"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it." - Henry David Thoreau
Tell me if any of these sound familiar:
- You pull out your phone to search something up. Snap your fingers. 10 minutes have passed and you're on Instagram, 20th swipe down on the feed. You shut off your phone only to realize you never searched up the thing you intended to… and can’t remember details of any of the content you just read.
- You're out to dinner with friends, having a great conversation. Go to the bathroom, pull out your phone, scroll for a bit. Come back not quite as dropped into the pocket of listening and learning as you were before.
- You wrap up a long day of work. Sit down on the couch to relax. Snap. 35 minutes have gone by watching YouTube Shorts. You feel more cloudy-headed. Now you gotta shut off your phone, reset, go to bed.
Moments like these, on an individual basis, don't totally suck. But they add up. All these little cheap-dopamine actions are votes for the type of person we’re becoming. Any individual vote doesn't quite move the needle.
But play it out over a decade (or more), what does that person become?
Instead, here's what I want to become:
I want to be able to:
- Enter a room and just be fascinated
- Look at a single piece of brick on the wall and see how it connects to everything around it, letting that observation spark ideas and conversation
- Look a stranger in the eyes without self-consciousness, approach them as a human and build a genuine connection
- Show up to the dinner table with things to offer, able to navigate conversation with anyone seated across from me
- Sit down and sip coffee with an 80-year-old for an hour, and goof off as an uncle to 10-year-olds.
I want my cake and I want to eat it too, d*mmit!
And if you're still reading this, I think you do too.
But you've tried the apps: Opal, Apple Screen Time, whatever. They work for a little bit. But inevitably, that monkey in you finds a way to break out. Old habits reappear. On net, nothing permanently changed.
The traditional methods don't work. We have to build a cage that our monkey brain cannot exit, no matter how hard it tries. And we need to accept that we will always lose the battle against big tech company engineers.
But here’s the thing: you're not even losing something good.
Think about it. When's the last time you finished scrolling and thought, "Wow, that was worth it?" Never.
You can't remember a single post. You feel foggier than before. More anxious. Less connected.
The apps aren't giving you anything real. They're creating the very thing that they pretend to satisfy. Feel restless → scroll for relief → feel more restless → need to scroll again. It's a hamster wheel disguised as a reward.
So yeah, we're building a cage. Not because we're depriving ourselves of something valuable, but because we need help seeing clearly: there's nothing in there worth having. The cage just buys us time to remember what actually feels good.
Building an unbreakable cage
Here's the deal: if you take the next ten minutes to do what’s shown below, you’ll gain back a thousand hours over your life. Probably more.
We’re going to lock ourselves out of all social media. And we will not be able to undo it.
It will inconvenience your life. There will be times a friend sends you a link and you literally can't open it. Times you want to check something and you just can't. But those moments are never life or death. Not once.
What you give up in conveniences and ‘being plugged in’, you gain back with:
- Impulse control
- A deeper presence
- A better knowing of yourself
- Greater fascination with the world
- More to offer the people around you
- A stronger attunement to the world around you
- Etc, etc.
I’ll take that!
The Setup (10 min max)
- Download Beeper so you can still get messages from social media + chat with friends
- Use Buffer so you can still post (if needed)
- Download Freedom (phone + computer, buy the paid version)
- ⭐ Set a blocklist with all social media + cheap dopamine sources
- Set it to recurring (I do 22 hours of the day)
- Be ruthless here. No cheap outlets. No feeds. No shows. No XXX stuff. Etc.
- ⭐ Put your Freedom settings on locked mode so you cannot go back and change it.
- Make sure it works when you search those apps or open them.
Boom. You've earned back a thousand future hours. Probably way more.
I hope you actually go and do it…. if this piece gets just one person to make that 10-minute setup, it'll be well worth it. This set up is probably one of the best decisions I've ever made.
- L
PS: you can also use News Feed Blocker to block the feed while still being able to use the app
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