Away From Social Media Quotes

Media: Keep the adult public attention diverted away from the real social issues, and captivated by matters of no real importance.

When I take a digital Sabbath away from social media, I come back feeling smarter, less anxious, and tapped into an expansive energy I was unable to access while scrolling every day.

I have this highly developed fraud-alert for social influencers. From a mile away I can spot an ad designed to undermine the contentedness of vulnerable female teens.

Things changed when my phone outsmarted me. Once Facebook had a permanent place in my pocket, it became a permanent portal—able to transport me away from my family. Even if we were physically in the same room, I wasn’t necessarily there with them. Facebook was no longer simply a naptime vacation but an all-day form of escapism.

I am increasingly persuaded that our 24-7 addiction to screens and social media is perhaps our most destructive habit, not only to our ability to sleep but to our mental health in general. So I banish those from my evenings (or at least, I try to). Turn off the computer and put away your phone at least an hour before bedtime. Do NOT bring your laptop or phone into bed with you.

In the travellers’ world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unknown. Now the familiar is not left behind and the unknown has become familiar even before one leaves home. Unpredictability – to my generation the salt that gave travelling its savour – seems unnecessary if not downright irritating to many of the young. The sunset challenge – where to sleep? – has been banished by the ease of booking into a hostel or organised campsite with a street plan provided by the internet. Moreover, relatives and friends evidently expect regular reassurance about the traveller’s precise location and welfare – and vice versa, the traveller needing to know that all is well back home. Notoriously, dependence on instant communication with distant family and friends is known to stunt the development of self-reliance. Perhaps that is why, amongst younger travellers, one notices a new timidity.

when you become addict in to MATERIAL things in life then the TRUE natural life start to run away from you, YES! it's can give you certain pleasure in the society but in the same time it will sabotage your true HAPPINESS of life which we could have simply with GRATITUDE and FORGIVENESS

I’ve been spending a ton of hours on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Meerkat, Periscope, LinkedIn, and many other platforms, and from this man’s point of view we are living in an unbelievably interesting time. I haven’t felt this sense of disruption since 2006–2007, when Facebook and Twitter started to eat away at Friendster and MySpace. The

Staying away from news channels, print, and social media makes one realize, that the world actually is a beautiful place to live.

And then you’ve got a media ready to package that, because it takes away from the political content of them songs. Suddenly there’s not a real serious social message, there’s just a drug addict. I

Yes, having to abandon a novel is painful. It causes an immense anger, usually aimed towards the author, and then at oneself for failing to appreciate a book probably called ‘dazzlingly inventive’ by some fucker in the Guardian. Keep away from social media. The urge to pan a novel and publicly humiliate the author for wasting your time is immense, but in the long run, the best revenge is to say nothing and read superior works.

The Devil wants me to fill my emptiness with an unhealthy dependence on the acceptance of others. Because then he can get me so focused on the shallow opinions of others I get completely distracted from deepening my relationship with Christ. And in the process is my masked boasting pulling others into the crazy comparison traps that lures them away from Christ as well? It’s all such an unhealthy cycle that’s never satisfying. And again, I’m not against social media but we do have to be so careful how we use it. Is it to bless others with encouragement and love or are we really just boasting on ourselves and feeding others’ unhealthy comparisons to us? One quick hop on social media, and you’ll see how careful we must be not to play right into the Devil’s schemes.

Pavlov formulated his findings into a general rule in which the speed of learning positively correlated with quiet isolation. The totalitarians have followed this rule. They know they can condition their political victims most quickly if they are kept in isolation. In the totalitarian technique of thought control, the same isolation applied to the individual is applied also to the groups of people. This is the reason the civilian populations of the totalitarian countries are not permitted to travel freely and are kept away from mental and political contamination. It is the reason, to, for the solitary confinement cell and the prison camp.

I wanted to evaluate my own escape from the crowds in 5 different stages so that I could clarify my thoughts and help my readers get more benefits. (1) Getting away from the media (2) Getting away from the big city (3) Going to nature as a life style (4) Getting away from the social media (5) Being only with people I want

Many of us constantly use work or technology to “leave our place”—to escape the moment in which we currently find ourselves so that we can avoid the uncomfortable feelings that are arising. Bored? Hop on Twitter! Lonely? Start texting people! Anxious? Unwind with some TV! Doubting your purpose in life? Dive into those work emails! But on Shabbat, many of the strategies we use to run away from ourselves are prohibited. We can’t escape to the office or into a screen. We can’t curate our life for others’ consumption on social media, focusing on how our life looks, rather than how it feels. Instead, for twenty-five hours, we actually have to live it.

This is an age-old fantasy. I remember reading a quote from the apologist Edward John Carnell in Ian Murray’s biography of the Welsh preacher David Martyn Lloyd-Jones. During the formative years of Fuller Theological Seminary, Carnell said regarding evangelicalism, “We need prestige desperately.” Christians have worked hard to position themselves in places of power within the culture. They seek influence academically, politically, economically, athletically, socially, theatrically, religiously, and every other way, in hopes of gaining mass media exposure. But then when they get that exposure—sometimes through mass media, sometimes in a very broad-minded church environment—they present a reinvented designer pop gospel that subtly removes all of the offense of the gospel and beckons people into the kingdom along an easy path. They do away with all that hard-to-believe stuff about self-sacrifice, hating your family, and so forth. The illusion is that we can preach our message more effectively from lofty perches of cultural power and influence, and once we’ve got everybody’s attention, we can lead more people to Christ by taking out the sting of the gospel and nurturing a user-friendly message. But to get to these lofty perches, “Christian” public figures water down and compromise the truth; then, to stay up there, they cave in to pressure to perpetuate false teaching so their audience will stay loyal.

We all have a story to tell, adventures to share and memories we would like passed down from generation to generation surrounding a place we call home in a location that isn't actually where we live full time. Just snapping a photo and putting it on social media isn't the same as taking it slow, collecting your thoughts and sharing and documenting experiences.

It seems perverse that we can be more social than anyone would have thought possible when we are at our most anti-social, locked away from the world and silently staring at a computer screen, but that, as psychologists will tell you is the way we operate. When we are at the maximum of our disconnect we also are ready to connect and feel the need for interaction.

Trump often seems like a one-man set of Aesop-like fables—with easy-to-decipher morals like “those who lie down with dogs will get up with fleas” or “when someone tells you who he is, believe him”—but because he is president of the United States, his actions do not simply end in a tagline moral; rather, they ripple outward like a toxic tsunami, creating havoc in the lives of millions. Once he has left office, the damage he has done to American institutions and the country’s foreign policy will take years to repair. And to the degree that his election was a reflection of larger dynamics in society—from the growing partisanship in politics, to the profusion of fake stories on social media, to our isolation in filter bubbles—his departure from the scene will not restore truth to health and well-being, at least not right away.

Another student taught me a word I’d never heard before: “slacktivism.” Slacktivists promote causes on social media to show their followers that they are caring, empathetic people—but they rarely follow through with real action. It’s easy to put up a message to highlight a cause, but how many of us are taking time away from sports and studying to do something that makes a difference? one student asked me rhetorically.

Many people in the West have a poor understanding of the concept of free speech. Whenever I mute or block someone on social media, a cacophony of fools will accuse me of being a free speech hypocrite for “silencing their voice.” They do not understand that I have the right to walk away from their online taunts, insults, and idiocy. To do so is not “restricting” their speech but expressing my right to avoid listening to them.

All too easily we forget that the other guy, a hundred yards away, is just like us. Time and again, we fire at one another from a distance -- through social media or online forums, from the safety of wherever we're holed up. We let fear, ignorance, suspicion and stereotypes be our guides, making generalisations about people we've never met. But there's an alternative. Hatred can be transformed into friendship and bitter foes can shake hands. That's something we can believe in -- not because we're entitled to be naive, but because it actually happened.

The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness. Unfortunately, one side effect of the Internet and social media is that it’s become easier than ever to push responsibility—for even the tiniest of infractions—onto some other group or person. In fact, this kind of public blame/shame game has become popular; in certain crowds it’s even seen as “cool.” The public sharing of “injustices” garners far more attention and emotional outpouring than most other events on social media, rewarding people who are able to perpetually feel victimized with ever-growing amounts of attention and sympathy. “Victimhood chic” is in style on both the right and the left today, among both the rich and the poor. In fact, this may be the first time in human history that every single demographic group has felt unfairly victimized simultaneously. And they’re all riding the highs of the moral indignation that comes along with it. Right now, anyone who is offended about anything—whether it’s the fact that a book about racism was assigned in a university class, or that Christmas trees were banned at the local mall, or the fact that taxes were raised half a percent on investment funds—feels as though they’re being oppressed in some way and therefore deserve to be outraged and to have a certain amount of attention. The current media environment both encourages and perpetuates these reactions because, after all, it’s good for business. The writer and media commentator Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before. The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are. People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good. As political cartoonist Tim Kreider put it in a New York Times op-ed: “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.” But

Most of the messaging and chatting I did was in search of answers to questions I had about how to build my own computer, and the responses I received were so considered and thorough, so generous and kind, they’d be unthinkable today. My panicked query about why a certain chipset for which I’d saved up my allowance didn’t seem to be compatible with the motherboard I’d already gotten for Christmas would elicit a two-thousand-word explanation and note of advice from a professional tenured computer scientist on the other side of the country. Not cribbed from any manual, this response was composed expressly for me, to troubleshoot my problems step-by-step until I’d solved them. I was twelve years old, and my correspondent was an adult stranger far away, yet he treated me like an equal because I’d shown respect for the technology. I attribute this civility, so far removed from our current social-media sniping, to the high bar for entry at the time. After all, the only people on these boards were the people who could be there—who wanted to be there badly enough—who had the proficiency and passion, because the Internet of the 1990s wasn’t just one click away. It took significant effort just to log on.

