Blog/Digital Garden

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.