With love,

time spent offline

The perfect place/ to waste some time

Hi there,

You can learn a lot from hating yourself, but you go a lot further with love.

Five things to share:

1. You think, foolishly, wrongly, if you hate the internet, social media, and your stupidly overpriced phone— remember you chose it— and yourself for spending yet another weekend scrolling through the deafening sound of tik tok, tik tok, tik tok— a ticking time bomb, then you will finally be able to unplug, disconnect and get offline. Lord know, you have read all the articles under the sun: The Internet holds an infinite amount of information. You listen to the experts and diligently follow their advice. You track your ScreenTime meticulously, try 30-Day No Internet challenges, and even remove the addictive apps off your stupidly smart smartphone some of the time. And you cannot wait until you are finally that person: No Internet, no email, no smartphone.

2. Because, love liberates. 

3. A quote I want to share with you:

   The man who chases two rabbits, catches neither.

   — Confucius 

   In modern terms, don’t be a donkey.

4. A wise man once advised me to be selfish with my time and attention. He was talking about emotionally unavailable men but I used to feel just as toxically attached to my always-there-always-available phone. It's hard to say what makes emotionally unavailable men especially enticing but the phone is easy. In the new economy, attention is the most valuable asset, and somebody, somewhere is always trying to make a buck off of anything valuable: Don't they teach you capitalism in that school of yours? So, somebody, somewhere figured out a way to make a whole lotta buck off of harvesting our attention, and if Silicon Valley is the Don Eladio of technology, smartphones are a pipe to the crack that is social media and the internet in general. Since you gotta spend money to make money, Silicon Valley hires very smart people making lots of money to figure out which Sans Serif font will keep us scrolling for hours through 15-seconds of clips of a dog humping its shadow. Don't worry, you have already lost: They are smarter, richer, better than you. Admitting defeat is the first step. Then we can consider some changes we can make.

5. A question for you: What do you love about love? Add more love, and less media, to your days.

That’s all for this week!

Thank you for reading, and share with anyone you think may benefit.

time spent offline is now a monthly analog publication you can get delivered straight to your mailbox with 20 ideas every month.

With love,

Mehret