I need to get an energy assessment done.
I had one done at our old home, but after our recent move I have just had too many excuses not to get one booked in here. It was an interesting process watching the technician work, deploying all manner of interesting gadgets measuring how tight our house was. Blower fan in the door to check for air leaks, thermal imaging camera checking for heat losses…and in the end it was rather depressing seeing how much energy was being lost to inefficiencies.
“As it stands,” the technician had said, “the air loss is equivalent to having a one square foot window wide open.”
The thought was bracing. What a waste! In mulling fixes for the multitude of issues, it made me think about other inefficiencies we too often put up with. Part of mindful fatherhood is ensuring that your home is well-insulated – and that goes beyond the pink stuff in your attic. What other resource can flow out of your home through an opening if you’re not careful?
Wasted time.
One of the ways I reclaimed a lot of wasted time in parenthood was developing an adversarial relationship with the people on the other side of the screens in my house. Sure, the screen itself is inert…but if you regularly saw people skulking about wanting to steal from you outside an also-inert window in your home, I bet you’d keep it locked.
And thieves abound behind that glass.
With the advent of algorithmic content service, the home page of your smart television is literally the precipice of an abyss of wasted time crawling with those who’d predate it given half a chance. If you spent eight hours a day, seven days a week watching new content on YouTube alone, it would take you over ten years to watch what’s uploaded in one hour. If you left YouTube running on autoplay 24 hours a day from birth until death, you’d have to reincarnate and live an average life 255 times to watch what’s presently there, and could never catch up with new content in real time. You could literally watch for an eternity and never be done.
A ceaseless parade of wasted time.
So how can you guard against the people wanting to suck time out of your house through your television? Mindfulness. If you go to watch television, go for a particular purpose: One movie in particular, two episodes of a particular series, X minutes of videos from Y creator, or whatever the case may be. Unless you airlock your time that way, the algorithm will whirlpool you in and you’ll look up after three hours of wasted time and mindless clicking having watched nothing of substance or import.
I understand the impulse. After however long of being switched on, the pull to unplug is strong. And you shouldn’t feel guilty for not constantly working. But if you go through that process unmindfully, you’ll come out of it feeling unfulfilled and with no sense of control – you’ll have just been a cork bobbing along on the path of least resistance the computer picked for you. You’ll feel better if you take control, leverage your screens as the tools they are, and exert yourself as the master over them rather than being their subject.
And they’re obviously not the only time thief lurking about – time, even more so than money, is our most limited and most valuable resource, and there is no end to the competition for it. It’s why I so deeply appreciate your readership, because there’s so much else you could be doing. The question remains for all of us, though:
Do you need an energy assessment?
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This post was previously published on THEUNBOTHEREDFATHER.COM.
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