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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.

Letting go of unnecessary products one at a time. The human body is home to hundreds of species of micro-organisms. The important part they play in keeping us healthy by inhabiting our gut has already been established by scientists. Recently though scientists are learning these microorganisms play an important role in keeping us healthy by living on our skin as well. These microorganisms can prevent pathogenic (aka bad bacteria/germs) from infecting us, alert our bodies when we are infected, and promote healing of wounds. Using body soap/body washes harm this natural protective layer covering our skins. Using soap on our hands is of course a necessary, life saving practice. Using soap on our bodies on the other hand not only doesn’t serve a purpose but actually harms us.

Within an hour you can collect hundreds of arugula seeds.
Saving seeds is an important part of growing and sharing food. Arugula is a leafy green that can be grown all over the USA and other similar climates. It can be grown year-round in warm places, or it can be grown seasonally during the warm months of colder climates. It is an annual which means it doesn’t continue to grow year after year, but instead produces seeds at the end of its lifecycle. It reliably self seeds, so it acts like a perrenial. This means that ideally you won’t need to plant it again and again each year. It does the work of planting more arugula on its own, saving you time. It can even self seed in colder places that get snow like Chicago. Other plants can self-seed as well. Generally plants become less tasty after they start producing seeds, so you want to eat them before then.

(or any streaming service)

Streaming services suck, and are not designed so that artists can make any money. Bandcamp on the otherhand only makes money when their artists make money, so they always are incentivized to help artists make money. The common trend with tech giants is to undersell competitors and move in as a monopoly. Making profits in the beginning is not the objective, but rather to push out competition by offering a service which seems too good to be true. This has been the story with Netflix, Uber, Amazon, and Spotify. Drive out competition by undercutting everyone, avoid paying laborers fairly, and then slowly increase the price for the consumer while continuining to buy off competition. Artists are caught in the crossfire of this and their needs are never considered.

Using GitHub and Jekyll, one can write, edit, and upload posts to their blog/site using their phone.
Unlike content management systems like WordPress or Squarespace, Jekyll provides you with all of your site’s code/text in an easy-to-access format using markdown files and plain HTML. Websites made with Jekyll can easily and freely be hosted with GitHub.

When running a TTRPG, player inaction can be confusing and even frustrating for game masters.
You can feel like it takes away from the momentum and fun of the game. After all, these games are about players doing things and GMs narrating the consequences that follow. It’s crucial for players and GMs to remember that even inaction is a choice.

Making yogurt is actually easy, and can be an anti-capitalist action.

Making yogurt from scratch like making most things from scratch is significantly cheaper. A 32 ounce jar of yogurt costs 4-8 dollars. A 128 ounce (1 gallon) jug of milk costs about the same (4-8 dollars). By this math, making your own yogurt only costs about a fourth of what it would cost to buy it. This means not only are you saving money, but you’re giving less money to corporations. The less money we spend, the less money billionaires have.

Our world faces huge issues like environmental collapse, governments perpetuating genocide, extreme wealth inequality, corporate greed.

The list of huge problems quickly feels insurmountable, but there is hope. These problems do have solutions. Often the solutions feel completely inaccessible, unclear, or abstract though. Robin Greenfield, an activist, successfully grew and foraged all of his own food for a year. This could be a blueprint or at least a glimpse of the solution.

The internet, once an exciting, new tool for human connection, is now seen as a problem in many people’s personal lives.

Books like Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism becoming a New York Times bestseller, and reddits like r/nosurf cropping up with almost 250,000 users, show that people have come to see the technologies of the internet as a double edged sword. Much of this, I think can be attributed to the centralization of the internet. Four out of five of the most visited websites in the past month, August of 2024, were social media sites or content silos, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and X.com.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy is a popular form of therapy which focuses on the ways in which our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors are interconnected.

Cognitive Restructuring is a flexible, CBT related tool which has been found to be useful by many individuals and CBT professionals. This tool is used to identify and change or reframe the thoughts which are contributing to emotional or behavioral issues.

First of all, if you’re reading this and you’re not familiar with either of these things, why are you reading this?

No, seriously, email me and tell me. Just in case that is you though, Cairn is a rules light fantasy tabletop role playing game (TTRPG). An open table is kind of like a pickup game of basketball. Different players might show up each week, and it’s open to anyone each week. Cairn is a really good fit for this style of table because the rules are so easy to pickup and can be explained on the fly. Characters can be easily and quickly generated at the start of the session or even in the middle of a session.

Learning a language takes a long time.

It’s common for people to spend several years learning a language and even then not reach a high level of fluency. According to Dreaming Spanish for speakers of European languages, it takes about 1,500 hours to reach native like fluency in Spanish. That’s obviously a long time. Even if you were totally consistent with getting one hour of comprehensible input a day it would still take over four years to reach. That’s not that bad though considering that so many people never reach native like fluency in their target languages.

Doing nothing even just for ten minutes is painful.

I remember doing a lot of nothing as a kid. As an adult I rarely do this. If you want to try this go ahead. Sit down anywhere in your house. Set a timer for ten minutes. Then do nothing. Don’t read text messages on your phone or watch the clock go down. You can think obviously, and pet your cat if you have one. That’s it though.

The oscars define a feature length film as being 40 minutes long at least.

That seems a little short, but at least it’s a definition everyone can agree on. Film buffs have long touted movies with budgets in the thousands, sometimes ten or even hundred thousand dollars as being “no budget” or “micro budget” films. A lot of young people getting into the world of films and film making are very discouraged hearing numbers like this. These big numbers make it seem like it’s impossible to create a serious or real film for anything under thousands of dollars. Joel Haver shows us that anyone can make “real” films with aboslutely no money at all.

Short form content is bad for our brains yet is still appealing.

It shortens our attention spans. It can often be a huge time sink. Without a clear endpoint, it’s easy to scroll for longer than intended. Even when viewing educational content, it’s extremely difficult to retain anything you learn due to the nature of back to back short content. Despite all of this and even other consequences, people still continue to view short form content, and lots of it. However, If you are going to view this type of content, there is a way it can actually benefit your brain.

The Freedom Model is a positive approach to reassessing behaviors usually referred to as “addictions”.

It strongly emphasizes our ability to choose our behaviors by encouraging a realistic and clear view of our options. The book was written with substances in mind, but really the principles can be applied to many behaviors and areas of life.

Mini essays are the tool I’ve been searching for to help me process and make sense of my daily life.

You can probably tell what they are based on the name, but just in case I’ll explain. Mini essays are short essays that are often informative, but really can be about anything you want. I find myself often going through life feeling like I’m asleep. It feels like I’m encountering ideas, feelings, new information, and experiences, but I forget about them or have to move on to whatever the next thing is. Life feels fleeting, and I want to hold onto it. Mini essays, and writing in general, and honestly all documented self expression have been my solution to this panic inducing thought that life won’t last forever.