all posts tagged 'mental health'

Why Being Bored Is Wonderful!


šŸ”— a linked post to goodness-exchange.com » — originally shared here on

Visualize what I am about to share with you. Take a glass beaker with clear water in it. Throw in some gravel and stir vigorously. It becomes cloudy but, in a few minutes, the gravel settles down and the water becomes clear again.

Now put in a handful of sand and stir again. It takes longer but the sand finally settles down and the water becomes clear once more.

Now put in some gooey mud and stir. It could take weeks before that muck gets to the bottom, and you have clear water again.

And what happens if you stir this mixture every day?

You never have clear water in your beaker.

That is the situation we are in. All the stuff we let into our brain clouds and disturbs our mind.

In the old days there were fewer distractions, and we could return fairly easily to a state of relative calm. These days there are many disturbances causing influences and they take forever to settle down. And, we have been brainwashed into liking the gooey mud, so we keep stirring the water and it never becomes clear.

I am very excited to see if I can get my beaker to have clear water when I ditch my iPhone soon.

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I'm getting rid of my iPhone for a month

originally shared here on

Long time readers of this blog may recall that I've been psyching myself up enough to try switching to the Light Phone.

Iā€™m legit embarrassed to admit just how much Iā€™m addicted to my iPhone.

It happened slowly over the course of the last 15 years. Today, I find myself frequently incapable of putting it down, even when itā€™s actively making me feel terrible.

The biggest expense of always being virtually connected is never feeling connected to the physical moment happening in front of me.

That wasnā€™t so much of a problem to me when I was sitting in front of my Compaq desktop in the basement of my parentā€™s house.

Back in those days, I used to hate being away from my computer. The very first thing Iā€™d do when returning from a family vacation was to jump on the computer and catch up on a week of message board posts.

Here in 2024, though, I donā€™t subject myself to that experience.

The other day, I was playing a Lego game with my son and while he was explaining an aspect of the game to me, I pulled out my phone and went to turn on music. Mid sentence, he stops and says, ā€œDad, can you put your phone away? Itā€™s distracting me.ā€

Oof. Thatā€™s not how I want my son to remember me.

Iā€™ve tried all the techniques people say can help limit screen time. Grayscale the screen. Delete apps. Block toxic websites. But because none of those tricks are actually working, itā€™s time to take more drastic measures.

My plan is to move my phone number onto the Light Phone for a month. Just a month.

I'm going to do this during the month of August. That will give me a couple weeks to prepare for it. I am honestly worried about what Iā€™ll be giving up, and so I'm doing what I can to brace myself for that impact.

Iā€™m mostly excited, really. After more than a decade in the comfortable, walled garden of the Apple ecosystem, I think it will be nice to experiment with new tech tools again.

The Light Phone is designed to be as boring and practical as possible. It can make phone calls, send texts, and give driving directions, among a few other things.

But there are certainly some activities that the Light Phone wonā€™t do very well which I am unwilling to give up. So here are those activities, along with how I'm thinking I'll deal with those activities for the time being:

Taking notes and reminders.

A notepad with a pen. āœ…

Next.

Reading.

Sometime in the last couple of decades, I stopped reading books.

Iā€™m not exactly sure why. I used to love reading books when I was a kid. I would go to the library and read every book they had on building websites and computer programs. Iā€™d also read every new edition of Animorphs, Goosebumps, and Harry Potter as soon as my library stocked it.

But beginning in high school, I stopped reading books for fun. Reading felt like a burden, something you were assigned as punishment. I resented reading so much, in fact, that I used to pride myself on not buying books for class in college and finding a way through without them.1

If I read books these days, I almost only read non-fiction, which is fineā€¦ but I miss reading for fun.

Earlier this year, I helped my wife proctor some tests at her school. I wasnā€™t allowed to be on the internet, so I brought a book along that a friend recommended called What You Are Looking For Is In The Library. I burned through it in a day, and it got me interested in reading fiction once again.

