The average American touches their phone 2,617 times a day and spends 11 hours 6 minutes on digital media. Brian Johnson examines the costs of constant connectivity and suggests ways to optimize your tech use.
Questions this episode answers
11 hours and 6 minutes per day.
2,617 times.
About 2.5 million years (≈100,000 generations).
Hey, hero, if you're enjoying these daily plus ones, make sure you head to heroic us to check out all of the other goodness we have to help you activate your best every day. And now, today's Plus One.
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Heroic Plus One. In our last couple Plus 1s, we spent some time with Michael Easter and wisdom from his book the Comfort Crisis. We talked about the odds of you being alive, head exploding, and the importance of creating a fasting window of 12 to 16 hours. Today, I want to chat about another crisis we faced. It's related to our technology. Get this, and I quote, For 2.5 million years, or about 100,000 generations, we had nothing digital in our lives. Now the Average person spends 11 hours and six minutes a day using digital media. That's from cell phones, TV, audio and computers. Smartphones only stand out because they're newer, actively steal our attention with notifications, and are accessible at any time. But the average person still spends double the time watching TV than they do on their smartphone. He continues by saying, so all these measures that help us break up with our phone are great. Unless we swap our phone time to binge watch some Netflix series or surf the Internet on our laptop. That's like quitting smoking Marlboro Reds to pick up chewing red man. End quote. And that's from a chapter about the importance of boredom and how we're destroying our ability to be with ourselves doing nothing, and the catastrophic consequences of our inability to do so. The chapter is called 11 hours, 6 minutes. 2.5 million years of evolution. 100,000 generations. Zero digital inputs. Let that sink in for a moment. Now. Now we spend nearly every moment of our lives using waking lives, using digital media. Michael also tells us that the average American touches his or her phone 2,617 times. Pause and reflect on that insane stat for a moment as well. When I think of all these digital inputs, I think of Alberto Villoldo's Wisdom from One Spirit Medicine, where he tells us, and I quote him, from television and Internet alone, we're exposed to more stimuli in a week than our Paleolithic ancestors were exposed to in a lifetime. Pause and reflect on that insane stat for a moment as well. If you feel so inspired now, all of that would be fine if it didn't lead to catastrophic consequences. But it does, which calls for a philosophy for our digital technology usage. Check out my class called conquering Digital Addiction 101. And a class my friend Cal Newport did for us called Digital Minimalism 101 and my notes on his book Digital Minimalism. For more wisdom on the subject, you might also enjoy our notes on Irresistible by Adam Alter, the Shallows by Nicholas Carr, and Bored and Brilliant by Manoush Zimadorodi. And today's one is simple. How's your tech usage? What's one thing you could do to optimize? Here's to conquering our digital addictions and using technology heroically today.
We hope you enjoyed today's heroic one. For more ancient wisdom, modern science, and practical tools to help you flourish in energy, work and love, head to Heroic Us where you can get started on your heroic journey for free.
