Tag: writing

Unplug to Recharge

The story of my experimental lifestyle change of unplugging from my phone to recharge my life.

For the past month or so I’ve been experimenting with a new lifestyle:

I ignore my phone as much as possible.

Let me explain…

I Hate Cell Phones

I bought my first cell phone in 2007 at the age of 22 when I was in college. From the moment I walked out of that Cingular store til now, I’ve hated the idea of having a cell phone.

Up until that point in my life, I had never needed nor desired a device on my person that would put me at everyone’s beck and call anywhere, anytime. Up until that point, if anyone wanted to reach me, they could call my home or apartment phone and if I happened to be there, I would answer. If not, too bad, leave a message I’ll call you back whenever I get to it. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there was something freeing and liberating about this way of life. And it wasn’t unique as it’s how everyone lived an operated until some time in the 90’s when I remember my parents getting their first cell phones.

Don’t get me wrong, as a kid I was fascinated by the technology of cell phones. I was a master of the classic game “snake” on my mom’s Nokia. As a teenager I enjoyed calling my girlfriend from my home phone to her cell phone and chatting for hours, possibly wishing I had my own cell phone so I didn’t have to worry about my parents breathing on the other line listening to my inspiring, eloquent, love-captivating, flirtatious sweet nothings whispered through the electromagnetic radiation waves of technology.

Besides that, I don’t remember ever asking my parents for a cell phone or ever feeling like I had to have one. And for that, I’m grateful. I may have been part of the last generation of teenagers that spent our high school years happily without a cellular device.

After high school I spent 2 years in Ecuador as a missionary and when I came back to college in January of 2007… EVERYBODY HAD CELL PHONES. Apartment landlines became obsolete and I was forced to buy calling cards just to use it. As if I didn’t have enough financial stress as a poor starving college student, I caved and found myself buying a cheap flip phone on a basic plan, something like 250 minutes and 250 texts per month.

I reluctantly entered the next technological paradigm shift of my life.

Dumb Phones

Dumb phone, oh dumb phone, I miss you so,

Your screen was so grainy, your buttons so small,

The satisfying feeling of snapping you shut,

Your cheap plastic shell was more than enough,

Your camera was crappy, your service was bad,

Your buttons were clicky and sticky and sad,

But hey, I could text just about anyone,

With eyes closed, one handed, with only my thumb,

You served your purpose, no more and no less,

You felt no desire to technologically progress,

When “smart phones” arrived, therefore labeling you dumb,

You took no offense as you knelt to succumb,

And now, in a world where smart phones reign supreme,

Surrounded by videos, noise, GIF’s and memes,

I recall the sweet silence that felt just like home,

Of using a boring, plain, quiet dumb phone.

Smart Phones

Some time after college while working in my first job in 2012, I decided it was necessary for me to finally upgrade to a smartphone. An iPhone seemed like the logical choice, and while I’ve occasionally drifted into different android and Google phones over the years, iPhone has really been my solid foundation. And for a while, I was a sucker for anything and everything that had to do with the iPhone. I wanted the latest iPhone as soon as possible, the newest software, the best features. I would watch the Apple events and even download the beta versions of iPhone software updates to experience them first.

I was hooked. There was just something about having that little expensive rectangle in your pocket that affected the way I felt about my life. I became dependent on it. Addicted to it.

And not just the phone, but everything ON the phone. Apps, games, and social media. In a matter of almost no time at all, the distractions of everything I could do on my iPhone that kept me so connected with the world, actually disconnected me from the world and most importantly the people in my life around me. It became an escape, a dopamine fix, a place to temporarily sooth my shallow soul while I looked at everyone else’s glossy life and hoped for more comments and likes on my own shared social media.

Any feeling of pleasure I’ve ever derived from any app on my iPhone is very short lived and kept me coming back for more. I hated that his little device designed for communication became like an all-powerful evil genie, pretending to grant me wishes and trapping me in it’s lamp.

Smart phones are the epitome of phenomenal cosmic powers trapped in an itty bitty living space.