I think I wanna try getting into a fiction series. The last series I read was the Left Behind books in high school, so uh, yeahā€¦ Iā€™m a bit out of the loop with whatā€™s good out there.

If anyone has recommendations, let me know!

Taking pictures.

I used to be really into cameras when I was really into making clips2. When my oldest was born, we thought it made sense to buy a good SLR, so we picked up a Canon Rebel T6i.

I do still grab it out of storage and bring it along to the occasional soccer game or choir performance, and the shots feel better to me than the ones I get with my iPhone. It helps that I have a decent assortment of lenses, but I think it also speaks to the joy you get from using a tool that was intentionally built to complete a task.

Of course, I canā€™t realistically carry an SLR with me all the time. I need something more practical.

When I sold cameras at Best Buy3, the camera I recommended the most was the Canon SD800 IS, and it was the camera that documented some of the most fun moments of my life. It was small enough to fit in my pocket alongside my iPod.

Even though it fit, I still didnā€™t carry it with me every day, which makes the pictures I did take with them feel extra special when I browse through them today.

Maybe having a camera on me all the time is less necessary than Iā€™m worried about. I mean, in a normal day for you, how many situations can you envision where you must take a picture of something and can't flag down someone to take one and send it to you?4

So Iā€™m in the market for a camera thatā€™s small like the SD800 was, but perhaps more professional. I remember seeing someone mention the Canon PowerShot G7 X Mark III and I thought the silver one looked kinda dope.

It makes me happy to see Canon keeping these devices up to date. The G7 X can shoot 4k video, and itā€™s got WiFi and USB-C so itā€™ll be easy to get media off of it. Most importantly, its size means it can stay in the drawer by the door and leap into service at a moment's notice.

But anyway, what about yā€™all? Anyone else use something besides their phone to take a picture or a video?

Listening to music.

The whole reason I wanted to make this post is because I wanted to brag about my restoration project with my old fifth generation iPod.

But because of course this is what happens when I brag, Iā€™ve been stuck for a few days trying to debug a hardware failure that is proving exceptionally frustrating to resolve. Chefā€™s kiss.

So instead of bragging about that, Iā€™ll instead confess that Iā€™m one of those sickos who maintains their own library of MP3s.

Iā€™ve always looked at streaming services with squinty eyes. Maybe itā€™s because Iā€™m still mad at what they did to our beloved Napster. Maybe itā€™s because I think itā€™s important to not give complete control of my cultural history to massive corporations5. Maybe itā€™s because buying an MP3 version of an album from an artist will give them vastly more money than my combined streams would ever account for. Maybe itā€™s because I am an aging boomer.

Either way, transitioning away from Apple Music will not be too excruciating for me. Iā€™ll still use it because I have HomePods all over my house, but when Iā€™m not home, I want need a way to bring my music with me.

The Light Phone does have some storage and an MP3 player option, but because of the intentional design, youā€™re limited to a single playlist and 1gb of tunes. That doesnā€™t work for me, brother.

Iā€™ll keep yā€™all posted with my progress on the restoration process. I want to get Rockbox installed on it so I can experience what the home brew community is doing with this old hardware.

In the meantime, if anyone knows how to address issues with an iFlash Solo syncing with an M1 Mac mini, holler at your boy.


Iā€™d like to take this opportunity to express how pathetic I feel that I need to take these extreme steps to reclaim some part of me that I feel like Iā€™ve lost ever since going whole ham on the mobile revolution.

I talk at length about the joy that comes with technology, but I should also recognize the negative impact that tech can make.

We went through an era of unfettered growth from Silicon Valley-powered firms who had nearly no supervision and did everything they could to exploit our political and economic systems for their own gain.

And to be clear, their growth did bestow some incredible tools onto us.

But as much as our society derides subgroups like the Luddites and the Amish for their apparent aversion to technology, there is clearly some merit to how they approach technology. You should adopt technology because itā€™ll help you, not because everyone else is using it.

Every night around 10:30pm, I find myself lying in bed, entering the casino that is my iPhone. Every app is a different section of the game room floor.

