Tag: mindfulness (page 1 of 1)

View from behind a small tan-and-white terrier with tall, alert ears, looking out over a sunlit patch of green grass with tree shadows falling across the lawn.
September 2, 2026 / 1 Comment

See You Outside?

Last night, I sat in the gym for several minutes after my elliptical run, scrolling Threads in my phone’s web browser. I clicked like on fan art and memes about the latest episode of the HBO series Lanterns and news of first-round wins of some of my favorite players in this year’s US Open alongside a smattering of other Women’s Sports news and conjecture. What I was interacting with wasn’t the problem. These are all things I enjoy and am actively invested in. Very few empty calories in this session. The problem is that it shouldn’t have been happening at all.

A few weeks ago, I removed all the social media apps except for Instagram from my phone. No Threads. No Facebook. No Bluesky. No LinkedIn. Instagram is hidden and requires my face to unlock it. The impetus was realizing that idle scrolling sessions were getting longer. They were keeping me from falling asleep at night or getting out of bed in the morning. The meaningful stuff—women’s sports, TV & film discussions or industry news, Los Angeles news & culture, interesting reads, communicating with friends and acquaintances—were shifting to shocking or stupid videos, rage bait, or digital ephemera that was intended to keep my attention but not ignite my mind or heart.

And still, here I was in the terrible browser experience of my preferred social media timeline, and it keeps cajoling me to reinstall the app. I haven’t succumbed. Yet.

Jenny Odell, whose writing on this topic has long been a critical resource for my attempts at avoiding the brain-rotting effects of modern digital society, recently suggested on the How to Touch Grass podcast that one approach is to take an “outsider’s perspective” to our relationship with our phones and apps before attempting to change anything. Examine how what you’re doing in these spaces makes you feel, like a scientist observing a subject, without judgment, and then treat the findings as an experiment.

She describes digital habits as grooves formed geologically over time, which is why cold-turkey attempts fail. Social pressure and muscle memory pull us back. This is exactly how I ended up fumbling around threads.com in the Chrome mobile browser. Text mesages between me and Tiffany and our basketball friends are dotted with shares from Instagram and Bluesky and Threads and even though I know I can usually wait until I get back to a desktop experience to consume and enjoy the memes, jokes, and news, the thumb clicks because of course it does and now I’m looking at my notifications and here’s a good point about the latest episode of my favorite TV show and some stranger is wrong about the Los Angeles Sparks and there’s a random dashcam video of people doing stupid things on a freeway somewhere in America and what terrible thing did Pete Hegseth do now and, wait, where did the time go?!

I don’t want this on my phone, and I definitely don’t want to lose precious minutes of my life thoughtlessly while sweating post-workout in the middle of the gym or in the car for who knows how long after I’ve reached a destination.

Do I need a physical impediment to curb these habits, or can I figure out how to “stand apart” from the device on my own?

In Vauhini Vara’s Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age, she examines how tech companies have both fulfilled and exploited the human desire for understanding and connection by creating these experiences that we seem to find so useful and inescapable and then building so much wealth and power around them that it is nearly impossible to disentangle ourselves from them individually or as a society. 

While reading through her own spelunking into the deep crevices of her Google search history, Amazon shopping orders, and ChatGPT chat logs, I smugly thought to myself, well, I don’t use these things like that.

Lies.

I used Google Search over 2600 times in the last 12 months. I watched over 2400 videos and shorts on YouTube in the last three months. I’ve made only nine purchases via Amazon this year, but as I dug into these troves of data, I realized that what I do online is ultimately beside the point. What I know and what many people are coming to the realization of lately is that when I think about the most meaningful experiences of my life and days, they are hardly ever connected to something I experienced on a screen. When my father passed, I, of course, looked to my digital world to make sense of things and found it lacking. I was using an AI-powered journaling app called Dot at the time—it’s now defunct—and while I was initially impressed by its seeming insightfulness, I quickly found that a software program cannot express true empathy and understanding. When the things in your life that you most wish would not happen occur anyway, healing comes in the presence of other people. I walked through my grief with my friends as we hid in my mom’s sewing room during the repast, sipping Japanese whiskey and laughing through the tears. I gave shape to my loss by listening to my mother, sister, and others as they expressed his departure’s impact through their own words and actions. No chatbot could give me that.

Vara similarly and to great effect exposes how she used ChatGPT as a partner in writing an essay about the grief of losing her sister at a young age. The piece brought her great acclaim, but ultimately, she realized the parts ChatGPT “created” were memories that weren’t hers. Even if clever, it wasn’t real.

I’m hungry for real things. When I write in my journal about the things I want to remember from the day, it is rarely a meme, reel, or back-and-forth argument with strangers online. Life is about the other humans in it. Really in it. Life is the people you share a domicile with or a street with. Life happens for me when I talk with a neighbor as I walk to the grocery store. What I remember is meeting people and learning about their hopes and dreams. I also remember being in a sports venue, hugging, cheering, and celebrating with my fellow sports fans.

I also remember when a real friend or family member texts or calls, and we get involved and invested in each other.

Odell fills the time she might have previously spent scrolling her phone or staring at screens with enriching experiences outside of the house. Standing appointments in nature and the physical world. I’ve been thinking about that too. Many of my day-to-day activities and hobbies currently default to an app or a website. Maybe, though, it’s time I sought out learning Spanish in person with others instead of with Mango. Maybe I need more standing appointments to volunteer rather than my ad hoc approach now. Maybe when I’m bored, I go to the park or the coffee shop or call a friend or family member and have an impromptu hang. 