More recently, Dallas Willard put it this way: Desire is infinite partly because we were made by God, made for God, made to need God, and made to run on God. We can be satisfied only by the one who is infinite, eternal, and able to supply all our needs; we are only at home in God. When we fall away from God, the desire for the infinite remains, but it is displaced upon things that will certainly lead to destruction.5 Ultimately, nothing in this life, apart from God, can satisfy our desires. Tragically, we continue to chase after our desires ad infinitum. The result? A chronic state of restlessness or, worse, angst, anger, anxiety, disillusionment, depression—all of which lead to a life of hurry, a life of busyness, overload, shopping, materialism, careerism, a life of more…which in turn makes us even more restless. And the cycle spirals out of control. To make a bad problem worse, this is exacerbated by our cultural moment of digital marketing from a society built around the twin gods of accumulation and accomplishment. Advertising is literally an attempt to monetize our restlessness. They say we see upward of four thousand ads a day, all designed to stoke the fire of desire in our bellies. Buy this. Do this. Eat this. Drink this. Have this. Watch this. Be this. In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller opined, “It is as if we have inadvertently stumbled into some horrific wonderland.”6 Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.

Communication is not just about words. It’s about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheromones, all of which can’t be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes.” And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. 5

A big part of personal growth is defining how your zone of comfort looks and finding ways to break free from it. That usually happens by trying new stuff, doing things you’re afraid of and challenging yourself by consciously putting yourself in new (possibly uncomfortable) situations. But with a phone in your hand, your comfort zone also becomes mobile and it’s just a locked screen away. The only way out is to ditch your phone for certain times of the day, to limit social media usage, build new habits, or completely unplug for some time to breathe freely and live life. There are more symptoms of social media networking obsession that you might have noticed or experienced yourself.

One of the photos Yaken posted on social media after he made it to Syria showed a bucket filled with severed heads, hashtagged “#headmeat.”36 Irrespective of whether his adventure to the land of the caliphate was spiritually fulfilling, the imagery it produced was a kind of pornography. And like all pornography, it aroused strong reactions, ranging from titillation to revulsion, and sometimes both at once. These reactions share an intellectually disarming effect. As in the case of porn, they resist detached analysis. The scholar of religion Jonathan Z. Smith noted a similar tendency in the failure to understand the mass suicide at Jonestown in 1978. The problem, he said, was an unwillingness to undertake the difficult task of “looking, rather than staring or looking away.”37

Maybe you can imagine this in your own life. We no longer look at the sun but at our phones to see what kind of time has passed. We don't look out of our cells but at our cell, flipping to a social media stream and scrolling through what our friends are doing. While we scroll, we develop a resentment that our lives are less fun and fulfilling than the lives of our friends. The here and now, the people who are around and present, pale in front of the manicured and curated versions of another person's life. We begin to wonder, like Evagrius, if we have lost the love of our friends, and we begin to believe that there is "none to comfort" us. So we fill our evenings with overeating, because it feels comforting, or binge-watching our favorite show, because we are so tired that we just need to "relax." We split our attention between the screen of the television and the screen of our phones. Indeed, one of the most effective ways to avoid the gnawing questions of meaning is by staying busy enough to avoid them. A constant flow of information and distraction turns the mind and the heart away from the abyss of asking why. Why do we worry about tomorrow? Why do we toil and reap? What is the treasure of great price that all our lives are working toward? When we do pause between activities, we try to fill the void. We forget that we are more than our work or the things that we produce. Our busyness represents a profound loss of freedom, and one that occurs through a gradual winnowing away of what it means to be human. We replace that it means to be a person with a shallowness of activity

In certain young people today…I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well mexecuted in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship. I find it obscene. People who ask you to ‘educate’ yourself while not having actually read any books themselves, while not being able to intelligently defend their own ideological positions, because by ‘educate,’ they actually mean ‘parrot what I say, flatten all nuance, wish away complexity.’ People who wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People who depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused. Ask them a question and you are told that the answer is to repeat a mantra. Ask again for clarity and be accused of violence. And so we have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow.

Fuckboys (and Fuckboy Prospects), read this closely: When a woman breaks up with you (usually because she is fed up with your shit) it’s never easy. I understand your ego is bruised, you can’t imagine another dude doing things you used to do with/to her and that shit will eat you up! I understand. That doesn’t mean you should disrespect her – or kill her goddamit! That doesn’t mean you should post revenge porn pictures and videos of her to your 5000 online friends. It does not justify you calling her a hoe to ease your lil battered ego. Doing any of those makes you a certified upper echelon fuckboy bro. Walk away – just go on airplane mode, remove yourself from the situation and allow yourself to heal. If you are one of those social-media love butterflies who advertises every moment with your boo, then log out of all your profiles and go into cocoon mode.

Kids are spending so much time communicating through technology, they're not developing basic communication skills that humans have used since forever,' says psychologist Jim Taylor, author of Raising Generation Tech: Preparing Your Children for a Media-Fueled World. "Communication is not just about words. It's about body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, even pheremones, all of which can't be conveyed through social media. Emoticons are very weak substitutes." And when nonverbal cues are stripped away, it can limit the potential for understanding, arguably the foundation of empathy. When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from seventy-two studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among American college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40 percent lower than their earlier counterparts.

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.

Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain. If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.

A large brand will typically spend between 10 and 20 percent of their media buy on creative,” DeJulio explains. “So if they have a $500 million media budget, there’s somewhere between $50 to $100 million going toward creating content. For that money they’ll get seven to ten pieces of content, but not right away. If you’re going to spend $1 million on one piece of content, it’s going to take a long time—six months, nine months, a year—to fully develop. With this budget and timeline, brands have no margin to take chances creatively.” By contrast, the Tongal process: If a brand wants to crowdsource a commercial, the first step is to put up a purse—anywhere from $50,000 to $200,000. Then, Tongal breaks the project into three phases: ideation, production, and distribution, allowing creatives with different specialties (writing, directing, animating, acting, social media promotion, and so on) to focus on what they do best. In the first competition—the ideation phase—a client creates a brief describing its objective. Tongal members read the brief and submit their best ideas in 500 characters (about three tweets). Customers then pick a small number of ideas they like and pay a small portion of the purse to these winners. Next up is production, where directors select one of the winning concepts and submit their take. Another round of winners are selected and these folks are given the time and money to crank out their vision. But this phase is not just limited to these few winning directors. Tongal also allows anyone to submit a wild card video. Finally, sponsors select their favorite video (or videos), the winning directors get paid, and the winning videos get released to the world. Compared to the seven to ten pieces of content the traditional process produces, Tongal competitions generate an average of 422 concepts in the idea phase, followed by an average of 20 to 100 finished video pieces in the video production phase. That is a huge return for the invested dollars and time.

Somehow, I get seated halfway down the table from her. I am trapped next to this young techno-optimist guy. He explains that current technology will no longer seem strange when the generation who didn’t grow up with it finally ages out of the conversation. Dies, I think he means. His point is that eventually all those who are unnerved by what is falling away will be gone, and after that, there won’t be any more talk of what has been lost, only of what has been gained. But wait, that sounds bad to me. Doesn’t that mean if we end up somewhere we don’t want to be, we can’t retrace our steps? He ignores this, blurs right past me to list all the ways he and his kind have changed the world and will change the world. He tells me that smart houses are coming, that soon everything in our lives will be hooked up to the internet of things, blah, blah, blah, and we will be connected through social media to every other person in the world. He asks me what my favored platforms are. I explain that I don’t use any of them because they make me feel too squirrley. Or not exactly squirrley, more like a rat who can’t stop pushing a lever. Pellet of affection! Pellet of rage! Please, please, my pretty! He looks at me and I can see him calculating all the large and small ways I am trying to prevent the future. “Well, good luck with that, I guess,“ he says.