My email app is a slot machine, where I hope Iā€™ll hit the big bucks and get an email saying ā€œyay youā€™re hired!ā€, but the odds are better that Iā€™ll see an email saying ā€œlol you owe me money still.ā€

LinkedIn and Reddit are craps tables, where I sometimes roll an 11 and see a post from a friend who had a successful day at work or a post on /r/AskHistorians that teaches me something interesting (like Did President Andrew Garfield ever eat lasagna?). But more often than not, I roll snake eyes and see something which makes me feel like a failure or living in a dumpster fire of a society.

Even my beloved RSS reader app, filled with feeds that I explicitly opted into, can feel like a game of blackjack. Yeah, I often walk away with at least some money, but I still sometimes leave the table feeling unsure why Iā€™m passionate about anything anymore.

I let this happen to myself. And every time I pull my phone out of my pocket during a family dinner, I rob myself of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Like our Silicon Valley overlords like to say, you canā€™t stop the march of progress. Technology is rapidly improving, and major advances in our collective understanding of the universe are unveiled at an overwhelming pace.

Thereā€™s gotta be a way where we can harness the good parts of technology without entirely succumbing to all of its detriments. The first step, I suppose, is defining what I want to get out of life.

And really, itā€™s pretty simple:

  • Play Legos with my son
  • Sing karaoke with my wife
  • Watch Rockoā€™s Modern Life with my daughter
  • Make music, work out, and learn new things
  • Be able to visit the doctor when Iā€™m not feeling well without going bankrupt
  • Build something useful for people
  • Not make other peopleā€™s existences any worse than they already are

If those are the things that are important to me, then why would I burn precious energy spending time on a device which gives me anxiety attacks on a daily basis?

So yeah, come August, Iā€™m signing off from my iPhone for a bit. Itā€™ll feel good to step out of the casino and focus on building legos, taking walks, shredding on the guitar, singing karaoke, hanging out with friends, and listening to music.


  1. At the time, I was extremely anti-book because the book publishing market is an extreme racket, issuing frequent updates to textbooks with minimal tweaks while commanding insane prices. Today, part of me wishes I read the assigned works for most of my liberal arts classes. Maybe I wouldā€™ve picked up more useful facts about the Australopithecus or found useful anecdotes from Cold War geopolitical conflicts. 

  2. This is what we used to call videos before YouTube. We'd record a bunch of segments of a video on someone's dad's camcorder, then use a capture cable to play back the video onto a computer, and then edit it in something like Pinnacle Studio. Wild times, indeed. 

  3. Which seems to be my point of reference for where to look for all of these problems... I worked at Best Buy from 2005 to 2010, so basically, what were the tech solutions we had for these problems before the iPhone came out? And is there anything from the past 15 years that has improved on that tech? 

  4. Maybe this is a hypothesis born out of privilege, but letā€™s call a spade a spade: this entire article and premise is only possible for someone who is drowning in technology and choosing to reduce his consumption. 

  5. Brennan Lee Mulligan recently had an excellent monologue about this topic, but I donā€™t have a direct link to it. Just look at Paramountā€™s recent decision to remove all of MTV and Comedy Centralā€™s backlogs of content as all the proof you need that you should back up what you care about. 


Life's absurdity is a cause for happiness


šŸ”— a linked post to iai.tv » — originally shared here on

Sisyphus is forced to push a heavy boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down; for all eternity. Camus famously compared Sisyphusā€™ condition to the human condition. We too are fated to complete mundane, meaningless tasks, to chase desires and achieve goals only for them to be replaced by new desires and goals; always returning back where we started. Ronald Aronson argues it is our awareness, our human self-consciousness, of this condition that makes us superior to it.

I didn't read Camus in college1, so this concept of imagining Sisyphus happy is brand new to me.

If you also don't have much exposure to philosophy, give this article a try. It's certainly given me motivation to try reading The Myth of Sisyphus for myself.


