I’ve Been Using News as Entertainment

Overall, I’ve been quite successful in wiping out the vast majority of mindless entertainment that I used to consume. And with it, I’ve found that I have much more energy (and time) to be productive and also focus on things that I actually care about.

But one of the remaining forms is maybe a little surprising: the news.

When I’m bored and need a distraction, I just go to Google News and scroll through and pick a couple articles to read. It seems like a good thing, right? Keeping up-to-date on what’s happening in the world.

I think there are two problems with this:

  1. I’m using it just to distract myself and to be entertained (also way too frequently)
  2. I would argue it’s a terrible way to truly learn about the world and current events in a meaningful, impactful way

I could go on about the second point for ages and probably will (or have?) at some point, but the first point is still equally relevant and the moment. I’m not going to the news in order to fulfill a need to be informed: I’m going to be entertained.

And that’s the problem.

I think it’s a huge problem that we all have this need to be constantly entertained now, and I want to be very intentional about how I spend my time and especially how I consume entertainment.

This is not an important one to me, and I need to start taking measures to ensure I don’t do this anymore.

Emails Give Me a Nice Hit of Dopamine

I feel like I’ve been talking a lot about dopamine lately, but a thought I recently had was that going through emails seems to give me a nice hit of it.

Or, possibly more accurately: thinking about doing emails gives me the dopamine, and each time I move on to a new one, I get a little more.

And that’s part of why it has been one of the bedrocks of my productivity, I think. It’s not that hard for “going through emails” to compete with “messing around on my phone” because it triggers a similar neural pathway. Or something, I don’t know, I’m not a brain scientist.

I’ve discussed here in the past how my email habits are actually some of the most useful and consistent that I’ve developed. It does wonders for my productivity. I’m able to just blast through all emails without really needing any “willpower,” and it really isn’t very cognitively demanding.

I’m not totally sure why that is. Could it be that all established habits provide these same benefits?

Honestly, a life where I do everything productive with minimal effort and can coast through on “auto-pilot” for the difficult things sounds pretty good.

I guess I need to really start focusing on habits again in order to test this theory.

Am I Mentally Lazy?

I feel like I almost never use all of my brain power.

At any given moment, it seems like I’m only 20% committed mentally to whatever it is I’m doing. As a result, I think that things tend to be done poorly or very slowly.

Take, for instance, my flashcard studying. I study a huge variety of topics via flashcards everyday, most notably (and most time-consumingly) Spanish vocabulary.

On a typical day, it’s a grind. I can barely focus, and it feels like I’m not activating my whole brain to be able to recall words and their meanings.

I know that I’m not using everything because every so often, I will be fully committed. I’ll just feel like I’m totally dialed-in, and I’m remembering everything perfectly and it just flies by.

But that’s not the norm.

And it applies to other areas, too.

Whether I’m working, or playing the guitar, or even writing a blog post, it sort of feels like I’m just barely there all the time.

Now, I’ve discussed in multiple blog posts (here and here; both private, sorry everyone else!) how I tend to hoard my attention span and use it very selectively. I think this is sort of the same thing.

Using brain power is exhausting, and it may be quite limited. So maybe I just hoard it all the time and that’s all that’s happening.

But I don’t think that’s the full story.

I’m pretty sure dopamine plays a big role. Try as I might, I often find myself constantly giving in to some form of technology addiction. Recently it has been YouTube videos and shorts.

It’s well-documented that these types of things (including and especially Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others) give you constant hits of dopamine. While the amount of dopamine in your brain doesn’t necessarily change, your sensitivity to it does.

And if dopamine is no longer effectively getting me to do things or concentrate, the end result will be that I never fully can.

I also have more evidence about this in my own life. I recently spent 8 days hiking in Patagonia, and during that time I didn’t have any internet access. No internet meant no social media or mindless distractions.

And by the end of it, I was amazed at a number of things. One was that hearing music or other forms of entertainment was mesmerizing. It immediately captured my attention and I loved it.

And overall I definitely feel like I could concentrate better and generally felt better.

So that’s all the evidence I really need. I need to focus hard on avoiding all forms of mindless distractions and will see where that gets me.

To start, I’m removing the shortcut to YouTube from my phone.

 

My Buying Power has a Massive Influence on how I Feel About a Place

In the last couple days I’ve discovered the existence of the “Blue Dollar”: a euphemism for the not-so-underground black market for US dollars here in Argentina. Due to government restrictions, the official exchange rate is kept low while a parallel market tracks closer to the true value.

If you have US currency, you can exchange it for pesos at the black market rate, which currently is more than double the official rate.

So what does this mean for me?

My buying power more than doubled overnight.

Things that previously seemed moderately priced or even a tad expensive are now very affordable. Things that were already cheap… Are basically free.

I can now get a decent bottle of Malbec for $1.50 USD. Unreal.

The really interesting thing, for me, didn’t occur until after I began walking away from Western Union with a massive stack of cash in my pack. I started thinking about all the things I could do now that I didn’t need to worry about the cost. A whole new world of opportunity was available to me, guilt-free.

Immediately I felt considerably more excited about the city and my general feelings towards it improved dramatically.

Don’t get me wrong: I already liked the city quite a bit. But where there was once a mindset of thrift and having to hold back in a lot of ways, there is now only opportunity. And that mindset shift is huge.

I thought back to some of my favorite cities and places in the world, and realized that a huge contributing factor (sometimes perhaps the main factor) was simply how affordable they were.

Cheap and great tacos in Mexico, cheap drinks at my favorite college bars, cheap… Everything in Colombia. When you don’t have to worry about what you’re spending, you simply have a better time.

And then I thought a little more.

As long as things are affordable to me, I could feel this way anywhere.

If I was making $500,000/year, I wouldn’t think twice about a $30 cocktail. Just about any restaurant or bar in the world would be so affordable to me that I could just go and have a great time without worrying about the cost at all.

This all just sort of taught me that “cheap” and “expensive” are relative, and more importantly: that things are a lot more enjoyable if you can afford them without any issues.