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

What exogenous causes are shifting the allocation of moral intuitions away from community, authority, and purity and toward fairness, autonomy, and rationality? One obvious force is geographic and social mobility. People are no longer confined to the small worlds of family, village, and tribe, in which conformity and solidarity are essential to daily life, and ostracism and exile are a form of social death. They can seek their fortunes in other circles, which expose them to alternative worldviews and lead them into a more ecumenical morality, which gravitates to the rights of individuals rather than chauvinistic veneration of the group. By the same token, open societies, where talent, ambition, or luck can dislodge people from the station in which they were born, are less likely to see an Authority Ranking as an inviolable law of nature, and more likely to see it as a historical artifact or a legacy of injustice. When diverse individuals mingle, engage in commerce, and find themselves on professional or social teams that cooperate to attain a superordinate goal, their intuitions of purity can be diluted. One example, mentioned in chapter 7, is the greater tolerance of homosexuality among people who personally know homosexuals. Haidt observes that when one zooms in on an electoral map of the United States, from the coarse division into red and blue states to a finer-grained division into red and blue counties, one finds that the blue counties, representing the regions that voted for the more liberal presidential candidate, cluster along the coasts and major waterways. Before the advent of jet airplanes and interstate highways, these were the places where people and their ideas most easily mixed. That early advantage installed them as hubs of transportation, commerce, media, research, and education, and they continue to be pluralistic—and liberal—zones today. Though American political liberalism is by no means the same as classical liberalism, the two overlap in their weighting of the moral spheres. The micro-geography of liberalism suggests that the moral trend away from community, authority, and purity is indeed an effect of mobility and cosmopolitanism.202

I believe that social media, and the internet as a whole, have negatively impacted our ability to both think long-term and to focus deeply on the task in front of us. It is no surprise, therefore, that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, prohibited his children from using phones or tablets—even though his business was to sell millions of them to his customers! The billionaire investor and former senior executive at Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya, argues that we must rewire our brain to focus on the long term, which starts by removing social media apps from our phones. In his words, such apps, “wire your brain for super-fast feedback.” By receiving constant feedback, whether through likes, comments, or immediate replies to our messages, we condition ourselves to expect fast results with everything we do. And this feeling is certainly reinforced through ads for schemes to help us “get rich quick”, and through cognitive biases (i.e., we only hear about the richest and most successful YouTubers, not about the ones who fail). As we demand more and more stimulation, our focus is increasingly geared toward the short term and our vision of reality becomes distorted. This leads us to adopt inaccurate mental models such as: Success should come quickly and easily, or I don’t need to work hard to lose weight or make money. Ultimately, this erroneous concept distorts our vision of reality and our perception of time. We can feel jealous of people who seem to have achieved overnight success. We can even resent popular YouTubers. Even worse, we feel inadequate. It can lead us to think we are just not good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. Therefore, we feel the need to compensate by hustling harder. We have to hurry before we miss the opportunity. We have to find the secret that will help us become successful. And, in this frenetic race, we forget one of the most important values of all: patience. No, watching motivational videos all day long won’t help you reach your goals. But, performing daily consistent actions, sustained over a long period of time will. Staying calm and focusing on the one task in front of you every day will. The point is, to achieve long-term goals in your personal or professional life, you must regain control of your attention and rewire your brain to focus on the long term. To do so, you should start by staying away from highly stimulating activities.

If one looks at modern society, it is obvious that in order to live, the great majority of people are forced to sell their labour power. All the physical and intellectual capacities existing in human beings, in their personalities, which must be set in motion to produce useful things, can only be used if they are sold in exchange for wages. Labour power is usually perceived as a commodity bought and sold nearly like all others. The existence of exchange and wage-labour seems normal, inevitable. Yet the introduction of wage-labour involved conflict, resistance, and bloodshed. The separation of the worker from the means of production, now an accepted fact of life, took a long time and was accomplished by force. In England, in the Netherlands, in France, from the sixteenth century on, economic and political violence expropriated craftsmen and peasants, repressed indigence and vagrancy, imposed wage-labour on the poor. Between 1930 and 1950, Russia decreed a labour code which included capital punishment in order to organise the transition of millions of peasants to industrial wage-labour in less than a few decades. Seemingly normal facts: that an individual has nothing but his labour power, that he must sell it to a business unit to be able to live, that everything is a commodity, that social relations revolve around market exchange… such facts now taken for granted result from a long, brutal process. By means of its school system and its ideological and political life, contemporary society hides the past and present violence on which this situation rests. It conceals both its origin and the mechanism which enables it to function. Everything appears as a free contract in which the individual, as a seller of labour power, encounters the factory, the shop or the office. The existence of the commodity seems to be an obvious and natural phenomenon, and the periodic major and minor disasters it causes are often regarded as quasi-natural calamities. Goods are destroyed to maintain their prices, existing capacities are left to rot, while elementary needs remain unfulfilled. Yet the main thing that the system hides is not the existence of exploitation or class (that is not too hard to see), nor its horrors (modern society is quite good at turning them into media show). It is not even that the wage labour/capital relationship causes unrest and rebellion (that also is fairly plain to see). The main thing it conceals is that insubordination and revolt could be large and deep enough to do away with this relationship and make another world possible.

We have traded our intimacy for social media, our romantic bonds for dating matches on apps, our societal truth for the propaganda of corporate interests, our spiritual questioning for dogmatism, our intellectual curiosity for standardized tests and grading, our inner voices for the opinions of celebrities and hustler gurus and politicians, our mindfulness for algorithmic distractions and outrage, our inborn need to belong to communities for ideological bubbles, our trust in scientific evidence for the attractive lies of false leaders, our solitude for public exhibitionism. We have ignored the hunter-gatherer wisdom of our past, obedient now to the myth of progress. But we must remember who we are and where we came from. We are animals born into mystery, looking up at the stars. Uncertain in ourselves, not knowing where we are heading. We exist with the same bodies, the same brains, as Homo sapiens from thousands of years past, roaming on the plains, hunting in forests and by the sea, foraging together in small bands. Except now, our technology is exponentially increasing at a scale that we cannot predict. We are overwhelmed with information; lost in a matrix that we do not understand. Our civilizational “progress” is built on the bones of the indigenous and the poor and the powerless. Our “progress” comes at the expense of our land, and oceans, and air. We are reaching beyond what we can globally sustain. Former empires have perished from their unrestrained greed for more resources. They were limited in past ages by geography and capacity, collapsing in regions, and not over the entire planet. What will be the cost of our progress? We have grown arrogant in our comfort, hardened away from our compassion, believing that our reality is the only reality. Yet even at our most uncertain, there are still those saints who are unknown and nameless, who help even when they do not need to help. They often are not rich, don’t have their profiles written up in magazines, and will never win any prestigious awards. They may have shared their last bit of food while already surviving on so little. They may have cherished the disheartened, shown warmth to the neglected, tended to the diseased and dying, spoken kindly to the hopeless. They do not tremble in silence while the wheels of prejudice crush over their land. Withering what was once fertile into pale death and smoke. They tend to what they love, to what they serve. They help, even when they could fall back into ignorance, even when they could prosper through easy greed, even when they could compromise their values, conforming into groupthink for the illusion of security. They help.

What Is the Importance of Social Media Marketing? In the arena of generation, the conversation has come to be simpler than ever. The international has now gotten smaller from an extensive populated land to a community of speaking people residing in an international village. People from everywhere in the globe has come nearer collectively and distances have reduced to the volume that a character is simply a click on away. In this ever-developing community of human beings a brand new concept has emerged, the concept of 6 levels of separation. The concept at the back of that is that among you and every other character within side the international is most effective a sequence not than six human beings. This emphasizes the importance of online conversation and the manner it has made the arena an entire lot smaller. This is the electricity of social media and top smm panel the tendencies in an online conversation. A going on in a single part of the arena reaches the second element in a count of seconds. Imagine if that information or going on turned into approximately you. The importance of this generation is the benefit it gives. Using this device for your benefit can provide you with a massive quantity of benefits. Social Media Marketing brings international repute for your call. -This is your price tag to worldwide degree repute. Your corporation or your call will be regarded around the globe with hundreds of thousands of fans and fans. Millions of human beings can get admission to those websites in which human beings come to talk online and specific their views. Once you step into the arena of social media advertising and marketing all of those human beings come to be your ability prospects. Your offerings are simply an unmarried seek away. Promote your enterprise or product as a severe product. -This generation gives you get admission to clearly the complete international and all its inhabitants. They are there to study and percentage whatever that you need to say. This is your danger to set up a photo for yourself that "Hey! I am right here to do enterprise" and "I am severe approximately the product or offerings that I provide". Social media advertising and marketing is almost free. If you had been to try to attain out to hundreds of thousands of human beings via the bodily way you will make loads of investments. This generation is the manner to maximum efficaciously attains out for your ability clients, now no longer most effective in phrases of price range however in phrases of time as well. Gives you comments in the form of viewer you have. -An exciting factor approximately advertising and marketing on those social websites is the extent of comments that you could expect. Using social media advertising and marketing can in reality train you approximately the folks who are or are probably interested in your product or service. This offers you a higher danger of changing your campaigns to benefit progressed results. You may also find out about the number of folks who go to your page, or a while of folks who remark or percentage your posts, or maybe their ethnicities, localities, religion, hobbies, and preferences. You train the arena approximately your product and social media advertising and marketing educates you approximately the folks who took hobby in it. You get to understand them in my view via the community of the top smm panel. Your purchaser may also have a few problems or he may also want assist or need to investigate greater approximately your product. Your presence on social media permits you to reply to him on a private degree. This in flip assures the purchaser which you are accountable and instills a feeling of trust.