  1. Although I did listen to The Magnetic Fields quite a bit. Sometimes, I lament not going through a brooding phase, and then I revisit the albums I listened to heavily in college and think, "oh yeah, I definitely had a brooding phase." 

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The Levers That Money Canā€™t Pull


šŸ”— a linked post to moretothat.com » — originally shared here on

Bob Marley (supposedly) said that ā€œsome people are so poor, all they have is money.ā€ What he meant was that there are people that mistake the pursuit of wealth for their purpose, and when they realize that theyā€™ve conflated the two, they understand that theyā€™ve missed the point of why life is so worthwhile in the first place.

This is why purpose must be discovered without the promise of incentives or monetary rewards. It can only come from conducting an honest audit of what makes you feel wonderment (i.e. childlike curiosity) or a sense of duty (i.e. parental responsibility), and then directing your attention to making the most of those endeavors.

The sense of self-worth that can be derived from purpose is free from moneyā€™s clutches, so keep this in mind whenever you feel discouraged by how much you have. Money is simply not a variable here, and the knowledge of that goes a long way.

Iā€™ve spent the past six months of unemployment conducting the audit described above.

And Iā€™ve learned that what brings me wonderment is learning how technology works1, and my sense of duty is in teaching others how to use it.2

Itā€™s not so much that I forgot those things about myself. What brings me such shame is the fact that Iā€™ve suppressed the urge to pursue those activities in the name of making money.

Ultimately, love is the thing that matters most, but itā€™s often overlooked and disregarded as a cheesy emotion. In the minds of many, skepticism signals intelligence, whereas love signals naivete. After all, you garner respect by sounding the alarm on humanityā€™s problems, and not by pointing to love as the answer to them.

This is precisely why love is taken for granted. Even if love is felt between you and another person (be it a friend, partner, family member, whomever), itā€™s often left unarticulated because saying ā€œI love youā€ means that youā€™re fine with seeming naive and aloof. And if this fear goes on long enough, youā€™ll feel that the best way to express your love will be through ways that act as surrogates for it.

Another thing Iā€™ve learned about myself is that I am a naturally trusting person.

The majority of people Iā€™ve encountered professionally appear to be the opposite. In particular, those playing the entrepreneur game seem especially skeptical or fearful of leaning into love.

Skepticism and fear drive those folks to make decisions about their business which ultimately lead to their demise.

Iā€™ve sat in countless meetings with teams of executives who are frantically trying to come up with an idea for how to get more people to buy their thing.

At some point, an obvious answer emerges which involves building something that genuinely helps people.

But that obvious answer is almost universally looked at the same way youā€™d look at a plate of boogers because of financial concerns.

This general feeling is why Iā€™ve struggled so hard to find a job. Iā€™m tired of building software which only serves the purpose of making money.

Instead of jumping into another job where the culture is driven by money, Iā€™m waiting until I come across a culture that is driven by love.3

Moneyā€™s a great tool, granting me a level of freedom that I may not have experienced had I pursued any other career.

But money is also the primary reason why I am dealing with severe anxiety and depression. Itā€™s why my heart constantly feels like someone is squeezing it like a strongman squeezing an orange.

The only thing that causes the grip to be released? Doing things that lift the ā€œpurposeā€ and ā€œloveā€ levers. Itā€™s when I trust others and spread as much love as possible when I feel the most alive.

Using the analogy in this article, Iā€™ve spent the last 12 years of my life optimizing for the money-receptive levers. Iā€™m gonna spend the next few in pursuit of lifting the money-negligent ones instead and see where that leads me.


  1. Itā€™s not just techā€¦ itā€™s all the STEM topics. And history. And sociology. And psychology. I find endless joy when I dig into understanding how anything works. 

