Get Out of the Sandbox
It was right about the time he wanted to buy Greenland. This must be a joke, I thought. It wasn’t. None of this is. We’re all being had at the expense of one person.
That Greenland thing was the inflection point for me. I knew I had to turn away from it all. I had to silence everything or risk getting swallowed up by it. But how? How would I get away? How can anyone?
Simple. Get out of the sandbox in which the bully plays. Plain and simple.
I’ve deleted the Twitter app off my phone plenty of times. I’ll reach a tipping point, then fast for weeks, sometimes months at a time. It’s therapeutic and necessary. That’s what my current Twitter strike is about, however I realized one critical element in the process: Twitter and all other social media, or any other thing we have to check on more often than we’d like—e-mail, voicemail, our calendar, our phones—they’re all the same thing. They all pull us away from the moment in which we live. They are robbing us second by precious second.
Twitter et al is just a junk byproduct of our fascination with the useless. What’s worse, there’s a validation component built in. How do you build a monster? Keep feeding it.
How do you make the sand in your hourglass fall faster, keep shaking it.
So, fellow men, what are we to do? Control the controllable. What’s controllable? The only thing we’ve had control over since we matured into men: our attention.
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Photo by Alexander Dummer on Unsplash