But won’t political involvement distract us from the main task of preaching the Gospel? At this point someone may object that while political involvement may have some benefits and may do some good, it can so easily distract us, turn unbelievers away from the church, and cause us to neglect the main task of pointing people toward personal trust in Christ. John MacArthur writes, “When the church takes a stance that emphasizes political activism and social moralizing, it always diverts energy and resources away from evangelization.”83 Yet the proper question is not, “Does political influence take resources away from evangelism?” but, “Is political influence something God has called us to do?” If God has called some of us to some political influence, then those resources would not be blessed if we diverted them to evangelism—or to the choir, or to teaching Sunday School to children, or to any other use. In this matter, as in everything else the church does, it would be healthy for Christians to realize that God may call individual Christians to different emphases in their lives. This is because God has placed in the church “varieties of gifts” (1 Cor. 12:4) and the church is an entity that has “many members” but is still “one body” (v. 12). Therefore God might call someone to devote almost all of his or her time to the choir, someone else to youth work, someone else to evangelism, someone else to preparing refreshments to welcome visitors, and someone else to work with lighting and sound systems. “But if Jim places all his attention on the sound system, won’t that distract the church from the main task of preaching the Gospel?” No, not at all. That is not what God has called Jim to emphasize (though he will certainly share the Gospel with others as he has opportunity). Jim’s exclusive focus on the church’s sound system means he is just being a faithful steward in the responsibility God has given him. In the same way, I think it is entirely possible that God called Billy Graham to emphasize evangelism and say nothing about politics and also called James Dobson to emphasize a radio ministry to families and to influencing the political world for good. Aren’t there enough Christians in the world for us to focus on more than one task? And does God not call us to thousands of different emphases, all in obedience to him? But the whole ministry of the church will include both emphases. And the teaching ministry from the pulpit should do nothing less than proclaim “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). It should teach, over the course of time, on all areas of life and all areas of Bible knowledge. That certainly must include, to some extent, what the Bible says about the purposes of civil government and how that teaching should apply to our situations today. This means that in a healthy church we will find that some people emphasize influencing the government and politics, others emphasize influencing the business world, others emphasize influencing the educational system, others entertainment and the media, others marriage and the family, and so forth. When that happens, it seems to me that we should encourage, not discourage, one another. We should adopt the attitude toward each other that Paul encouraged in the church at Rome: Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God…. So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother (Rom. 14:10–13). For several different reasons, then, I think the view that says the church should just “do evangelism, not politics” is incorrect.

I’m going to find out who Amber is. We’ve got to get to her before he does.” My head swirled with maybes. Maybe Tony would lose his nerve. Maybe he’d drag his heels just a little longer. Maybe he’d show his hand too soon, and Amber would fight him off or get away from him in time. There was still a chance. I love social media and the people who are careless with it. Tony had an open Facebook profile. I rummaged through his pictures and posts, looking for a clue. Then I found one, and wished I hadn’t. “Bentley.” “Did you find her?” he asked, peering over his bifocals. “Amber’s his daughter, Bentley. She’s eight years old.

The residents blamed the "Gahmen", naturally. Since the explosion of social media, those "Gahmen" guys have been blamed for everything from HDB flat prices to the price of oil, climate change, the shortage of Hello Kitty dolls and kids not clearing their trays away at hawker centres.

CHOOSING CONTENTMENT All that we have comes from God: our spouses, children, families, friends and jobs. That includes our houses, property, furnishings, cars, clothes, family heirlooms and all other personal belongings. God gives us these good gifts for our use and enjoyment. There is nothing wrong with these things, but sometimes our attitudes toward our things can cause problems for us. Throughout history, people have had the desire to get more stuff. But in our culture today, the media shows us how much we don’t have. Because we are exposed to people in different social standings, we can compare what we have to what others have. In previous generations, people compared what they had with their family or neighbors (who probably had similar things); today we have TV shows that portray the lives and belongings of the megarich. When we begin to focus on what others have, we become obsessed with material things. We are tempted to live beyond our means. We become stressed as we work harder and longer in order to buy more stuff. It is easy to wonder why others have more than we do, especially if we’re struggling to keep up with payments on our house, cars and loans. We say, “Other people are just like us, but they have so much more than we do. It’s not fair! Why doesn’t God bless us like he does them? Why should we always have money problems?” Maybe we become upset with our spouse and insist that we should do better than we are doing, or that our children should have the same opportunities that other children have. Jealousy, anger and ambition can eat away at a marriage when we think we should have more than we do. But the stuff we want may not be what God has allotted to us. He has promised that he will provide all that we need but not necessarily all that we want. So one tough spiritual lesson we need to learn as married couples is to shape our wants to match God’s allotment, not the other way around, and to choose, like Paul, to be content whatever our circumstances (see Philippians 4:11). Finding contentment with God’s allotment to us helps ease the stress of getting and spending. It lightens the load of acquiring more and more. And it may help us to grow together as a couple as we learn to enjoy each other’s company without the pressure of reaching for bigger and better toys, vacations, houses or recreational vehicles. When we begin to treasure each other, our hearts will be there also.

Everyone always wonders when the end really is. How do we know when the right time is to say goodbye, the right time to walk away, the right time to let it all go. I don’t know if there really is a definition of ‘end’ when it comes to emotion. Is the end when the communication stops, or is it when you remove the photographs from the frames? Maybe the end is when you delete the person that you once stalked on a daily basis from every opportune social media site? Or maybe the end is when you’re more in love with the memories than you are with the person themselves.

John Piper wrote, “True freedom from the bondage of technology comes not mainly from throwing away the smartphone, but from filling the void with the glories of Jesus that you are trying to fill with the pleasures of the device.”2

People need to live their lives,” she reminded me. “Clearly part of living our lives, I think, needs to be resisting those systems that are dominating us and controlling us and making us afraid to speak our minds. But I would say that people should get offline sometimes. Leave your phone at home. Go for a walk with your friend or your lover. Go into the woods . . . Swim in a pond where nobody can see you. Try to actually enjoy privacy sometimes. Get away from the Internet and have a life that’s independent of that kind of shit.

STEP 4: BEWARE OF LIMINAL MOMENTS Liminal moments are transitions from one thing to another throughout our days. Have you ever picked up your phone while waiting for a traffic light to change, then found yourself still looking at your phone while driving? Or opened a tab in your web browser, got annoyed by how long it’s taking to load, and opened up another page while you waited? Or looked at a social media app while walking from one meeting to the next, only to keep scrolling when you got back to your desk? There’s nothing wrong with any of these actions per se. Rather, what’s dangerous is that by doing them “for just a second,” we’re likely to do things we later regret, like getting off track for half an hour or getting into a car accident. A technique I’ve found particularly helpful for dealing with this distraction trap is the “ten-minute rule.” If I find myself wanting to check my phone as a pacification device when I can’t think of anything better to do, I tell myself it’s fine to give in, but not right now. I have to wait just ten minutes. This technique is effective at helping me deal with all sorts of potential distractions, like googling something rather than writing, eating something unhealthy when I’m bored, or watching another episode on Netflix when I’m “too tired to go to bed.” This rule allows time to do what some behavioral psychologists call “surfing the urge.” When an urge takes hold, noticing the sensations and riding them like a wave—neither pushing them away nor acting on them—helps us cope until the feelings subside.

[Aza Raskin] designed something that distinctly changed how the web works. It's called 'infinite scroll.' Older readers will remember that it used to be that the internet was divided into pages, and when you got to the bottom of one page, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page. It was an active choice. It gave you a moment to pause and ask: Do I want to carry on looking at this? Aza designed the code that means you don't have to ask that question any more. ...It downloads a chunk of status updates for your to read through ...when you get to the bottom, it will automatically load another chunk for your to flick through. ...'At the outset, it looks like a really good invention,' he told me. He believed he was making life easier for everyone. He had been taught that increased speed and efficiency of access were always advances. his invention quickly spread all over the internet ...But then Aza watched as the people around him changed. They seemed to be unable to pull themselves away from their devices, flicking through and through and through, thanks in part to the code he had designed. He found himself infinitely scrolling through what he often realised afterwards was crap, and he wondered if he was making good use of his life. ...Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter. (For many people, Aza believes, it's vastly more.) Sticking with this low-ball percentage, Aza wanted to know what it meant, in practice, if billions of people were spending 50 percent more time on a string of social media sites. When he was done, he stared at the sums. Every day, as a direct result of his invention, the combined total of 200,000 more total human lifetimes - every moment from birth to death - is now spent scrolling through a screen. These hours would otherwise have been spent on some other activity. When he described this to me, he sounded a little stunned. That time is 'just completely gone. It's like their entire life - poof. That time, which could have been used for solving climate change, for spending time with their family, for strengthening social bonds. For whatever is it that makes their life well-lived. It's just...' He trailed off.

the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention. [Tristan Harris] wants us to understand that this design is not inevitable. ...Humans could have made a different choice then, and they can make a different choice now. You could have all this technology, Tristan told me, but not design it to be maximally distracting. In fact, you could design it with the opposite goal: to maximally respect people's need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them achieve them. ...You could keep your phone on your laptop, and you could keep your social-media accounts - and have much better attention, if they were designed around a different set of incentives.