  2. My sense of duty also extends to caring for my wife and teaching my kids stuff. I went out a couple weeks back and bought us all baseball gloves, and every day since, weā€™ve been outside playing catch. That is, up until yesterday, when I accidentally threw the ball down the storm drain. šŸ˜¬ 

  3. Hereā€™s where Iā€™ll say that Iā€™m not so aloof as to deny that a business exists to make money. But when given the choice to be helpful versus to mint more money, Iā€™d rather be on a team which makes the ā€œhelp someoneā€ choice more often than not. Those teams are out there, but theyā€™re hard to find. And the turnover on those teams is exceptionally low. 

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WeblogPoMo 2024 - Song 13: Anxiety Attack Mitigation


šŸ”— a linked post to music.apple.com » — originally shared here on

A heads up: this post talks about mental health and suicidal thoughts again.

When you mention suicidal thoughts to your therapist, the first thing they do is work with you to write up a plan.

The plan is a series of steps you can take when you are unable to pull yourself out of a funk.

The steps start out small and accelerate all the way up to ā€œgo to the hospital.ā€

My first small step was to write down movies, TV shows, or songs that make me happy.

The movies and TV shows were easy, but I struggled to think of songs that made me happy.

As Iā€™ve written a lot about this month, most music simply distracts me or serves as a sympathetic friend. Itā€™s not often that songs put a smile on my face.

I started a new playlist in Apple Music called Anxiety Attack Mitigation1. Over the following few weeks, I added songs that brought a legit smile to my face when I heard them.

Here are the songs on it as of today:

Black Box - Fall into My Love (Radio Edit)

One night, my daughter was eating at the table while I was doing dishes. We were arguing about something unimportant. She was ā€œvery madā€ at me.

This song comes on shuffle and I begin dancing. I canā€™t help it with this song, itā€™s too damn groovy.

I turn around and look over at my daughter. She looks up from her plate with an angry scowl. She sees what Iā€™m doing and her jaw drops like a cartoon character. She gets this look on her face thatā€™s equal parts amused and shocked.

She quickly realizes that sheā€™s supposed to be mad at me, so she quickly covers her mouth and looks away.

Whenever this song comes on, even if Iā€™m ā€œvery madā€ about something, I canā€™t help but crack a smile.

Coolio - The Winner

I mentioned this song in my Hit ā€˜em High writeup, so Iā€™ll make this quick:

This is a song that Iā€™ve heard all my life, but never actually listened to until very recently.

Seriously, read these lyrics.

Iā€™ll admit that I didnā€™t expect this sort of message from the same guy as Gangstaā€™s Paradise, but Iā€™m grateful for the wisdom of Coolio.

Des'ree - You Gotta Be

102.9 Lite FM was my second favorite radio station growing up2.

Iā€™d fall asleep to that station every night.

The song I most looked forward to hearing was this one.

Even as a fourth grader, this song made me feel good about myself.

As an adult, the song serves as a manifesto for how to keep moving through life.

Sum 41 - Fat Lip

I had this song on my Cybiko.

Thatā€™s a big deal because my Cybiko had a 16 megabyte card, which could store a whopping 16 minutes of low quality MP3s.

This song reminds me of middle school. Wanting to rebel but never feeling courageous enough to do it.

Iā€™ve been lucky enough to see them perform it live twice this year3. I used to think pop punk music wasnā€™t something I was allowed to have as part of my identity, but the past few months have needed a soundtrack to help me make sense of my present situation.

Now, Iā€™m no longer ashamed to admit that I love it.

12 year old Tim wouldā€™ve loved to see Sum 41 live. 36 year old Tim is grateful to have had that realization before it was too late.

And every time I hear this song, it reminds me that I need to put on my own oxygen mask before helping others.

RĆŖve - Still Dancing

I already covered this one.

Hoobastank - Crawling In The Dark

Iā€™m embarrassed to admit I listen to a lot of these songs, and this one is probably the one Iā€™m the most embarrassed about.

Maybe Iā€™m reaching a point in my life where I want to care less about what other people think, and this post serves as exposure therapy.

But I canā€™t rock out enough to this song when I feel angsty. It helps me feel less alone.

Jimmy Eat World - The Middle

This was another song that was on my Cybiko.

