A Week of Change

 It started on a whim. Well, maybe not a whim… I have been discontent for some time between my auto-immune disorder, the fatigue, all else that goes with that, and the general lack of creativity in my life. 
The whim comes when we are sitting having ice cream and espresso at a little shop, Paciugo, in Loveland, CO. A neighbor down the street had sold their house. My father and I were discussing what our homes would sell for, we made a phone call, and the house was sold a month or two later. At the end of October, we moved back to Ohio.

 Fast forward through a summer home renovation, during which the girls were back in Denver for ballet for an entire month, and with the upheaval the move and attending a new school, we began to settle into our new lives. The kettle was heating up. We, that is, I mean my wife, decorated and furnished the house. We finished up my office, which may be the nicest home office in the history of home offices. I was beginning to think clearly again for the first time in a long while. This moment has been brewing, and over the last few weeks, it began to boil, started to whistle, and came pouring out of the pot to a distinct point of change.

I finally cut out all the noise.

 I used to be creative. I read and wrote frequently during my childhood. Then life happened, and I focused on my amazing marriage, kids, and work. You know, the essential things in life. The fatigue of rheumatoid arthritis pushed the point we are at now back ten years. Somehow, I made it. I'm reading and writing again.

 It's a strange web God weaves. I can see the threads, but not until I look back can I see exactly how far He's brought me, and what the weave looks like. I read a book over a year ago called 'Stolen Focus' by Johann Hari. In the book, he details how modern culture has changed how we work and the demands on our focus. While I don't intend to discuss modern work culture here, the critical part is to notice how the human experience has changed. Most of us are entirely digital now, using computers connected to the internet on social media, with screens in front of our faces for an obscene amount of hours. See Example A: Me.

 I spend most of the day on my computer, checking emails, updating information, looking at spreadsheets, searching for contacts, editing photos, posting to the website and other outlets, rechecking emails, then transitioning to my iPhone, making calls, checking emails, texting; you get the picture. I'm sure many of you can relate. If you can't relate, God bless you, don't screw it up.

 In the book's latter half, he reviews the development of the ubiquitous feature most websites and social media now call standard: infinite scroll. The big tech companies formed ethics committees to examine infinite scrolling and the addictive nature of these apps and report on whether or not they should use this feature and if it would be detrimental to their users. The outcome of those committees? They told the ethics committees they were no longer needed and set aside their findings.

 This should not be surprising. Companies, specifically publicly traded companies, are accountable to and ruled by their shareholders, which is to say, they are driven solely by profit.These companies want to create closed-loop systems by which they can both pay you less, do everything cheaper, make more and have you spend more time with them while convincing you their hands are clean. They want you to stay engaged with your mind, money, and work. Infinite scroll and micro-transactions are praised by shareholders and consumers alike. You can get the content you want when and how you want it. When you can't find what you are looking for, scroll a little farther, you'll find something; it's a constant drip of dopamine.

 Let's take a glance. According to the Pew Research Center's Social Media Fact Sheet, 72% of the public use social media, 90% of 18-29 year olds, and most of those people check social media and news sites daily. A quick Google search (notice how I'm using these things - they are still good tools) reveals that the average user spends 4-6 hours on their phones on top of the computer screen time they use. That is before the daily computer screen use, and average four hours of television. My daughter's health class discussed what time they go to bed; my daughter went to bed the earliest. Most, in this class of 13-14 year olds, do not sleep until after 11 PM. Why? They are on their phones looking at Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, and Snapchat. Constantly watching snapshots of other people's lives, their own life passing them by one finger swipe at a time.

 My point in bringing this up is that we are bombarded by noise. Ad companies and businesses, internet personalities, and budding internet personalities, all scratching and clawing to get in front of us. The television pundits are clamoring for you to tune in. Buy now, watch now, come hang out now. The technology of this day and age is instant, and they all want your attention this very second. I felt that. A deep gnawing away at my soul, a pain in the back of my head I couldn't shake, a weight heavy on my mind. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I think this is destroying culture, and I would wager if you took the time to reflect on it, you would agree.

 All of this has been weighing on me over the last few years, and until recently, I have been unable to express it. I see it in my family, my friends, and our relationships. I see it in the news, in the schools, in the churches, and in our culture. All of us mindlessly consuming thoughts that are not our own. I have been trying to tackle this for the past few months, and figure out some course of action for my own sanity. With age 40 quickly approaching, it is apropos to label it a mid-life crisis. Outside of reacting to work, I felt like I couldn't think coherently. Reading, surfing the internet, watching television, and video games just felt like nothing. I was numb. I was missing things I shouldn't, the least of which was creatively interacting with my kids, lest we all sit in the same room with that familiar electronic silence hanging over us. I have had enough.

