Blog/Digital Garden

Setting your phone to black and white and committing to it is a game changer. Deleting distracting apps is a great place to start, but sometimes it’s nice to be able to use your phone for things like YouTube which can be both distracting and helpful. This lets you use your phone for information and as a tool, but be able to ignore the bright colorful distractions. Setting your phone’s screen settings to black and white really destroys the attention grabbing nature of it. It becomes almost painful to use, a true joyless endeavor. This makes using your phone for simple things like texting, calling, and reading interesting and enjoyable. I’ve also noticed that I lean towards YouTube videos with a stronger focus on information instead of just attention grabbing visuals. You’re able to actually focus on what you intended to instead of the blinking neon signs of the modern capitalist hellscape of phones and the internet.

A common problem folks have when first getting into listening to Comprehensible Input to naturally acquire a language is they get bored. Fido game from Don’t Buy This.png.

Jekyll is a GitHub repository/Jekyll theme by Barry Clark that can be cloned to instantly have a blog up and running with GitHub Pages free site hosting. Busy Street in a German Town by Jacques Carabain

Go to your browser settings and make Ecosia your default search engine. Seriously, that’s all it takes. There’s really no reason not to do that.

Cast iron skillets aren’t overhyped. Everyone thinks they are, but they’re wrong. Cast iron skillets are the right amount of hyped.

My smart phone and laptop are now actually dumb.
My devices are setup to give me truly the best of both smart and dumb tech worlds without resorting to using an actual dumb phone. There are a lot of challenges, and videos online that show how to “dumb down” your smart phone or using a “dumb smart phone” temporarily. Unfortunately, most of these really don’t eliminate mindless scrolling entirely. They also don’t often last as lifestyle either. My setup, I believe has eliminated mindless scrolling from my life and is a part of my life to last. The whole philosophy behind my setup is to make the easy to access distractions more inaccessible, that way the activities which take effort, but are more life giving like reading a book become the go to activities.

Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language.

This means it’s an entirely made up language which didn’t naturally evolved like other languages. This is different than a code which obscures an existing language. A language allows for a completely different way of thinking. A language has its own grammar, morphology, phonology, etc. Toki Pona was created by Sonja Lang all the way back in the 2000s. Since then it’s grown a passionate community of speakers. The idea behind the language is to express the core truths of life simply without over complicating things. Thus the language only has around 150 words.

No seriously. We really do naturally pick up languages. My journey with CI (comprehensible input) began when I was a teenager in the 2010s when I stumbled on a video of Stephen Krashen explaining the input hypothesis. His thoughts and video on language acquisition are something anybody interested in language learning would benefit from.

It is better to wait for the tide to pull your boat to shore than to force yourself to pull it to shore.
The whole problem of life is that there are an infinite amount of possible choices to be made and no user manual. Folks prop up specific books, philosphies, and people as being the answer key to this test. Of course they’re all bullshitting. At best, someone can say “Hey I did this, and I’m happy. Maybe if you do this, you’ll be happy too.” Something like that would be the most honest way to suggest a choice. I’ll try and follow that same honest way of suggesting, nondoing. Inaction or intentional nondoing is an often overlooked option for each step in life’s path. At the very least, it is an approach that can bring a feeling of peace and joy especially to people who feel their actions ultimately amount to just adding more stress to life.

Enjoying the process is much more important than focusing on the end results.
Intrinsic Motivation is the key to achieving goals, forming/breaking habits, and having a happier life. People often begin endeavors with a goal or effect they want to achieve in mind. Unfortunately people don’t usually want to do what it takes to get those results. Otherwise, they would already be doing that activity and wouldn’t need the goal to push them in the first place. Afterall, people do what they see as providing the most value or happiness in the moment, even if that just means choosing the better of two poor choices. A practical example of all of this could be a person who has the goal or desire to be a healthy person, but enjoys doing things that harm their health and doesn’t enjoy the things that promote health. If you really love smoking cigarrettes, hate exercise, love junk food, and hate fruits and veggies, then getting the end result of “being healthy” will require you to actively go against all of your desires. That’s extremely difficult, and even if you can pull it off for awhile, it is not sustainable. Instead of focusing on just the desired end result, focusing on deriving pleasure from a different lifestyle or changing your short term desires, will be an easier, more succesful, and happier journey.