Every time I hear it, I try to place myself into the perspective of either the singer or the girl.

As the singer, someone pops into my head that I feel could use a pat on their back, so I shoot them a text and see how theyā€™re hanging in there.

As the girl, I allow myself to get the pat on the back.

Bluey - I Know a Place (The Creek Song)

The best childrenā€™s television show of the past few years is unquestionably Bluey.

The soundtrack to the show is part of the reason why.

Close your eyes when listening to this song and picture the scene being described.

Itā€™s a sure fire way to ground yourself back in reality, to give you a chance to let go of the thing that is causing you so much stress, to make space for thoughts that matter.

Em Beihold - Numb Little Bug

I went out for karaoke a month or so ago and heard someone sing this song that Iā€™d never heard before.

The lyrics match the way I feel when Iā€™m especially down, and listening to her helps me feel less isolated.

Modest Mouse - Float On

Like the Coolio song above, hereā€™s a song thatā€™s been in regular rotation for years, but I hadnā€™t really listened to the lyrics.

This song is a reminder that life often works out just fine in the end.

Hoku - Perfect Day

You listen to this song and try to not get a dumb grin on your face.

Curtis Mayfield - Move On Up

Yet another song Iā€™ve enjoyed for years without considering the lyrics all that much.

The uplifting lyrics and encouragement to persevere through struggle make this song perfect for this playlist.

It also often gives me perspective for my own struggles. I know there isnā€™t such a thing as ā€œthe suffering Olympics,ā€ but come on, my struggles arenā€™t much compared to those of an African American in the 70s.

The Linda Lindas - Talking to Myself

Iā€™m seeing Green Day this summer, and the Linda Lindas are one of the opening sets.

Their entire Growing Up album is very good, but this song made it on this playlist because, much like the Numb Little Big song, it often feels like weā€™re alone when we have depressive thoughts.

Iā€™m super lucky to have friends I can call to talk about the things I think about that I canā€™t help.

Some of you may even be reading this post! I canā€™t believe people read this stuff, but again, Iā€™m a very lucky guy. ā¤ļø


  1. This is an incredibly dorky name. Just needed to admit that here. 

  2. My first was Radio AAHS. The ink I could spill about my love for Radio AAHSā€¦ 

  3. They are currently on their final tour. Iā€™m not sure if this is like pro wrestling when people have retirement matches and then go on to wrestle for another 30 years (looking at you, Ric Flair), but it sure feels like they are ready to call it. Yet another reason Iā€™m glad I took the opportunity to see them live this year. 

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WeblogPoMo 2024 - Song 9: EKKSTACY - im so happy


šŸ”— a linked post to youtube.com » — originally shared here on

Editorā€™s note: This post contains discussion of suicide. Take care of yourselves, yā€™all.

Alright, so I guess some of these WeblogPoMo posts are going to be albums instead of songs, because sometimes the collective is more meaningful than any one individual song.

Thatā€™s certainly the case for this EKKSTACY album.

I first learned of EKKSTACY from the When We Were Young festival. I didnā€™t catch them live because they were on at the same time as the headliners, but I did give their Misery album a couple of spins leading up to the festival.

The album came across shuffle once again shortly after getting laid off at the beginning of this year, and I havenā€™t been able to stop listening to it.

First of all, this style of music just sounds cool to me. The guitar and bass sound so ethereal, the vocals are haunting and brooding. Thereā€™s a simplicity to the melodies that makes it feel approachable1.

But maybe what I love the most about this album is how striking the lyrics are.

Back in February, these lyrics from the song ā€œChristian Deathā€ specifically were stuck in my head for days:

I just wanna die, I just wanna kill myself
I donā€™t give a fuck about anyone else
I never leave my house
When I die, I hope thereā€™s a pistol in my mouth
I just wanna die, I just wanna kill myself

This past February and March were quite difficult for me. I constantly felt the worst mental pain Iā€™ve ever felt in my life. Not only was I dealing with burnout and stress, but I also had this asshole voice called depression in my head with me nonstop.