Aza [Raskin] said: 'For instance, Facebook tomorrow could start batching your notifications, so you only get one push notification a day ... They could do that tomorrow.' ....So instead of getting 'this constant drip of behavioural cocaine,' telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on - you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarising it all. You'd be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. 'Here's another one,' he said 'Infinite scroll. ...it's catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.' Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll - so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling. Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarise people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention. Since there's evidence YouTube's recommendation engine is radicalising people, Tristan [Harris] told one interviewer: 'Just turn it off. They can turn it off in a heartbeat.' It's not as if, he points out, the day before recommendations were introduced, people were lost and clamouring for somebody to tell them what to watch next. Once the most obvious forms of mental pollution have been stopped, they said, we can begin to look deeper, at how these sites could be redesigned to make it easier for you to restrain yourself and think about your longer-term goals. ...there could be a button that says 'here are all your friends who are nearby and are indicating they'd like to meet up today.' You click it, you connect, you put down your phone and hang out with them. Instead of being a vacuum sucking up your attention and keeping it away from the outside world, social media would become a trampoline, sending you back into that world as efficiently as possible, matched with the people you want to see. Similarly, when you set up (say) a Facebook account, it could ask you how much time you want to spend per day or per week on the site. ...then the website could help you to achieve your goal. One way could be that when you hit that limit, the website could radically slow down. In tests, Amazon found that even 100 milliseconds of delay in the pace at which a page loads results in a substantial drop-off in people sticking around to buy the product. Aza said: 'It just gives your brain a chance to catch up to your impulse and [ask] - do I really want to be here? No.' In addition, Facebook could ask you at regular intervals - what changes do you want to make to your life? ...then match you up with other people nearby... who say they also want to make that change and have indicated they are looking for the equivalent of gym buddies. ...A battery of scientific evidence shows that if you want to succeed in changing something, you should meet up with groups of people doing the same. At the moment, they said, social media is designed to grab your attention and sell it to the highest bidder, but it could be designed to understand your intentions and to better help you achieve them. Tristan and Aza told me that it's just as easy to design and program this life-affirming Facebook as the life-draining Facebook we currently have. I think that most people, if you stopped them in the street and painted them a vision of these two Facebooks, would say they wanted the one that serves your intentions. So why isn't it happened? It comes back... to the business model.

Part I. Dopamine and the Role it Plays, we’ll explain what dopamine actually is and how it works. After reading this section, you’ll understand why you can’t stop checking your phone, struggle to stay away from social media, or binge-watch videos.

My analysis shows that the best path would be to follow the trend away from social media and into social gaming. Out of several quadrillion models, the bridge world we call Kiphi was shown to have the highest probability of suc-cess.

How exactly does social selling work? For the purposes of prospecting for new business, social selling involves contacting prospective customers on social media platforms, most commonly LinkedIn and Twitter. Here are some pointers: Cultivate a relationship: Social selling is not for the quick wins, generally speaking. You can start simply by following a prospect, engaging with their content, and then inviting them to connect. You want to draw their attention, but not overwhelm them. Don’t pitch right away: In the early days of social selling, it was possible to immediately pitch a prospect online with some success. That time has passed, so don’t assume that when someone accepts your connection request it means they want to buy from you. Be someone worth talking to: Your prospects will see your public profile, so be sure to demonstrate your expertise in your profile and content. If you’re still using your LinkedIn account as a resume, you’re doing it wrong. Move from online to offline: The goal of social selling is not to run through the entire sale over social media. As with all initial contacting, your goal is to set up a real-time conversation over the phone or in person. While nearly all great salespeople communicate with prospects across all three of these channels, it’s best to become confident with one before adding another. Cold calling, while unattractive to many, will yield the greatest number of opportunities to learn which offers and messaging resonate with our prospects. The skill of adapting to prospects in live conversation is invaluable throughout the sales process. In fact, it’s one of the most important skills to master in order to advance your sales career.

The video of the killing of George Floyd has a lasting impact because we believed it, saw it as a faithful representation of what happened on the streets of Minneapolis that day, and because it was shared over and over again as if it were actually happening over and over again, which is of course a core part of its message. There is one George Floyd on video but many more who see the same fate away from the scrutiny of the lens.

With social media, they will keep you away from the essentials. With the weapon that you happily agreed to use against yourself.

Trying to prevent certain people from seeing or understanding your posts gets more complicated. Sure, you could just remain completely private by never making an account or posting anything, but that's like saying you could avoid contangious disease by never touching a human, or avoid getting hit by a falling piano by simply never leaving the house. Most of us find that it's worth trading away some privacy for the sake of having a life. Instead of embracing hermit-hood, we seek a balance

In explaining his shift away from Maoist economics, Deng Xiao Ping, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, described his market-oriented changes as "socialism with Chinese characteristics." Today, American businesses, as well as the media and academic establishments that serve them, increasingly embrace what can best be described as "Chinese capitalism with American characteristics.

The billions of texts, tweets, photos, videos, and other postings tsunami-ing in all directions in response to the general panic featured some helpful information, the way in negotiating a nearly impenetrable rain forest you might every so often come across an edible piece of fruit. The good news was that the internet democratized and facilitated the sharing of information, and that was the bad news, as well....On the one hand, useful information might have been pouring in from everywhere; on the other, you had to stir through the stew of journalism and entertainment and horseshit and noise to find it. And anything was probably more comforting than the official story, which seemed perpetually to be 'We're working on it,' and with so many more appealing options out there reality was being abandoned the way you might walk away from farmland that had lost its water source.

Personally, I suck at efficiency (doing things quickly). To compensate and cope, here’s my 8-step process for maximizing efficacy (doing the right things): Wake up at least 1 hour before you have to be at a computer screen. Email is the mind-killer. Make a cup of tea (I like pu-erh) and sit down with a pen/pencil and paper. Write down the 3 to 5 things—and no more—that are making you the most anxious or uncomfortable. They’re often things that have been punted from one day’s to-do list to the next, to the next, to the next, and so on. Most important usually equals most uncomfortable, with some chance of rejection or conflict. For each item, ask yourself: “If this were the only thing I accomplished today, would I be satisfied with my day?” “Will moving this forward make all the other to-dos unimportant or easier to knock off later?” Put another way: “What, if done, will make all of the rest easier or irrelevant?” Look only at the items you’ve answered “yes” to for at least one of these questions. Block out at 2 to 3 hours to focus on ONE of them for today. Let the rest of the urgent but less important stuff slide. It will still be there tomorrow. TO BE CLEAR: Block out at 2 to 3 HOURS to focus on ONE of them for today. This is ONE BLOCK OF TIME. Cobbling together 10 minutes here and there to add up to 120 minutes does not work. No phone calls or social media allowed. If you get distracted or start procrastinating, don’t freak out and downward-spiral; just gently come back to your ONE to-do. Congratulations! That’s it. This is the only way I can create big outcomes despite my never-ending impulse to procrastinate, nap, and otherwise fritter away days with bullshit. If I have 10 important things to do in a day, it’s 100% certain nothing important will get done that day. On the other hand, I can usually handle one must-do item and block out my lesser behaviors for 2 to 3 hours a day. It doesn’t take much to seem superhuman and appear “successful” to nearly everyone around you. In fact, you just need one rule: What you do is more important than how you do everything else, and doing something well does not make it important. If you consistently feel the counterproductive need for volume and doing lots of stuff, put these on a Post-it note: Being busy is a form of laziness—lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being busy is most often used as a guise for avoiding the few critically important but uncomfortable actions.

As with previous “drug crises,” the opioid problem is not really about opioids. It’s mainly about cultural, social, and environmental factors such as racism, draconian drug laws, and diverting attention away from the real causes of crime and suffering. As you’ll discover throughout this book, there’s nothing terribly unique about the pharmacology of opioids that makes these drugs particularly dangerous or addictive. People have safely consumed them for centuries. And, trust me, people will continue to do so, long after the media’s faddish focus has faded, because these chemicals work. Fatal overdose is a real risk, but the odds of this occurring have been overstated. It is certainly possible to die after taking too much of a single opioid drug, but such deaths account for only about a quarter of the thousands of opioid-related deaths. Contaminated opioid drugs and opioids combined with another downer (e.g., alcohol or a nerve-pain medication) cause many of these deaths.19 People are not dying because of opioids; they are dying because of ignorance.

But as the cyberpunk writer Bruce Sterling points out, connectivity is not necessarily a symbol of affluence and plenty. It is, in a sense, the poor who most prize connectivity. Not in the sense of the old classic stereotype that 'the poor love their cellphones': no powerful group would turn down the opportunities that smartphones and social media offer. The powerful simply engage differently with the machine. But any culture that values connectivity so highly must be as impoverished in its social life as a culture obsessed with happiness is bitterly depressed. What Bruce Alexander calls the state of permanent 'psychosocial dislocation' in late capitalism, with life overrun by the law of markets and competition, is the context for soaring addiction rates. It is as if the addictive relationships stands in for the social relationships that have been upended by the turbulence of capitalism. The nature of this social poverty can be recognized in a situation typical of a social industry addict. We often use our smartphones to take us away from a social situation, without actually leaving that situation. We develop ways of simulating conversational awareness while attending to our phones, a technique known as 'phubbing.' We experience this weirdly detached 'uniform distancelessness,' as Christopher Bollas calls it. We becomes nodes in the network, equivalent to 'smart' devices, mere points for relay for fragments of information; as much extensions of the tablet or smartphone as they are of us. We prefer the machine when human relationships have become disappointing.

