Introduction part 7 – Living your extra life the way you want
This post is part of the introduction series. If not read already, I recommend to start with the Introduction part 1
In the previous chapter of the introduction, Introduction part 6 – Extra Life Under Control, I suggest that you might want to free up some of your time by using software and services that care about your privacy and don’t have their business model based on making you addicted to an app, service or game, in order to gather as much as data as possible on your interests, contacts, habits, health, financial situation and other aspect of your life. Do you remember at lest 5% of what you have read or seen on Facebook/Instragram/Snap/TikTok/Twitter/Reddit (choose your drugs) only one day later after scrolling it for hours? In a future post I will tell your in detail why I quite Facebook and deleted completely my account years ago, then stopped using any Facebook related service, including WhatsApp, never used Instagram, Snap nor TikTok and reduced, only recently, my Reddit and Twitter consumption by more than 90%, without much effort or sensation of missing something that might happen. If you are less addicted you should end up using your smartphone and computer mostly for things that are useful, educating or some quality entertainment and many time leave your phone on a shelf board or at least a few meters away while you are doing something else. Don’t get me wrong, my smartphone and computer are wonderful tools that I love and use daily, I would not switch the smartphone off for most of the day and never switch off internet at home (otherwise this website would be offline), but they are tools that I use only when necessary and try to avoid being interrupted by them while I’m doing something else. You don’t need to cut the cord to feel the benefit, just do some tweak and improvements to reduce useless attention and disturbance from them and you will feel a real improvement without missing anything and without wanting to come back again to endless scroll any feed.
Digital life is not my whole life
Life cannot be summed up at what you do with a smartphone or computer. There are other aspects of our life that we can improve in order to free some time and money for activities that we care the most. Are you always saying that you should spend more time with your family, traveling, live your passions, make more exercise, start your own business or just chill off, maybe a little bit of all of this, but your don’t have more time. You would like to spend less time working to earn money that just pay your bill, less time to tidy up and clean your home, less time to commute between your work, home and activities, but what can we do, we have to work to pay bill, tidy up to keep your home habitable, drive or take public transport to go to work or other places you need to be. What if you could spend less money? Easy, you spend less you save more and at some point you can start working less, so less time commuting to work. While you spend less, you accumulate less objects and maybe start to get rid of everything you don’t really need in your home, it will then be tidier with much less thing to put back in place and much less storage furniture and boxes, ending up with more space to live and eventually needing less space to live the same way, so you can save money by moving to a smaller apartment or house.
Before I continue on the topic, there is a long story why I end up thinking about improving my money spend and more importantly my time spend on earth. It started with a FIRE that didn’t catch.