At first, this guy would show up and whisper stuff in my ear, much like youā€™d see a drug dealer sneak up to someone in a 90s anti-drug PSA.

ā€œHey, an easy fix to all this would be to kill yourself. I wonder what that might look like.ā€

Just like how Iā€™d imagine if someone snuck up to me and offered drugs in the 90s, I replied to these thoughts with genuine bewilderment and confusion.

Why would you be offering me free drugs? Your drug dealing business would be way more profitable by selling that product to your existing customers. I also do not have an income, so what would you gain by getting me addicted?

Why would I kill myself? What benefit would that actually give me? How would that solve any problem and not create way more problems for everyone around me?

The bewildered response was how I often responded to this guy because I frankly donā€™t have much experience interacting with those thoughts.

My usual response to bad feelings (like guilt, embarrassment, shame) is to completely shut down. Just nope out of whatever situation I am in and sit alone doing everything I can to push the thoughts away.

But there was no nope-ing out of these thoughts. And since shutting down is not an ideal response to those other feelings, I started working on how to cope with these thoughts.

One day, I was out on a walk, and that depression guy showed up and started being a jabroni again. This time, I happened to be listening to this album and those lyrics came on.

A smile appeared on my face. I felt a true feeling of relief, and Iā€™m not quite sure why.

In some warped way, it felt a little silly hearing someone talk about killing themselves in such a brazen way.

It felt good to know other people have spent time shacked up with this depression voice and found ways to keep them from completely taking over.

Maybe the juxtaposition of endorphins from the walk, a more neutral observation of the suicidal thoughts, and actually speaking them out loud was all it took to realize how absurd it is to take those thoughts too seriously.

Iā€™m feeling a lot better here in May, by the way. I still find myself avoiding uncomfortable and difficult feelings because, well, they suck.

But at least I now have tools to handle them. One of them is throwing on this album, sitting with the feelings for a bit, and telling them that itā€™ll be okay.

And I wish I could forget
That everything will end
And everyone I love has said at least one time
That when wŠµ die, everything will be fine


  1. Alright, so maybe this is just what all emo music is and Iā€™m just describing everyoneā€™s experience with it. But Iā€™ve spent a lot of my life deriding emo and actively avoiding it, so I suppose this is a footnote to pat myself on the back for being more open-minded. If you canā€™t be self-congratulatory on your own blog, where else can you be? 


Cal Newport ā€” How to Embrace Slow Productivity, Build a Deep Life, Achieve Mastery, and Defend Your Time


šŸ”— a linked post to tim.blog » — originally shared here on

One of the dominant reactions to burnout right now is an all-out rejection of work itself, like, "well, any drive to do things, itā€™s a capitalist construction, and the real thing to do is just do nothing", but that doesnā€™t last.

And the people who are telling you to do this are not doing nothing. Theyā€™re striving really hard to make sure that their Substacks and books about doing nothing are going to have a really big audience and theyā€™re giving talks on it.

You canā€™t just focus on the "doing less" part, you need the "obsess over quality" part, and thatā€™s where youā€™re able to still fulfill the human drive to create, and thatā€™s where you still build the leverage to control your life and make a living.

As someone who has been unemployed for nearly five months now, I can assure you that the ā€œdoing lessā€ part sucks.

I donā€™t want to do less.

I just want to be able to go through my waking hours making something which will make society a nicer place to live for everybody.

Then, I want to go to sleep at night knowing I inflicted the least amount of harm on as many living things as possible.

Why are those goals so difficult to strive for?

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On Disruption and Distraction


šŸ”— a linked post to calnewport.com » — originally shared here on

Value-driven responses are not as immediately appealing as finding a hyper-charged digital escape, but these latter escapes inevitably reveal themselves to be transient and the emotions theyā€™re obscuring eventually return. If you can resist the allure of the easy digital palliative and instead take on the heavier burden of meaningful action, a more lasting inner peace can be achieved.