... so, for those keeping score at home, he wants a guerrilla war where Americans shoot and hang other Americans. It will be very easy to tell who they need to kill because they will be the ones telling you to wear a medical mask and get a vaccine. Even after I gave him the first food he had eaten in two days, he still was not willing to listen to me for just a few seconds and explain that “socialism” actually means using taxes to pay for hospital visits, instead of running up huge medical debts. Rather than letting me talk, he threatened to hang me, all while still eating my food. On most days, I might dismiss a conversation like this as nothing but the rantings of a homeless guy whose mind has been pushed too far. But today he’s just come from the Sea of People who stormed the Capitol and forced Congress to flee for their lives. On a day like today, I think this interview merits more consideration, especially when so many others I interviewed concurred with parts of what he said. I believe men like him represent a much larger segment of the population than those mesmerized by The Media want to accept. Based on the miles I’ve driven and the conversations I’ve had while Chasing History, I’d say men (and women!) like him are a large minority of the population and they ain’t going away. And unless some modern-day messiah manages to re-open political dialogue in this country, I see more trouble in the years ahead.

I’m sick of waking up every day with that boredom gnawing away at my soul. I’m sick of being unable to reciprocate the things people say they feel for me — all I can do is mirror and mimic them. I’m sick of knowing I should be angry or sad about my past, but being unable to feel those things even when I try my hardest. It’s like I’ve been banished from my own body, and no fucking key is going to let me back in.

YouTube Short: CANCEL CULTURE is preparing us to be MASS MURDERED by 21 Studios July 31, 2022 Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for mass murder. They are seeing if people can be disappeared from social media, and if people accept people being disappeared from social media, then they will accept people being disappeared from the world. When communists get into power, when socialists get into power, they kill us. No kidding, no fooling, and our families are lucky to get away. Cancel culture is a dress rehearsal for extermination. And the kind of lies that are told about me in the main stream media, in Wikipedia and other places, are very specifically designed to get crazy people to target me in a violent manner. They call it character assassination, because it’s a rehearsal. See, culture is when you disagree, and we are allowed to disagree, because that’s what culture is. When you silence people you disagree with, that’s the opposite of culture. It’s a cult. It’s just the first syllable, “cult.” Not culture.

That’s because, time and again, we find ourselves back in the trenches. All too easily we forget that the other guy, a hundred yards away, is just like us. Time and again, we fire at one another from a distance–through social media or online forums, from the safety of wherever we’re holed up. We let fear, ignorance, suspicion and stereotypes be our guides, making generalisations about people we’ve never met.

People feel like they can say whatever they want to say on social media, because of whatever is happening, or they comment on. It Is far away from them. Until they learn that their words had a negative impact on the situation or on someone. Is then they preach to be kind to others trying to cleanse their soul and consciousness. What keyboard worriers don’t know. Most of their suffering, bad luck, misfortune, and a curse. It Is because of the things they said with their banner, catfish, and anonymous accounts. It is karma for their action.

Does it bother you that your girlfriend is a heartless bitch?” the next customer asked. And just like that, her smile withered away to nothing. This was the response she’d expected. Had experienced before she got smart and stopped checking her social media accounts. The ball of anxiety in her stomach that had started to calm began to twist and turn and bounce around the small space again. “Excuse me.” Donovan’s voice carried through the room, quite forceful in its intensity, snaring the attention of all occupants. Jada laid a hand on his bare forearm. “It’s okay.” “No, actually it’s not. No one talks about my girlfriend that way.” Jada’s jaw unhinged itself from her face and fell straight to the floor. She couldn’t hear anything else over the buzzing in her head. When she stumbled out of her stupor a few seconds later, Donovan was marching the woman to the door and gently but firmly pushing her out the door while the other customers cheered. Well, the ones who weren’t recording the spectacle. He came back and held up his hand for silence. Such a principal move, but kinda cool. And so fucking hot. “Thanks, everyone, but the applause isn’t necessary. We’re happy to serve anyone who wants a cupcake and a photo, but I won’t tolerate rudeness.” His message was received loud and clear. For the next thirty minutes, they sold cupcakes to very eager, but polite customers.

If you insist on ‘exposing us’,” Donovan said, his voice hard as ice, using air quotes, “we’ll have to do some exposing of our own. Certain people, like network executives, probably aren’t too keen on their employees engaging in blackmail. Besides, Jada is beloved. You know it, and I know it. I’m sure her fans would love to fill your Twitter mentions with all kinds of creative replies if they knew what you were attempting to do.” “You have no proof of blackmail.” Lila’s eyes spat fire. Jada held up a manicured index finger. “Oh, but I do. You know how you kept calling and leaving messages? Silly me, I thought you were asking me to do interviews. Which you were, I guess, technically. I finally got around to listening to the voice mails.” She wrinkled her nose, “Wow. Really creative vocabulary you have there, Lila. That last voice mail was quite a doozy. I wasn’t expecting the threats about how you were going to destroy me, how you were going to leak damaging rumors about me, how you’d been behind a lot of the hate I received online with bot accounts.” Jada grimaced. “Ugly stuff. You sounded drunk or high when you admitted that, so you might not remember saying all that, but you did.” Jada kept her gaze trained squarely on Lila. She ignored John’s gasp. Lila’s already pale skin turned ghastly white. “I don't know what you’re talking about.” Jada sniffed. “Oh, I think you do. Really, I’d hate for those messages to fall into the wrong hands.” Lila sneered, her veneer finally cracking. “You wouldn’t dare. You’re a spoiled, rich girl. You don’t have the balls.” The courage of her convictions swept through Jada. “Keep telling yourself that.” Jada turned to the other member of the blackmailing crew. “As for you, John, I’m sure people would love to know their perfect Mr. America has slid into the DMs of no less than three contestants from My One and Only with a woe-is-me story, trying to get back together with them, all at the same time.” Jada snapped her fingers. “Did I forget to mention I ended my social media hiatus to check my DMs? I do so love it when women have each other’s backs.” Jada gave the cowards a moment to respond. When none came, she offered up the kill shot. “If none of that reasoning convinces you, and I can't imagine why it wouldn’t, please remember this spoiled, rich girl has a billionaire grandmother who loves her very, very much. If I tell her what you both attempted to do to me, she will ruin both your lives, barely lifting a finger. Contrary to what you believe, Lila, I don't make idle threats. I suggest you both slink away and forget you ever knew my name.

This compulsive seeking infects many in the Western world. Some run from one destination to another, some chase romantic partners, others are compulsive seekers of money, prestige, fame, or recognition on social media. But whatever the outward form it takes, the underlying motivation is the same – the seeker is trying to run away from the banality of their existence. They are seeking to fill the void of emptiness that comes from living a meaningless life. But as Jung explains this void cannot be filled with things, or even experiences, what fills this void is knowing that we are living in a way that makes a difference.

From: REFLECTIONS - "I think people have come to rely on social media as a means of avoiding real contact with one another. They stay indoors, don't pick up the phone, put off opportunities to gather together. Rather, they depend upon the cocoon of the internet — the comment or the like; They make themselves believe that this form of contact is adequate to exist. Social media reduces life to an abstraction — one that can be employed as a tool to advance an idea, or a weapon to repudiate another. Social media has a dehumanising effect. It chips away at empathy, rendering us indifferent to the potential for harm and the suffering that is inflicted. The arena becomes a battleground, a cage, an abattoir where psychological war can be waged and metaphysical murder committed with impunity

Truth is, we all project a false front to the world, peppering our social media pages with witty words and silly emoticons. Life narrowed down to 140 characters, staged selfies, and tirades over opinion posts. Life lived for the approval of the masses, all while tearing strangers down for the slightest misstep. And when you turn away from that electric glow, when you no longer see those silent, pixelated opinions, who are you, really? Who do you see in the mirror? When did the regard of those unknown masses become your existence? Those who will never be there for you except to judge.

Because, as a friend once said to me, social media is a kind of fun-house mirror of society, in that it warps some things and reveals others, which makes it confusing to navigate but also fertile ground for for the work of trying to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Because we are trying to do something new--because, in our digital search for meaning and realness, we are all amateurs--we have the opportunity to see things in a new way. So even though I sometimes feel tempted to look away from social media, I can't shake that feeling that jumping ship is not the best way to answer the questions I've been wrestling with for almost my entire life.

If something other than God quick- ens your heart more than His love, take note. That which makes your heart beat fast may actually be the thing you need to fast from. While we may not be a culture that worships idols carved out of wood, many of us have made idols of our digital devices. During this forty-day fast, we are laying down our phones, physi- cally turning away from the divisive distraction of social media and those we like in an e ort to turn our attention back to the One we love. If you have made the subconscious choice to turn away from God’s love over the years, you can make a conscious choice to turn back to it now.

A cornerstone of 'hustle culture' is that you should be narrating your career on social media - so that you are doing and performing your job at the same time. I am struck by this revelation every time I tweet about a new podcast episode, or an article I wrote. It is easy enough to make my work visible, but many jobs 'are about "thinking" and there's no visible product that comes from thinking', notes Derek Thompson. Making work out of the work can drain what you find fulfilling about your job in the first place. 'Having to externalise your whole life inherently takes away from the things that are scientifically made to make us happy,' as Thompson states.

By the way, if you look at a blank journal and freeze because it is almost too much commitment to put words into such a pristine, blank vessel, then find another way that works. It doesn’t have to be pen and paper. Hammer away on your laptop. Do digital voice recordings. Record a personal vlog or create a social media channel (not a public channel; do this just for you!). There are tons of ways to get benefit from this exercise. Don’t get tied up by the word “journaling”…it doesn’t actually have to be in a journal.

