Get Bored on Purpose # Eleven habits for climbing out of doom-scrolling, from someone who makes videos about digital minimalism and still catches himself scrolling. That admission is worth more than expertise would be. The eleven # Leave a gap in the day. Ten or fifteen minutes with no phone, no music, nothing. Washing up or driving in silence works well. It’s practice at tolerating being unstimulated. Delete one high-dopamine app. You may not miss it at first, then notice how much room it was taking. Even deleting the app while keeping the account works, because you won’t re-download and log back in just to have a look. Rewatch things. Shorts and Reels run on novelty specifically. Going back to music and shows you already love breaks that, and the stretches of his life spent on more considered content were, looking back, better ones. Put the phone further away. Another room, or a bag. The walk to fetch it gives you time to ask why you’re fetching it, and that question alone often ends the trip. One thing at a time. Not watching something while eating, not two screens at once. Days feel slower and better, and things you enjoy get properly enjoyed rather than half-noticed. Stop treating boredom as an emergency. Most of us can’t sit in a waiting room any more. Catch the automatic reach and just be bored — a lot of what gets consumed isn’t even enjoyed, it’s just filling something that felt uncomfortable. Choose slower content deliberately. Curate the subscriptions and playlists. Slower doesn’t mean dull — books, drawing, walking, lower-stimulation games. What surrounds you sets your baseline mood. Fewer windows open. Finish one thing before opening the next. One or two tabs. The overhead of switching is larger than it feels. Have one offline hobby. Not monetised, not content, not for an audience. Walking, the gym, sketching, reading. Something that exists purely because you like it. Stop the background audio. It usually starts as “at least I’m learning while I do chores” and degrades into noise. The problem is what it does over time: anything that isn’t enhanced starts to feel unbearable. End the night without an algorithm. Don’t let an app pick what you watch before bed. Choose something, or read. If you only take one of these, do tonight without the phone and see how tomorrow feels. The single thread # Every one of them is the same move: rebuilding your tolerance for not being stimulated.
Twelve Minutes Before Breakfast # A glass of water, then straight out the door for a brisk walk, stopping every couple of minutes for twenty squats. Six minutes out, six minutes back. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and stacks about six separate longevity levers before you’ve eaten anything. The protocol # On waking: socks, shoes, clothes. Drink half a pint to a pint of water. Go straight outside.
Sort People Into Allies and Acquaintances # You can’t cut everyone difficult out of your life. Some of them are your colleagues, some are family. What you can do is stop being confused about which category someone’s actually in. The seven worth spotting # Gossips. If they’re talking about someone else to you, they’re talking about you to someone else. Worth stopping early — “I’d rather not hear that” does it. Listening either drags you in or quietly poisons how you see the person being discussed. Jealous ones. They shrink your good news the moment you share it. Odd thing is a lot of them do want you to do well, they just can’t say it. Reframe that helps: critics make you do it better, haters make you do it faster. Time wasters. Not usually deliberate. They ramble, they want your attention without a reason. Redirecting kindly works — ask for the short version, say you’ve got something you need to get to. Money wrappers. The ones always asking, always vanishing when the bill lands. Worth actually checking your statements for. Are you buying things for people who need it, or people who just ask? Oversensitive people. Carrying enough that they feel got-at most of the time. They can be in your life. They shouldn’t have a big role in it if you’re trying to go somewhere, because the emotional bandwidth they need is the same bandwidth direction needs. Excuse makers. Always tired, always broke, always a reason it won’t work. Sometimes they’re actually shielding you from their own fear. Doesn’t mean the fear is right. Miseducated people. Not unintelligent — just holding wrong ideas about what actually gets you somewhere, and degrees don’t protect anyone from that. The tricky version is the friend who uses supportive language while quietly getting in the way. The bit that actually matters # The list is less useful as a hit list than as a sorting tool.
When You’re Stuck, Think Less # Feeling stuck is usually a signal that you’re overloaded, not that you haven’t tried hard enough. Which means the instinctive response — think about it more, sleep on it, run it again in the shower — reliably makes it worse. Trap one: thinking harder # Working memory is a workbench, and everyone’s is small. When a problem has more moving parts than fit on the bench, adding effort doesn’t add capacity — it just adds fatigue, and clarity drops the longer you push.
Someone earning $85,000 breaking even isn’t a lifestyle problem. In one real case the entire gap between breaking even and saving properly came to about four discretionary transactions a month. That’s a targeting problem, and the fix is sequencing rather than sacrifice. How a good income ends up at zero # Three things landed in the same year: a move to a $2,000-a-month apartment, selling a paid-off 2014 car to finance a used Tesla, and a pet needing $3,500 of emergency surgery.
Every Upgrade Needs a Downgrade # After an 84% pay cut, the rule became: life still has to feel good on a fraction of the money. What came out of that constraint is more useful than most advice written by people who didn’t have one. The rule that does the heavy lifting # Every time you add a nice-to-have, take something else of the same cost away.