Dumb Parents

As I’ve become a parent heavily involved in my children’s lives and activities, I’ve had to learn to be more and more cautious about the use of my phone. I’ve seen way to many dance performances, touchdowns, and soccer goals from within the frame of my 6.1″ display. In my effort to capture the moment, I miss the moment, and I can never get that back. Sure I can watch it later on my screen, and maybe post all over social media for other’s to enjoy, and I know there’s a time and place for that, but… I felt like I was missing out on a lot of real time moments that would be more impactful if I would just put the phone down and take the experience in.

I needed to stop capturing moments in 1080p and live in moments of full HD. The resolution from watching something happen live with my own eyes beats any kind of resolution replayed in 4k, 8k, or even a 120k screen.

Also, I hope I’m not the only parent who experiences this, but one of the negative effects of posting photos and videos of your children to social media is that your children will start to think that EVERY photo and video you take will end up on social media, and they (smartly) don’t want that! We’ll be on a family walk, and the kids will start saying or doing something funny, and I’ll pull out my phone to capture the moment, but as soon as they see that I’m recording, they’ll stop and insist I delete whatever I recorded because they don’t want it shared to the world. Most of the time, in those kinds of moments especially, we as parents have no intention of posting anything, we just want to capture a fun family moment. But the moment is ruined by a fear of potential social media posting, and the result is we aren’t able to capture what would have otherwise been a funny thing to enjoy again later as a family.

How many goofy and silly pictures and videos did we all take as children and teenagers? We felt free to be ridiculous, creative, and funny on our 80’s and 90’s camcorders because we figured nobody would ever see it but our ridiculous, creative, and funny family. The idea that any of that could be potentially shared with the world on a public platform wasn’t even a thought.

But now, it is. And it’s ruining some of those moments.

On top of that, there’s also an emotional effect that occurs inside me that connects me to my child, in that moment, where nothing else matters but my full attention and focus on my child. A smile and a cheer from the sideline or from the audience, feelings of pride and happiness expressed without distraction or interruption. Allowing myself to be fully present.

Then there’s the example I set to my children as a parent. How often do they walk into a room and try to talk to me and I’m on my phone? I may even be doing something productive and healthy, like listening to a good audiobook or uplifting music, or catching up and responding to important family messages and events. It doesn’t matter what it is, I have to pause or stop and say to my child “sorry, what was that?” They don’t know what I’m doing on my phone, they just see me on my phone, and in their eyes, mom and dad are always on their phones, and they will follow that example when they someday get a phone.

I have a teenage daughter who has a phone and preteen son who has a watch. Now these are very limited devices and can pretty much only text and call, NO INTERNET WHATSOEVER, but even still, they are drawn to them. We can’t keep them off them! We give them a little bit of freedom with a communication device and they very quickly feel entitled to use these devices however they damn well please.

And why not? We’re kidding ourselves as parents if we think that we can expect our kids to not want to be on phones or communication devices constantly if we ourselves are on them constantly.

Smart Parents

I finally decided it’s time to be smart, and I hope it’s not too late. I don’t want my kids to see me on my phone anymore. I don’t even want to carry it with me when I leave the house. Maybe if they can see that I don’t need to be on my phone all the time, they don’t need to either.

I understand that especially as my kids get older, more and more of their friends will have phones at younger and younger ages. My third-grader informs me that kids his age on the bus regularly watch episodes of “The Last of Us” on HBO Max on their phone. I’m in a loosing game here if I think my example can compete with that of their peers.

But at least it’s something. Maybe they’ll remember me as an always present non-distracted father, maybe they won’t.

More than that, I want to be accountable to myself. I want to eliminate the distractions for myself. I want to empower myself to function in the world I live in without being so heavily reliant on or addicted to my phone.

So how do I do this?

After some research on the internet of how other people have taken similar approaches, I landed on the best answer for me.

Apple Watch.

I learned that I could leave my iPhone at home, or even turned off and tucked away in my drawer, and still have a fully functional communication device in the form of my Apple Watch.