The Industrial Revolution that led to mass production and the division of labour brought separation between the manufacturer and the customer. Over time as companies grew and grew, so did the rift with the customer. Tying executive compensation to share price has shifted the leadership’s attention away from the customer and towards the stock market, a contributing factor to the current malaise. Social media is starting to empower the consumer, providing a largely unregulated, democratic means to hold businesses to account for disappointing or dishonest behaviour. Personalisation and customisation are becoming the norm, raising customer expectations. The profusion of new digital touchpoints – smart-phones, kiosks, websites – has created headaches for

Then, too,” she continued, “we’re more polarized than ever, more propagandized than ever. And this is only getting worse as new tech, especially social media and 24/7 news, divide us. First, we’re each getting individualized news feeds, so no two debaters are even working from the same set of facts, the same objective reality. And social media provides an anonymous platform to spew venom, to unleash our worst selves on each other, bypassing the normal restraints that evolution has built into us when interacting in person.” Singh paused and returned her glass to the table in front of her. “Our tech ensures we’re always connected, always reachable, always on call. Which is stressful enough. But even worse, the tech is designed to worm its way into our minds, tempting us into devoting more and more attention to it. As I mentioned, we’re in a society filled with people hell bent on doing whatever they can to addict us. It’s a war for your brain. “The alcohol industry, the gambling industry, the tobacco industry, the drug cartels, and many others have long done whatever they could get away with to better addict their customers. Then designer drugs came along, offering more potent, faster-acting highs that make them more addictive than ever before. “But it goes far beyond substance abuse. Over the past few decades we’ve invented entirely new classes of products. Products that lead to what is called behavioral addiction

The soil, where family seeds are laid in this city, is rotten. Boys and men still believe in the illusion that their crowning achievements are sleeping with as many women as they can. The more women, the more they are revered as a man. They are left in the dark, completely oblivious to the truth that a part of them is given away or dies with every meaningless sexual exploit. The ignorant remain content until one day, and that day may come when they are on their deathbed, where the veil is removed and the harsh reality slaps them with a sobering truth. And that truth, wrapped with regret, sucks the nectar out of all the names, the faces, the bodies, the women who they thought they conquered. They are left free-falling in a never-ending pit. It could be in a flash, and time and space no longer hold ground. That split second will feel like their entire lifetime. That never-ending pit is their hell. As for the girls and women, they too are lost souls. They dive into a virtual world of selfies, likes, hearts and fire emojis. They get chased by men, their sense of self-worth builds to a crescendo, filling them with a sense of desire. A sense of being wanted. The dopamine, the deceitful dopamine, gives them a false sense of value. They lose sight of the difficult “real world” questions: What am I worth? What is my purpose? What are my principles? They lose themselves in pixels and scrolls. It starts with a selfie and pouchy lips. Then a collarbone. Then the breasts. Then the ass. This never-ending loop of reward tricks them into baring themselves naked, physically and emotionally, for men behind a screen to admire. They buy into the idea that every man desires them. They entertain them. And they do. Only for a brief period of time. Then time starts plotting. They get old. The same breasts that got likes and drooling emoji faces from men start to sag. Her ass no longer the peach standard emoji. Her womb, no longer able to bear children. She is left empty. Hollow. All of those likes, comments and meaningless nights with men who do not even remember her name leave her shattered. They gave in their youth for cheap thrills unaware that Father Time comes after every living soul. They then too plunge into that never-ending pit with the men they lived a lie in. That also becomes their hell.

In this sense, grocery is a story still being written. In the beginning, there was nature, powerful and cruel—that original destroyer of worlds—drought and predation, wind and disease. And so we built tools to subdue her: from jamming sticks into anthills to charting out agronomist tables and plows. And we built these tools so well and for so long that now nature, real nature, is mostly a dream, an uneasy longing, repressed and turned kindly by submission, the way terrible fathers crumble into grandfathers. Then somewhere, after centuries, we woke to the fact that our tools had become too powerful—our monocultures, pesticides, and mine scalings—the tools just as fearsome as the nature they set out to rein in, and we found ourselves cowering once again. This is the typical end point, with our Frankensteins and atomic Godzillas. A daily alienation updated almost as a background app into our iPhone addictions and queasy feelings about social media we just can’t quit. But what we’ve begun to see, what I certainly learned writing this book, is that we’ve undertaken a new project. We decided that, caught between two awesome external forces—nature everlasting, and these new tools of our own creation—the one piece in the whole operation that was most malleable was us. Our selves. That we would happily trade away aspects of our lives—be it community or duty or eccentricity or care—for an ability to survive between them.

They used my name and permit to grow the weed and earn money to repay their debts and compensate their investors. To keep my girlfriend. To take her. I am uncertain if any of them have ever spent a minute in jail for any of these activities. Adam proudly showcases his new motorcycles on Instagram, posing on a hill above Barcelona. He also displays his brand new electric camper van, which they use to travel and transport drugs across Europe and Iberia, as well as his gigantic marijuana cultivation located in Portugal. People like Ruan and Martina admire his public images. I came across a picture of Ruan and Martina together in Berlin, where their mother Fernanda visited them. Martina became member of the Evil Eye Cult, and the custom made mafia group in Spain, which used her as a pawn in their porn and drug-related activities. She now operates as their representative in Berlin. Martina and I have lost the ability to genuinely smile. Her social media posts only show disinterest or a malicious demeanor. ‘A boot stomping on a human face.’ In a picture with her brother and mother, she puts on a forced fake “good vibe” and “happy” smile, revealing her flawless teeth and the subtle lines of aging. With each passing day, she bears a greater resemblance to her rich and so happy mother, the bad person. As far as I know, none of these individuals have faced consequences for their actions, such as having their teeth broken. As I had. Innocently. Taking care of business and their lives. With love. I find this to be incredibly unjust. In the 21st century. In Europe. On planet Earth. By non-EU criminals. “Matando – ganando” – “killing and gaining” like there were no Laws at all. Nowadays, you can observe Sabrina flaunting her fake lips and altered face, just like Martina her enhanced breasts. Guess who was paying for it? It seems that both girls now sustain themselves through their bodies and drug involvement, to this day, influencing criminals to gain friends in harming Tomas and having a lavish lifestyle filled with fun and mischief. Making a living. Enjoying Spain. Enjoying Life. My money. My tears. This is the situation as it stands. I was wondering what Salvador Dali was trying to tell me. I stood in front of the Lincoln portrait for a long time, but I couldn't grasp the point or the moral behind it. I can listen to Abraham Lincoln and ‘trust people. To see. If I can trust them.’ But he ultimately suffered a tragic fate, with his life being taken. (Got his head popped.) I believe there may have also been a female or two involved in that situation, too, possibly leading to his guards being let down. While he was watching: Acting performances, he was facing a: Stage. Theater. It is disheartening, considering he was a good person. Like Jesus, John Lennon and so on. Shows a pattern Machiavelli was talking about. Some individuals are too bright for those in darkness; they feel compelled to suppress those brighter minds simply because they think and act differently. Popping their heads. Reptilian lower brain-based culture, the concept of the Evil Eye, Homo erectus. He couldn't even stand up properly when I was shouting at him, urging him to stand up from the stairs. ‘Homo seditus reptilis.’ But what else was there in the Lincoln image that I didn't see? What was Dali trying to convey or express or tell me? Besides the fact that the woman is in his mind, on his mind, in the image, exactly, his head got popped open. Perhaps because he was focusing on a woman, trusting her for a split second, or turning his head away for a moment.

When people get a flattering response in exchange for posting something on social media, they get in the habit of posting more. That sounds innocent enough, but it can be the first stage of an addiction that becomes a problem both for individuals and society. Even though Silicon Valley types have a sanitized name for this phase, “engagement,” we fear it enough to keep our own children away from it. Many of the Silicon Valley kids I know attend Waldorf schools, which generally forbid electronics.

I was not perpetually sad – that’s not what depression is. More than ever before, I was tired all the time. I had lost interest in most activities. I was eating whatever, whenever, drinking more and more. I was easily irritated. Despite wanting to do not much more than sleep, I couldn’t sleep. I had developed chronic back pain that even an MRI could not diagnose. These were the individual signs and symptoms of depression I had battled for decades, and now I was experiencing them all at the same time and they were not going away. I was no longer able to hide what I was dealing with from my family and those closest to me. More than anyone, my wife knew that, if she couldn’t find me in my home office, my work for the day was done and I was in our room binge-watching something on the television, anything to get away from the noise of life. On stage, in court, in public and on social media, I remained in character: high energy and high efficiency, just another terrific day. Backstage, away from where you could see me, where only my family and closest friends could see, nothing: an empty shell. That’s no way to exist and it certainly is not living.

Especially today in the information overload we experience through our phones, it’s easy to come away from our day feeling like it was jam-packed full and that we can never unplug. The reality is that no one does unplug anymore. While we’re all out there hustling to earn money, we’re also gorging our brains on the emptiness of social media, celebrities, and whatever outrage we are personally attuned to. It is costing all of us our lives because we are in a constant state of being plugged in.

