I was listening to Cal Newport’s podcast about phone use and how to limit it and his suggestions were 1. to get all algorithmic apps off the phone 2. to put the phone in a particular place when you are home (kitchen, charging station etc). and 3. cultivate long term dopamine hits. (Usually I don’t listen to Cal Newport because he has three kids and a wife and never mentions them in managing his time. I feel like he has a very nice wife who takes care of all these things so he can do deep work, lol). Anyways, I’m in the mood to limit phone time, so I did make my phone as boring as possible – it is sooo boring – took off news apps, reddit, youtube in the past few weeks, long ago I took off facebook, instagram. I still have the NYTimes games – and I need to not do spelling bee, because that one in particular takes too much time. In the past, I have been good at leaving my phone elsewhere in the house, so I reinstituted that. Three is the hardest one – to turn to other long term projects to relax and enjoy. But I was thinking this week in particular, I feel like I’ve made strides in both the guitar and weightlifting. Got compliments on technique on both things this week! It’s pretty terrible, the rate at which one gets dopamine hits in the real world vs phone time. OMG, I’ve been at guitar for two years – I still can’t really do barre chords. Weightlifting for about a year. I was telling Ward, my lifting coach, it took me six months just to get used to people staring at me lifting. Forget about the actual lifting technique, I really don’t like people looking at me very much – so when the entire sport is people looking at you, that takes a long time to not be embarrassed to try things while people look at you! Also, it’s hard for me to enjoy these things and not turn them into another “job” another thing “to do”. That kind of ruins things for me, I take them too seriously. Gah. Take things seriously, but not too seriously. Hahaha.
For the first time, instead of replacing my iPhone, I got the battery changed out. I have the iPhone 14 which I bought 3 years ago, almost exactly. The battery was down to 73% – they recommend replacing at anything lower than 80%. It cost about $100 and they took my phone for about four hours, which they apologized for, but I was relieved because I thought they would want to take it for two weeks. I remember getting the 14 and thinking it wasn’t much better than the 10 I had, so no reason to upgrade now to the 17 or whatever they have (though it does come in a pretty orange color that Jeremy is salivating over). The dropping off and the picking up took longer than I thought it should have, they have a weird check-in and waiting system that I don’t particularly like, but I know some business major thought really hard about it. I probably spent about 45 minutes in the store waiting. And while I was waiting, I thought of Dante’s circle of hell – which I thought I was in. The inside of the store looks good, but there are too many people, it’s like 5 degrees warmer in there than it should be from the sweaty bodies, the music is some random techno-beat non-music. There seem to be as many staff as there are customers, yet..I wait. The staff walk in/out of the back room – sometimes with items, other times with no items. This is the entry to the weird hell-scape that the internet can be sometimes.