For a few years now, Apple Watches have had the ability to have their own cellular number or companion connection through an iPhone to function away from your iPhone. Due to cost and unnecessary hassle, I never bothered to look into it much. It seemed like a luxury service. But now that I was considering using my Apple Watch as my main communication device, this seemed like a viable option. I did some research, found a very affordable way to make this happen (US Mobile), and now I barely touch my phone. I answer all calls and texts, listen to music, audiobooks, podcasts, access maps, etc on my Apple Watch, without the need for my phone close by.

I ignore my phone as much as possible.

There’s some sacrifices (if you can call them that). No more sitting and scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or YouTube. No Netflix, Prime, Max, Hulu, or Disney+ whenever I want. The longer I keep my iPhone tucked away at my bedside, the easier it is to ignore it.

The biggest drawback is if you have any texts from your green bubble friends, Apple being the way it is, they won’t come through to your Apple Watch without your iPhone nearby. So occasionally I do need to turn my iPhone on and check messages from my long lost android and google phoned friends. Incidentally I’ve learned how few people I know and regularly communicate with that DON’T have an iPhone. So this hasn’t been a dealbreaker for me.

The only other drawback is taking photos. If I’m out and about with my Apple Watch, I’m unable to take any photos or videos. At first, I was really worried about this, especially with all of my kids in sporting and dancing events. I’ve always been the screaming dad behind the camera filming my children doing every little awesome amazing thing.

Now, after a little over a month, it’s totally fine and I addressed my feelings about that earlier in this post. If I feel that strongly about taking photos or videos, my wife has her iPhone or I could bring my phone along for photos. Or I could go buy an actual camera (something I’d love to do!). I’ve basically learned for myself that I don’t need to take as many photos and videos as I think I do.

Other than that, if there’s something that I need to accomplish on my iPhone, I’ll just do it on my iPad. Or my MacBook. I go to my home office and do those things. I typically don’t carry those devices around the house.

Unplug to Recharge

I realize this lifestyle change just plain won’t work for everyone. For example, thus far I’ve failed to mention that I do actually have a day job that requires me to use the phone a lot, and I’m fortunate in that my job provides me a separate work phone to do that. I’ve had past jobs where I’ve had to use my personal phone for work purposes, and ditching my phone at home all day trying to operate on a watch just wouldn’t be possible no matter how much I might want to.

I do still post to social media when I upload a song, or a post like this one. I do enjoy using Marco Polo still to connect with friends. This isn’t 100% all or nothing solution.

This post is less about the means and more about the problem I was facing and feeling, and how I chose to solve it. And I’m far from perfect at it. I still have to watch myself constantly and stay vigilant.

I’ve read that if you keep a phone plugged in at 100% capacity at all times, this accelerates chemical aging and degrades the battery’s capacity faster. Today’s cell phones have protections built in to prevent this, but we’ve all had past phones with rapidly declining battery capacity.

I don’t think we’re much different. The more we stay plugged in to our phones, these lighted screens in front of our eyeballs, we drain our capacity. To function, to succeed, to get through the day with enough energy to survive. I’ve been raising 3 kids for 13 years now, and it’s utterly exhausting. I falsely believed that the solution or at least minor relief to my exhaustion during or at the end of the day was to relax and look at my phone for a while, but now that I’m doing that much much less and instead finding other things to fill my time, I am less exhausted. I feel more capable. My capacity seems to have increased.

The more I unplug, the more I’m recharged.

More than anything, I’m allowing myself to be alone with my thoughts more. Heaven knows there’s nothing wrong with listening to a good book or music or podcast, and I generally still do that quite a bit. But more often than not nowadays, it’s just me and my brain. Doing the dishes. Making dinner. Mowing the lawn. Cleaning the garage. Playing with my kids. All without the distraction and buzzing of a phone in my pocket.

I don’t have studies and I don’t have science or facts, but I’m pretty sure that sitting on the toilet without a phone not only enhances pooping efficiency, but also enhances brain stimulation and activity, lowers your water and electric bills, saves the whales, cures cancer, and slows climate change.