For me it's hard to know where to begin some days. I become overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of needs that flood my inbox and mailbox, my texts and social media feeds. In search of how to find a way forward, I once stumbled on wisdom tucked into some ancient Jewish writings known as the Talmud. There it says that if someone is suffering and in need, and you can take away 1/60 of their pain, then that is goodness, and the call to help is from God. This is a powerful expression of our being the salt - the preservers, the flavorers, the fertilizers - of the earth.

2. Social media takes control away from you and gives it to your peers.

The war for ideas has real consequences. Hitler argued for eugenics and a cleansing of the gene pool. He shut down the intellectual class who might challenge him, took guns away from the people so they could not resist him, set up a police state with sophisticated surveillance, then murdered more than six million Jews in concentration camps. Today, our Big Tech oligarchy censors pro-life social media accounts to give free rein to abortion advocates. The media and universities work hard to present a one-sided argument to the world. The game is rigged and the results are tragic.

The problem with instant relief Low mood gives us the urge to do things that can make our mood even worse. When we feel discomfort and the threat of low mood, we want to get back to feeling lighter. Our brain already knows from experience what tends to help the quickest. So we feel urges to do whatever will make it all go away as soon as possible. We numb or distract ourselves, and push the feelings away. For some that is via alcohol, drugs or food. For others it is watching hours of TV or scrolling through social media. Each of those things are so inviting because they work – in the short term. They give us that instant distraction and numbing that we crave. That is, until we switch off the TV, close down the app, or sober up, and then the feelings come back. Each time we go round that cycle the feelings come back even more intense.

I was not born into a world relatively unaffected by technology like you were. Rather, I was thrust into a world that had already succumbed to its disastrous effects! I have heard it said that the Internet was going to make the world a smaller place, and indeed it has. It has reduced the world from seven billion to just one! Just you, hiding behind your screen, interacting with others hiding behind theirs. The days of legitimate human interaction have been forever tainted by social media. The schedules of our workdays have been compressed tighter by the interventions of e-mails and cellphones. Our lives have been faker and faker, busier and busier and we have yet to realize that within, we are broken, weary and

High Switching Costs Products that require a significant amount of work to migrate away are said to have high switching costs. High switching costs reduce your churn and create a moat that keeps customers from switching to a competitor simply because that competitor is newer, cheaper, or even builds a better product. Most APIs are difficult to leave because to do so requires expensive developer time to integrate with a new product. Companies like Stripe, Twilio, and SendGrid have a pretty hefty switching cost moat. Tools like Slack are difficult to switch from because of the need to obtain buy-in from every manager in an organization. Also, because of the high number of integrations pushing data, Slack requires effort to recreate. Tools with low switching costs are those in which history is mostly irrelevant, and the time it takes to recreate something you’ve built in the tool is low or nonexistent. For example, a social media scheduling tool is easy to switch from because there is no critical history stored or complex workflows that need to be recreated using a new tool. Likewise, one-click SaaS analytics tools that tie into your Stripe account are relatively easy to switch from because they are “one-click easy” to set up.

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Don’t drink any alcohol, period—and if you absolutely, positively must, limit yourself to one drink before about 6 p.m. Alcohol probably impairs sleep quality more than any other factor we can control. Don’t confuse the drowsiness it produces with quality sleep. Don’t eat anything less than three hours before bedtime—and ideally longer. It’s best to go to bed with just a little bit of hunger (although being ravenous can be distracting.) Abstain from stimulating electronics, beginning two hours before bed. Try to avoid anything involving a screen if you’re having trouble falling asleep. If you must, use a setting that reduces the blue light from your screen. For at least one hour before bed, if not more, avoid doing anything that is anxiety-producing or stimulating, such as reading work email or, God help you, checking social media. These get the ruminative, worry-prone areas of our brain humming, which is not what you want. For folks who have access, spend time in a sauna or hot tub prior to bed. Once you get into the cool bed, your lowering body temperature will signal to your brain that it’s time to sleep. (A hot bath or shower works too.) The room should be cool, ideally in the midsixties. The bed should be cool too. Use a “cool” mattress or one of the many bed-cooling devices out there. These are also great tools for couples who prefer different temperatures at night, since both sides of the mattress can be controlled individually. Darken the room completely. Make it dark enough that you can’t see your hand in front of your face with your eyes open, if possible. If that is not achievable, use an eye shade. I use a silky one called Alaska Bear that costs about $8 and works better than the fancier versions I’ve tried. Give yourself enough time to sleep—what sleep scientists call a sleep opportunity. This means going to bed at least eight hours before you need to wake up, preferably nine. If you don’t even give yourself a chance to get adequate sleep, then the rest of this chapter is moot. Fix your wake-up time—and don’t deviate from it, even on weekends. If you need flexibility, you can vary your bedtime, but make it a priority to budget for at least eight hours in bed each night. Don’t obsess over your sleep, especially if you’re having problems. If you need an alarm clock, make sure it’s turned away from you so you can’t see the numbers. Clock-watching makes it harder to fall asleep. And if you find yourself worrying about poor sleep scores, give yourself a break from your sleep tracker.

The thirty-day no-contact rule Recovering from a breakup on a more practical basis can be likened to getting over an addiction. You go through periods of major withdrawal where you become overwhelmed by a cocktail of emotions, including guilt, fear, randomly missing him, and suddenly feeling like what he did to you ‘wasn’t that bad’. You start to play the mental showreel of all your good times (even if you only had a few), and suddenly you can’t remember why you left. Feeling this cluster of imbalanced emotions can be very confusing and irritating, but all hope is not lost. Contrary to popular belief, breakups don’t actually have to be hard. We assign so much spiritual and emotional value to these men, that by the time we finally distance ourselves from them, we feel distant from ourselves. And that’s really heartbreaking, because no man is worth losing yourself over. Ever. They say it takes about thirty days to break a habit. Texting your ex, stalking his profile from your second account, deliberately asking your mutual friends certain questions to get updates on his life and his new girl – it all needs to stop. So right now, go cold turkey, block his number on whatever messaging app you use, remove him from all your social media. Maintaining little corridors of access to him means he’s still on a pedestal. It also means your value system when it comes to men is warped, because naturally you’re going to keep comparing new guys to him as long as he holds this much space in your head. You want to evict him from that space so that someone new can blow you away when the time is right! This guy is not the be-all and end-all of your experiences with men, and the outcome of your situation with him really doesn’t have to define your future relationships. This thirty-day period of making yourself the centre of your world has a 100 per cent success rate, because by the time you get to day thirty, if it’s done honestly and correctly, you will have either a) met a new guy or b) found a whole heap of new reasons to love your healing self. But the thirty-day no-contact rule must be adhered to strictly, and if you break the pact with yourself, you must start all the way from the beginning – which might feel like torture.

We are increasingly forgetting about our commonalities. Many people have explored the disintegration of communities that has come with suburbanization and social media-ization, but it’s becoming increasingly stark. The complexity scientist Peter Turchin explored this in his 2013 piece “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,” and so many parts of it still ring true: “What we have then, is a ‘strange disappearance’ of cooperation at all levels within the American society: from the neighborhood bowling leagues to the national-level economic and political institutes.” We are breaking away from one another. This is not a novel phenomenon—as the piece outlines, the same thing happened in ancient and medieval empires. However, polarization is bad; it leads to less progress and eventual stagnation.

ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences The human brain is a social organ that is shaped by experience, and that is shaped in order to respond to the experience that you’re having. So particularly earlier in life, if you’re in a constant state of terror; your brain is shaped to be on alert for danger, and to try to make those terrible feelings go away. In a healthy developmental environment, your brain gets to feel a sense of pleasure, engagement, and exploration. Your brain opens up to learn, to see things, to accumulate information, to form friendships. But if … you’re not touched or seen, whole parts of your brain barely develop; and so you become an adult who is out of it, who cannot connect with other people, who cannot feel a sense of self, a sense of pleasure. If you run into nothing but danger and fear, your brain gets stuck on just protecting itself from danger and fear. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, “Childhood Trauma Leads to Brains Wired for Fear” (interview), Side Effects Public Media

There’s an expectation that because of this new invention, things will get better, more efficient, safer, richer, faster. Which they do, in some respects. But then things also, invariably, go sideways. At one moment, social media is being hailed as something that will allow ordinary citizens to upend tyranny. And then in the next moment, social media is feared as the platform that will allow citizens to tyrannize one another. The automobile was supposed to bring freedom and mobility, which it did for a while. But then millions of people found themselves living miles from their workplaces, trapped in endless traffic jams on epic commutes. How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?

FOCUS is one of the most valuable skills in business, and is becoming increasingly rare. If you can master this skill, you’ll achieve extraordinary results and make more money than most people. In his book, "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success In a Distracted World", Cal Newport says: “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.” When I started writing a book a month, I have to admit, it was challenging. I quickly realized I had a focus problem. Coincidentally, I attended a book festival and picked up a book by Catherine Price, "How to Break Up With Your Phone", and discovered my life was being sucked away one text message, one social media post, and one email at a time. If I wanted to write a book a month, I needed to get my life and my time back. I read Catherine’s book, and the following especially resonated with me: “Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we’re beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective… The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash—and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who’s actually in control.” I had lost control of my time and my ability to focus. It wasn’t an overnight event, it was a slow, insidious change that happened over a long period of time. Below are some other interesting statistics from Price’s book: Americans check their phones 47 times per day.