The Secret to Living Life to the Fullest
You’re supposed to close this tab.
Yes, really.
The goal of this blog is to convince you to close this browser window, turn off your device, and go do something slowly. Bake a loaf of sourdough (you know, that thing everyone was obsessed with during COVID), read a few pages in a book, sow some seeds for your garden, or call a friend.
Anything but scrolling, browsing, or shopping online.
The Brutal (and slightly scary) Truth
Every screen in your possession – your TV, your laptop, your tablet, your smartwatch, your phone – is designed to hook your attention and not let go.
Why?
Because for every app or website that holds your attention, the more advertisements you can be shown, the more data about your habits can be collected, and the more money a billionaire makes.
There’s a saying in marketing: if you’re not paying for a convenience or service, you’re not the customer… you’re the product. Social media is a great example of this principle.
And even when you are paying for the convenience or product, guess what? They’re still profiting off of you. (Think about your streaming services, for instance.)
All the while, your life passes you by, one post at a time.
Addicted to Convenience, Dopamine, and Scrolling
Technology has done incredible things for the landscape of our society. It has also completely rewired your brain.
At the end of a day, you’re exhausted. Your time is now your most precious resource, and rather than taking ownership of what’s always been yours, Big Tech is selling it back to you, right out from under your nose as if it were theirs to package all along.
Here’s how it works:
A company, like Meta, realizes that you (the general public) aren’t likely to use their service (social media) if they put it behind a paywall. Social media doesn’t fill a need in your life, and you’ve got bills to pay! Why would you bother?
So, Meta decides that it’s free to use. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, the whole nine yards, all free. But Meta is still a business. They’re not doing this for the love of it; they’re in it to make money.
How are they going to do that?
Advertisements.
Meta, like so many other entertainment platforms, sells ad space to other businesses. They go out of their way to research all of the best ways to capture your attention: bright colors, software that records every single action you do and don’t take on the app, and an extremely powerful algorithm that relentlessly pushes loud, fast talking content. It seems to know what you want, like, and need loooong before you do. These are features, not bugs, so they can sell ad space at a premium… and they’re using your data to do it.
Amazon took this one step further by adding the illusion of convenience.
Amazon is free to shop through, but shipping times are what they are – as are the shipping fees. If you pay for Amazon Prime, though, you can get your items tomorrow with free shipping.
Let me get this straight… we now pay to have “free” shipping… got it.
With every scroll and commercial, the billionaires’ wallets grow a little thicker, and yours erode in turn. It’s all thanks to that little screen in your hand.
So… what can you do?
Stop Paying Attention
It’s funny: the way we describe attention is in whether or not we’re paying it.
Stop scrolling.
Close the tab or the app.
Put down the screen.
Dare to turn it off. All the way off.
Not permanently — no need to jump to extremes.
But long enough to allow your brain to recover and learn to enjoy the kind of happiness that comes from delaying gratification. The deep, soul-soothing satisfaction of doing something slowly, without a device demanding you pay attention to it.
Full disclosure, it’ll be hard… at first. But the more you do it, the easier and more enjoyable it becomes.
The Art of Patience & Beauty of Disconnection
Like many things in life, patience is a learned skill. No one is born patient; it’s why parenting can be quite a challenge at times! It takes practice and commitment, but it’s well worth the effort.
Imagine being able to spend your Saturday afternoon completely detached from your screens, fully immersed in the joy of the moment. You’re completely absorbed in conversation with your friend, taking in the delight of the coffee you’re sipping and the smile on their face as they tell you about their week. It’s just the two of you, connecting and being fully present.
You could be doing one of a million things with your screenless time, including doing literally nothing, but at least you’d be doing it untethered to the digital void. The people who profit from your newly developed one-track-mind are you and your loved ones, the way it was always meant to be.
There’s something really precious about that kind of calmness and sense of stillness.
A Long, Novel Life
Time is a funny thing. We can measure it, but our perception of time is rather elastic. Some years pass in the blink of an eye, whereas others feel slow and stuffed full of unique memories.
You could spend 50 years living the same days on repeat. Those years would likely fly by, and when your time comes, you’ll be wondering what happened for the last five decades. In this story, your life’s timeline of events is simple: be born, grow up, work, retire, expire. You might have a couple hallmark events, like starting a family or that one vacation you took that one time, but that about sums it up: long life, short timeline.
Or…
You could pack your years full of novel experiences – special memories that bookmark incredible moments in time. One year could contain dozens of adventures, hundreds of belly-aching laughs, and thousands of “firsts.” That’s a long, impressive year that would feel like a lifetime when you look back on it. The timeline of events for that single year would take pages upon pages of notebook paper to diagram. Live 50 years like that, and you’ve got a life’s story that would fill volumes.
Same 50 years.
Wildly different experiences of time.
There’s this theory that the longest life isn’t determined by your number of years, but by the distance between novel moments. The more novel moments you have, the more “bookmarks” your brain creates in your mental timeline. The longer and more detailed that timeline is, the longer you perceive your life to be.
That’s it. That’s the secret: stop trading your novel moments for hours of screentime.
There’s a whole world outside of the internet. Close this tab and go live it. Touch some grass. Start the project you wonder about. Try something new.
What novel moment will you write into your timeline today?