 I began reading Wendell Berry's 'A World Ending Fire', an author my teacher Al Iten recommended to me years ago. It had been on my bookshelf for ages, and picking it up a few times, I never made much progress. It's a collection of essays on the movement away from the local economy, an agrarian economy, into what he would call the total economy of mass market goods and GMO consumerism. Essays for which he rightly earned the label of "the grumpy farmer". One in particular stood out to me 'Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer'. He outlines said title and articulates what he thinks technology should do if it is to be accepted responsibly. It made me pause to think about the little things we do. We talk about if we should do some of the big things in life, but we never stop to think of the modern conveniences. We seek to make things easier, and easier doesn't always mean better. Look at the rise of ChatGPT. Should I write this and work out my feelings, or rather let some AI generate some of this for me? It's a question worth considering before we plow away looking for quick solutions. This and other essays pulled the wool off my eyes, or rather it put a pebble in my shoe. I needed to change something and do it now or I wouldn't be happy, and I started to thinking.

 I began to reflect on how I used to think and how I think now. I realized that it changed. My attention span was shattered, already hampered by the cognitive dissonance of attention deficit (yes, it's a real thing). I rarely use Twitter, but I felt I could only think in 140 characters. Any time I sat down to read or to write something, I was blocked. I would pull out my phone and check the news or my email, Facebook, sports sites, and YouTube. I would lay in bed facing away from my wife, my wife doing the same, and a soft glow would illuminate the room on both sides. It's pathetic.

 At last, we come to the meat of this essay: Cutting the noise. It was time to take action, and over the past few weeks, I decided I had enough. Anything that would get in the way and hold my mind back from the things I really wanted would be cut away. I want my life to be well-lived; I want it to mean something. I want to connect with people and connect with God. I sharpened my knives and began to cut.

 We started this by setting our alarms to 5:15 AM. I needed some time where it was just us. We begrudgingly flick the lights on. I started reading more long-form content than just mindlessly scrolling. I allowed myself to stop stressing about what books I was reading and find things engaging to me. I downloaded but didn't play some of those new video games. I deleted games. I started this blog, "Consuming Thoughts" to collect some of these things and hold me accountable. It was a start, but it was not enough. I needed more. I took a complete inventory of my phone and removed every application that added nothing to my life. All of the video apps, all the social media apps, the news apps, all the games, everything that is wasting my time pulling me from the here and now. I even deleted the web browser.

 It was liberating. I now have only a few uses for my "dumb" phone, as the Redditors would say. I'm counter-culture now… or something. My phone now only has a few functions: calls, messages, email (hidden without notifications), Follow (my daughter's glucose app), Things (to-do list manager), Snooze(noise machine), Weather, authenticators, banking, and security apps. I cleared all the icons to the App Library except the phone and message. Next up was the computer. I did the same thing; I got rid of all the apps I don't use for business. I set up Freedom, a domain-blocking app, and set time blocks to block social media, YouTube, media sites, news sites… you get the idea. Ruthlessly, I cut away all the baggage stealing my attention and all the banging around in my head.

 A week later, and here we are. I have watched less than an hour of TV this week. My iPhone screen time is less than one hour daily (not counting phone calls). It's working. I'm writing again. This will be my second brain dump of the week, the first being a reflection on finding a note from my Grandpa. This is the first time I can think clearly in over a decade. It's not an exaggeration to say that even the colors outside seem brighter. In the last two weeks, I've read Plato's 'Five Dialogues', Alan Jacob's 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction', finished 'The World-Ending Fire', Greg Koukl's 'Tactics', finished Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises', and Make Time' by Jake Knapp and John Zerastky. That doesn't include the other essays and my regular bible reading (Robert M'Cheyne's reading plan). I don't mean skim through; I am actually reading again. I've played more board games with my kids than in years. None of this is a pat on my back. I'm not listing these books for commendation, but to show the shift in thinking, I want to show you that my interest and attention belong to me again.

 It has been a week of change in a year of change. I could feel the shift the second or third day in. It was that quick and noticeable. Suddenly, I don't need to impulsively check my phone every 15 minutes. I don't need to take it into the restroom and check the news. I don't need to jump on Reddit. I'm starting to think in sentences over 140 characters again. I woke up this morning at 5, eyes wide and awake, in the stillness of the cool morning. I got out of bed, woke my wife, made a country omelet layered with zucchini ala Jacques Pépin, and took a nice walk. I was looking forward to that cup of coffee this morning and a book in front of me while the rest of the country still sleeps. I realize I no longer need the screen; I will not miss anything. I can stand up whenever I want, walk away, and start living again.