Ten Hours

I think my new favorite app on iOS is Screen Time. It reminds me that I spend way too much time looking at social media, and I’ve been actively trying to look at it less. Lately I don’t use my phone when making and eating breakfast. Or an hour or so later when I make my french press coffee. Each of these moments might amount to 10 minutes per day, but over seven days that’s.. 70 minutes. Instead, I’ve been slowing replacing the every-so-often dopamine rush of anger / sorrow / terror with nice things:

• Reading books on my Kindle
• Stretching
• Looking out the window at the vast beauty of the changing leaves

The minutes, the time is still the same. I can’t make the water boil any faster. But I can choose how I spend those moments. Am I feeding my body and mind with good things? Or am I giving away my time and energy to a company overrun with trolls and nazis under the guise of “staying current?”

Ten hours is too much.