I’m still in my experimental phase of this lifestyle change and it’s safe to say that thus far, I think the experiment is going well.

LOST: The Best TV Show Ever

“While I enjoy being entertained as much as the next person, I would much rather be challenged. Yes, show me something I’ve never seen before, but also cause me to think about something I’ve never thought of before.”

Lost is hands down the best TV show to ever air on television.

When Season 1 of Lost aired on ABC in 2004, I was unaware of its existence. In fact, I was not aware of this show until 2007, well into Season 3. Now I have somewhat of an excuse. From 2005–2007 I was out of the country and otherwise preoccupied. I didn’t have a phone. Streaming wasn’t a thing. There was just no way for me to know that the best show ever made was being broadcast to 17–19 million viewers on American television every week.

Now to be fair, up until 2007, I barely watched any TV shows at all. TV shows to me were shows like Full House, Family Matters, Fresh Prince, Friends, and Seinfeld. Those last 2 I never really even watched, I was just aware of their existence due to their popularity. I was a teenager in those days and our family just didn’t watch a lot of TV shows.

However, once I was in college in 2007, I began to explore to the world of television as I’d never known it before. Now back in those days, you either bought the DVD’s (which I didn’t have the money to do) or figured out a way to watch it for free online. Hulu was barely a thing, along with a few other random websites, but mostly I watched TV shows on my laptop by going to the networks webpage and figuring out where to download the latest episode. If I was lucky, I would find someone who had actual cable TV somehow, and my friends and I would go watch it live as it aired. But that wasn’t the norm in a college town where most people could barely afford life, let alone TV.

I became invested in Lost because (and this is important) people were talking about it. It was the kind of show my friends constantly talked about. Watching the show was great, but talking about the show added another layer of excitement and intrigue. After hearing my friends talk about Lost and not understanding what they were talking about, I finally borrowed the DVD’s of seasons 1 and 2 from a friend and binged.

I was hooked.

Here are some things that make Lost the best TV show ever:

Large Cast

Lost has the biggest cast I’ve ever seen for a TV show. It’s an enormous undertaking. There just isn’t anything else out there like it. Having a large cast like this is a challenge because the question is, how do you give all these amazing actors enough screen time to showcase their character and venture through their character arc? 

Characters like:

Jack- A troubled but duty-bound tattooed doctor and reluctant leader with major daddy issues.

Kate- An escaped convict on the run, constantly torn in a love triangle between the hot doc and the sexy conman. Also some major step-daddy issues.

John Locke- A lowly manager at a box company with untapped potential as a knife weilding natural born leader, destined for life on the island. Oh yeah and, you got it, some major daddy issues.

Sawyer- Criminal that became an expert conman. Wishes he had a daddy.

Sayid- A soldier from Iraq, tortured by his torturing past of torturing people, including his late tortured wife, whom he also tortured.

Sun- Rich Korean woman in a strained and basically abusive marriage relationship. She may or may not secretly speak english. Mild daddy issues.

Jin- Lowly Korean fisherman causing the strain and abuse in his marriage relationship, due to his overbearing father-in-law who disapproved of the marriage to his daughter, until he realized Jin doesn’t mind beating people up for him.

Charlie- Merry from Lord of the Rings, but on drugs and in a rock band.

Claire- Expectant mother with a hot Australian accent. Falls in love with druggie rock band guy.

Hurley- Comic relief and everyone’s favorite character. Also uber rich cuz he won the lottery. Oh yeah and he’s crazy.

Desmond- Scottish crazy guy who lives in a hatch and presses a button to save the world.

Ben- Mr. Manipulative and winner of the yearly creepy stare contest.

Ok, some of those descriptions might not be helpful, and I could list about 20 more characters that are essential to the story, but you get the idea. It’s a lot of people!