Like the old days.

Maybe I need a Brick.

See you outside?

P.S.

I originally intended to mimic Vara’s book and provide detailed examples of my digital activity (searches, purchases, YouTube videos), but that felt like too much navel-gazing and would’ve pushed me further down the digital rabbit hole, when I really want to be “out there” and not “in here.” My ego, though, is particularly proud of one aspect of my Google activity, so I’m going to share the words I’ve used the “define:” search function with over the last year. 

  • quartile 
  • disambiguation 
  • artifice 
  • fungible 
  • forthwith 
  • apprehend 
  • epistemic 
  • clarity 
  • loyalty 
  • totem 
  • anathema 
  • aegis 
  • quatrain 
  • heathen 
  • heretic

I tend to look up words when I want to be sure I’m using them correctly or when I want to get into the etymology (I just googled to make sure that was correct) of a word or phrase. 

January 6, 2025 / 1 Comment

Switch

What’s the most ethical way to listen to digital music?

By ethical, which major services pay the fairest royalty to artists and music rights owners on a per-play basis? Spotify has been the most prominent digital music provider for years, and they have used that position to pay less than their competitors. They also are increasingly doing what tech companies tend to do when they begin to dominate the industry they are disrupting: find ever more creative ways not to pay people.

The collective disappointment with this year’s Wrapped—including me—has sparked a drumbeat of social media users reminding us that there are services that treat artists better than Spotify and provide more value for their customers if higher audio quality is your thing. TIDAL, Apple Music, and Amazon Music can all make this claim.

An infographic explaining streaming royalty rates, including a bar chart that shows that Tidal pays out the best while Deezer pays the worst, and several factoids about the state of music industry revenue

credit: ProducerHive

I have requirements beyond the baseline of a good digital music service—catalog size, playlist diversity, personalization, and audio quality. The most important of which is relatively niche: integration with Last FM. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m a bit obsessive about capturing my listening data, and this year’s Spotify Wrapped hammered home the need to continue to have a solution independent of the digital streamers.

That requirement severely limits my options as few services natively integrate with last.fm anymore. I could make it work if I only listened to music via iTunes or a web browser. Still, I regularly switch between my laptop, my phone, and my tablet, and so, despite having access to all of the major services in some form via bundles I pay for, they won’t work for me in this case. [ed. Note—we’ll need to examine the value of these bundles in the future.]

It’s frustrating that this is the case, but I don’t mind shifting to TIDAL. I’ve used the service before. They pay the best per stream of all the major digital music providers. They have the highest quality audio. It should be a no-brainer, but I have used Spotify so much over the decade since the death of rdio that I have gotten used to the things they provide.

A Pay table with three columns—Streaming Platform, Royalty Rates (per stream), and Streams Required to make $1. It only requires 78 streams to make $1 from Tidal Music while it takes 314 to achieve the same on Spotify.

credit: ProducerHive

But I’m listening right now, and the music sounds excellent. The transition felt daunting initially, but playlist transfer was easy thanks to TuneMyMusic (though why they require a subscription is bewildering. This is a once-in-a-blue-moon use case. Charge me once or on a per-usage basis). Within a couple of hours, I started to find my way. TIDAL has human-curated playlists like New West Coast, Women of Hip-Hop, New Arrivals: Hip-Hop and R&B, Grown Rap, Real Love: Best New R&B, R&B Hits, and Pop&B that are fair proxies for the mostly ML-based recommendation playlists that I used on Spotify. As I listen to more music, the home page is refining and showing relevant playlists, artists, songs, and albums I will likely explore. 

My Tidal home feed has sections for Suggested new albums, recently updated curated playlists, user playlists I might like, and albums it thinks I might want to revisit.

After using TIDAL exclusively this weekend, personalized music mixes appeared on my home page feed this morning.

My Tidal home feed has sections for custom mixes, my favorite artists, recommended new music, and curated Essentials playlists from artists I might want to get to know better.

There were some mishaps. I lost some song scrobbles because I didn’t check if I had to sign in to Last.fm on every device where I am using TIDAL (I do). Track-level data cleanup will be an ongoing concern, but I learned that I can correct metadata mistakes from TIDAL’s scrobbles to Last.fm by editing a track at the scrobble level. The cool thing is that when I correct that data, Last.fm allows me to correct previous scrobbles and set it so future appearances of that track will be automatically updated to the proper naming conventions. What a revelation! For example, I was able to go back and update scrobbles from when Kendrick Lamar’s GNX first dropped—before the featured artists were included in the track name—and fix those so I have an accurate count of how many times I have listened to dodger blue (feat. wallie the sensei, siete7x, roddy ricch) and peekaboo (feat. AzChike).

Fewer algorithmic playlists mean more active and intentional listening, and intention is IN for 2025. I’m tired of being tricked by convenience into being passive in so many things in my life. I want my brain to make more choices about things that matter to me, like what I’m listening to and why. I want my values to be the driving factor in where and how I spend money and time. 

If you’re on TIDAL, you can find me here. 

Where do you listen?

Banner Photo by Kojo Kwarteng on Unsplash