” The goal is a permanent change of outlook and behavior, like converting to veganism or Christianity, in service of a life that is more holistically productive—one in which we turn to digital technology only when it provides the most efficient method of serving a carefully considered personal aim. When you’re first learning to become a digital minimalist, it’s important, Newport explains, to keep doing stuff.

In Search of Lost Screen Time

Excerpt from this article:

More than three-quarters of all Americans own a smartphone. In 2018 those 253 million Americans spent $1,380 and 1,460 hours on their smartphone and other mobile devices. That’s 91 waking days; cumulatively, that adds up to 370 billion waking American hours and $349 billion.

In 2019, here’s what we could do instead.

A Mother’s Voice Is the Most Effective Smoke Alarm

Excerpt from this article:

A mother’s recorded voice will wake a child and get him out the room much faster than a standard smoke alarm, a randomized trial has found.

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With the mother’s voice — shouting names, instructions or both — almost 90 percent of the children awoke and were out of the room in an average of under 30 seconds.

 

How to Make This the Summer of Missing Out

Excerpt from this article:

“To me, it’s about setting boundaries,” said Cara Wenig, 30, a sales rep and JOMO practitioner. “In my work, it is really important to respond quickly and to be on top of things so it’s not as if I can completely unplug. But I can be more mindful about it.”

Given JOMO’s Luddite bent, it’s (perhaps) surprising that the tech industry has recently come on board. This spring, Sundar Pichai, the C.E.O. of Google, took the stage at the company’s annual developer conference with the words “Joy of Missing Out” projected behind him.

Mr. Pichai was announcing a new “digital wellbeing” initiative that aims to encourage healthier tech habits via several tools, including a dashboard on its newest Android that shows you how much time you spend per app, suggested breaks from marathon sessions and batched notifications to avoid the update-every-second situation.

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All of which means missing out can be a good thing. But how best to do it?

Mom Was Shamed For Staring at Her Phone in Post-Birth Photo – Her Snapback Is SO Good

Excerpt from this article:

Unfortunately, though, mommy shamers were quick to pounce on the new mom of five.

Many judged her drink of choice, but most called her out for not being more present with her just-born baby. One commented sarcastically, “it’s important to check your phone right now.” Another wrote, “she’s obviously googling parental advice.”

Although most of the negative comments were deleted, her legion of fans stepped in, sharing not only that she earned that hard-fought soda but that there was likely a very good reason she was on her phone.

Woman shares intimate Instagram to encourage new mums to embrace their post-pregnancy bodies

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Okay, this is quite a personal post but I am now 4 months postpartum and beginning to embrace what my body has become, I’ve housed two beautiful babies for 36 weeks and breastfed for 5 weeks. My pregnancy wasn’t exactly an easy ride these boys wanted to come out early and I was hospitalised a few times because of dehydration and early contractions, our bodies go through a lot, a lot of change and your body is put through an enormous amount and I am so proud of myself that I carried such beautiful children and gave them food, warmth and most importantly all the love that I never thought I had. With a scar that I will have for the rest of my life is a tiny sacrifice for a lifetime of beautiful memories with my family. Your stretch marks DO NOT define you, your scar DOES NOT define you, your flab DOES NOT define you. You are incredible, you are a mother and you are the light of your babies eyes. I wanted to share this to show the reality of our bodies and that it’s okay not to be perfect because in their eyes you are exactly that. #identicaltwins #twins #csectionrecovery #babies #brave #scar #csectionstrong #stretchmarks #beautiful #perfect

A post shared by ᗩᖇTᕼᑌᖇ & ᖴIᑎᒪEY (@marson.twins) on Mar 2, 2018 at 3:26am PST

Excerpt from this article:

A British mum has shared an intimate Instagram photo of her post-pregnancy body in a bid to encourage other mums to embrace their bodies.

Emily Marson from Wrexham, UK, posted a photo of herself four months after giving birth to twins via caesarian, stating she’s “beginning to embrace what [her] body has become.”

 

 

Before the Internet

Excerpt from this article:

Before the Internet, you would just sit in an armchair with a book open on your lap, staring into space or staring at a decorative broom on the wall—kind of shifting back and forth between those two modes of being.

Before the Internet, you might take it upon yourself to do a drawing. You’d quietly start sketching something in a notebook, not sure what it was, but you’d let inspiration guide you and then—woop!—turns out you’d drawn a squiggly alligator with a cockeyed approach.

Want More Time? Get Rid of The Easiest Way to Spend It

Excerpt from this article:

What I learned

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was nothing difficult about not using these services once they were off my phone. I didn’t miss them, but I did find myself, many times a day, taking my phone out and absently swiping through it. This impulse usually came at moments when there was some waiting to do: when food was heating in the microwave, when a friend had departed to the bathroom, or even when a website was loading slowly on my laptop.

By Day 6 my phone had become a much less interesting object. I took it out much less often, and spent little time on it whenever I did. The absent-minded swiping impulse, whenever it still happened, became a reminder to either get to whatever responsibility I was avoiding, to wait mindfully, or to read a book or an article. (I made good use of an app called Pocket, which stores online articles for later reading offline.)

Whenever I did log on to Twitter, Facebook, or Reddit, I found them quite boring, and even kind of repulsive. This is how I put it in my log:

…after taking even a little time away from these platforms, whenever I check in I can’t help but see them as repositories for stray feelings, and energy that we don’t want to spend on anything consequential. They seem like places to go when you’re bored, or when you’re actively avoiding the thing you know you should be doing. I know a lot of this feeling is pure projection—I have certainly used these platforms that way.

How Everyday Africa Sparked a Movement That’s Changing Western Stereotypes of Africa

Excerpt from this article:

Too often, the African continent has been captured by the West in a series of clichéd images: women carrying jugs of water atop their head; children either starving or wielding AK-47s; elephants and lions silhouetted against a savanna sunset. But that narrow focus is expanding.

This overdue perspective is thanks in part to Everyday Africa, an Instagram account-cum-global movement that’s shifting photojournalism toward collective, localized storytelling

Me Vs. My Social Media Self: Why Gen Z Is The Saddest Generation

Excerpt from this article:

Back in her room, in bed and depressed, she would scroll through her Instagram feed, jealous of the friends who looked like they genuinely loved their lives. It didn’t occur to her that maybe they were faking it, too. She considered taking a break from school — going home to Rockville, Maryland — but she was afraid that the gap would only make college (and her misery) last longer. She felt like everything about her life as a University of South Carolina sorority girl was contrived, but she lived in the house. She was trapped. But as soon as she could move out, she quit the sorority. Then, most importantly, she stopped posting on social media for the length of her junior year.

Once she stopped performing on social media, Steimer had the time and headspace to focus on bettering her life in the real world. She landed a communications internship in New York at NASDAQ, which helped her learn more about who she wanted to be, “a serious person who works hard.” She cut her hair short and dyed it brown. The fact that she didn’t share every little detail about her new job or new look on social media also gave her freedom to experiment.

“I’m posting this mostly for myself, but I think there’s probably some people out there who need to hear it,” she wrote in the caption. “To all the people who have told me I was prettier as a blonde, to all the people who have told me I used to be more fun, and to anyone who really thinks I was a cooler person when I had cooler Instagram pictures: The girl on the left is someone pretending to be happy and praying to get enough likes on her pictures to feel fulfilled, which never works. The girl on the right is a girl who learned how to look at life for what it is, not how other people see it or how it looks through a camera.” The photo got 200 likes and 24 comments, all positive.