How do you write for each character and involve them in the story in a way that’s interesting, engaging, and furthers the plot? Not that I have a lot of experience doing this myself, but the few small scripts that I have written involving a lot of characters becomes a tedious task of balance and boredom. Lost handles the large cast using a formula that not only executes this balance perfectly, but also keeps the audience engaged and caring about each of these characters. And this brings me to…

Flashbacks

While much of the story of Lost occurs while these characters are stranded on an island, nearly half of every episode is dedicated to a specific character and dives deep into their background through the use of flashbacks. The way Lost uses these flashbacks is very engaging.

They tell a deeper story of who this stranded island stranger is and why they are the way they are. It gives some much needed context into choices they make while on this mysterious island. But most importantly, it allows us, the audience, to fall in love with every character. We get to spend a significant amount of time with them. We get to understand them. Often times we’re surprised or even horrified at their mistakes of the past, and we admire the changes in their stressful and dire present situation. 

It was always exciting to see into which featured character we would dive that week. What questions would they answer? What would be revealed from their past? 

I’ll give an example: Hugo Reyes, AKA Hurley. He’s a happy go-lucky heavy set character that we immediately fall in love with. He is hilarious, good natured, and kind as he tries to be helpful with everyone. But he carries a deep secret. We find out through the use of flashbacks that he not only spent time in a mental institution, having regular hallucinations of people that weren’t there, but he also actually won the lottery a few years before boarding Flight 815, using mysterious numbers he overheard on the radio while institutionalized. From that time until the plane crashed on the island, he felt that the money he won was cursed. Everything started to go wrong for him, to the point that he didn’t want the cursed lottery money anymore. He also felt that because he was “cursed” that he was somehow responsible for the plane crashing on the island. He kept this information to himself for the most part, took everything in stride, and sought a new life on this island away from his cursed money. This added a lot of depth to his character.

Another example is the character of John Locke. His survival instincts and hunting abilities, along with his many knives, contribute extensively to the survivors on the island as he helps forage for food and fight off unknown island predators. However, we discover (spoiler alert!) through the use of flashbacks that up until flight 815 crashed, John Locke was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. 

I could go on and on about each individual character, but suffice it to say that if it weren’t f0r flashbacks for each of its many main characters, Lost would be a completely different show. Also a terrible one.

Mystery and Theories

Lost is full of mystery. Every episode seems to incite more questions than answers. You’re constantly wondering what in the world is going on. But not to the level of frustration or hopelessness that might cause you to be overwhelmed loose interest. It’s a great balance. It answers just enough questions to keep us engaged and guessing.

Here is where a show like Lost starts to shine. Like I said above, I first heard about lost not because I was in a room where somebody was watching it, but because my friends would constantly talk about it. Everyone would come up with their own theories about what they thought was going on. Then we would share these theories with each other and discuss. Lost gave a lot of wiggle room for questions and refused to answer many of them. Questions like:

What are the numbers?

Who are the Others?

What is the monster?

What’s wrong with Walt?

What’s the voice on the radio?

Who is Jacob?

And those are mostly just a few of the questions from season 1. And some of those answers don’t come until later seasons. That’s a lot of time to theorize and discuss. 

As the show was airing, I often heard people complain about the amount of mystery or questions that weren’t being answered. I would read blog posts about people getting tired of all the craziness going on on this island and how it was becoming too much. 

Not for me. I don’t need all my questions answered. I like a little bit of ambiguity. I like things being left open to interpretation. I think the writers intentionally left some things up to us, the audience, allowing us to become a part of the experience.

The Experience

Lost wasn’t just a show, it was an EXPERIENCE. A PHENOMENON. Shows like this are few and far between.

Every week I was desperate to find out what happened next! I wanted to be the first to watch. I wanted to see if my predictions came through, if my theories were correct, if my questions were answered. Waiting an entire week was too long! I would re-watch episodes to see if I missed any hints or clues to what was coming next. It was intoxicating! 

And what a fantastic premise! Take a bunch of people, strangers, with all sorts of different backgrounds and experiences, put them together on a crazy island in the middle of nowhere, and force them to not only get along and survive, but also deal with intense emotional, natural, and even supernatural events together. Their pasts are eliminated. They get to start over. Friendships form. Relationships even. People fight. People die.