Iā€™ve been finding more and more ways to become detached from my devices the past couple weeks1, and believe it or not, it has been an unbelievable boon for my mental health.

Here is a short list of things Iā€™ve done:

  • Turned on grayscale. I wanna find a way to wire this up to my shortcut button on my iPhone 15 Pro, but (a) too much work and (b) see my next bullet point.
  • Steeling my nerves to activate my Light Phone 2 that I got for Christmas. Itā€™s a pretty big commitment to switch off the iOS ecosystem, but Iā€™m getting close to trying it for a month or so.
  • Deleted most apps off my home screen. Everything is a swipe away anyways, so why not just have a barren screen that messes up your negative muscle memory?
  • Used a content blocker to block Reddit and LinkedIn. I canā€™t tell you what a relief it has been to not go down the politics rabbit hole this cycle so far, and thatā€™s all because I blocked Reddit. LinkedIn is just as bad for me, and if I am going to keep building my network over there, I should try to be strategic about it and not mindlessly scroll it all day.

Tech is so, so cool, donā€™t get me wrong. But I, for one, am sick of being addicted to the allure of social media.

Iā€™d rather spend my tech time building goofy websites and writing stuff.


  1. Except for the last three days, because I installed the Delta emulator for iOS and cannot stop playing Dr. Mario.  

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Tech doesnā€™t make our lives easier. It makes them faster.


šŸ”— a linked post to asomo.co » — originally shared here on

Because weā€™re social animals we tend to go along with the trend, and because we live under capitalist acceleration the trend is always one way, because our system only has one gear. We also have the ability to edit our memories, so can find ways to convince ourselves that this was all our own choice. That very same adaptability, though, prevents us from using the new tech to save time, because ā€“ under a system with a growth fetish ā€“ weā€™ll be expected to adapt to a new normal in which we have to do more stuff and get more stuff in the same amount of time.

The dark irony then, is that it is the introduction of the new tech that inspires the subsequent irritation at its absence. Twenty years ago nobody fidgeted in agitation if they had to wait ten minutes for a taxi. Now youā€™ll check your phone incessantly if the Uber is running three minutes later than you expected. And god forbid the driver cancels, because youā€™ve probably algorithmically planned everything down to the last minute. We increasingly live a ā€˜just in timeā€™ life because, at a systemic level, thereā€™s pressure to pack in as much stuff as possible at both a consumption and production level. Weā€™re just as dissatisfied, only busier.

The more I dig into the reasons behind my anxiety and depression, I keep coming back to some form of ā€œitā€™s the system, maaaan.ā€

And that thought often leads me down two paths:

The first path is wallowing in anger around our horrible healthcare system, our completely corrupt political system, and our inability to have a rational conversation around solutions to all these problems (often with people whom I actually deeply care about).

The second path is spinning around solutions for these problems. How can I tone down the heat in conversations with my loved ones? How can I push back against a culture hellbent on incessant and mindless consumption?

How do we all just slow down?

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I donā€™t care if you force close your apps


šŸ”— a linked post to birchtree.me » — originally shared here on

My official position is a fact followed by an opinion: The fact is that iOS is built to work best when you just let the system handle things for you. The opinion is that I donā€™t particularly care how you use your own phone because it impacts me precisely 0%.

Iā€™ve only recently noticed a direct impact on the correlation between my own acceptance of a personā€™s flaws and the improvement of my own mental health.

There are several posts on here about ā€œletting goā€ and ā€œdropping fucksā€ and whatnot that speak to this exact thing, but Mattā€™s explanation here is beautiful.

It doesnā€™t really matter why you swipe up on all your apps. If it makes you happy, and you donā€™t mind the slight hit to your UX by way of a tiny battery drain and longer initial load times, then by all means, you do you.

Reminds me of the Bluey episode where Bluey and Bingo are playing Grannies, and Bingo thinks Grannies can Floss (the dance).

After a bitter fight with her about it, Blueyā€™s mom says, ā€œWell, do you want to be right, or do you want to keep playing the game?ā€

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