But most importantly, people CHANGE.

Change

Lost takes us through the experience of watching people change. I’ll give the best example of perhaps my favorite character of the show and how he changes. 

James Ford AKA Sawyer. Seasons 1 and 2, I hated him. He’s a bad person. A criminal. Through flashbacks, we find out he went on a quest for revenge for the man who conned his parents out of all their money resulting in the death of his parents as a small boy. This quest turned him into a conman himself, and eventually a killer of an innocent man. Shortly after, he boards flight 815, the plane crashes, and now this grungy, rude, inappropriate and unpleasant conman is forced to survive with this group of strangers. He hates everyone, but he does make up rude (and often hilarious) nicknames for everybody, the only silver lining in the otherwise upsetting character of Sawyer.

However, as seasons 3, 4, and 5 of Lost slowly unravel, we start to notice some change in Sawyer. He starts to make friends. He starts to contribute. He starts to help people. He becomes less selfish. He even builds close personal relationships with several characters, and by the end of season 5, Sawyer is everybody’s favorite character. He’s a completely different person. Sure he has similar mannerisms and hilarious nick-naming habits, and he’s still often quite grumpy, but we love him. He contributes, he helps, he’s kind, he pursues successfully a loving relationship, and he creates a pretty good life for himself.

I could give similar stories for each individual character. They all slowly change. So slightly sometimes we don’t even realize it’s happening until we find ourselves rooting for the guy we once despised. Or hoping for the demise of a person we once admired. And everywhere in between.

The Ending

If you google “Lost ending” you’ll probably find that a lot people did not like how the show ended. And while season 6 (the final season) is not my favorite season (that would be season 5!), I think the show ended beautifully. 

I think the writers of Lost understood something that most TV shows don’t understand:

You don’t have to answer all of the questions.

One of the main reasons that people were upset with the ending of Lost was all of the unanswered questions. Or questions that seemed to be halfway answered, like the writers ran out of ideas. But I don’t think this is what happened.

I think we live in this entertainment world where we want something new and different, we expect to be entertained completely, and demand that it all end in a mind-blowing utterly satisfying way. Anything less than that deserves to be criticized. To me, this thought process is a little narrow-minded and disingenuous.

While I enjoy being entertained as much as the next person, I would much rather be challenged. Yes, show me something I’ve never seen before, but also cause me to think about something I’ve never thought of before. Trust me, your audience. Invite me into your world, explain how your world works, and let me be a part of the experience, not just be entertained by it. Let me escape into the creative recesses of your story and (much like real life) DON’T give me all the answers. Let me come to my own conclusions and allow room for my own interpretations. Who cares if I’m right or wrong, it’s just a story. Let that story enlighten our minds beyond the ever diluted dopamine craved shallow forefront of our creative consciousness. Let the message penetrate deeper so that we feel moved, encouraged, and maybe even inspired, to not only explore these ideas on our own and in our own way, but also to expand on them and share them with the world, whether it’s a song, a movie, or a lowly blog post on the internet about a TV show from 20 years ago.

The large cast. The flashbacks. The mystery. The theories. The experience. The change. All managed with care, passion, and intrigue. I wouldn’t go as far to say it’s a perfect show (that declaration belongs to “Breaking Bad”) but something doesn’t need to be perfect to be the best. Everything needs a little imperfection.

Needless to say, in my opinion, Lost is the best TV show ever. There are many shows that come close, and many more I have yet to see for myself, but so far nobody has quite surpassed what Lost was able to accomplish.

If you missed the hype when it came out, and never gave Lost a chance, trust me, it’s worth it. If you’re too young or have no idea what show I’m talking about, go look it up and give it a try. It’s better than most shows streaming today anyways. 

Or if you’re like me, and you’ve already seen the entire series several times but it’s been a little while, consider watching it again.

Go back to the island.

Namaste.