Turning off

I’ve had a really amazing fortnight.

I got married to the best woman in the world [1. MUCH more on that to come.] , I had the perfect stag weekend and this weekend I have a party with all my favourite people in the world.

Over the past fortnight, for about 80% of my time, the tools I use most to connect with my friends have been redundant. Often because I’ve been lucky enough to have my friends with me, but also because deepest Suffolk doesn’t possess the best mobile Internet coverage.

This got me thinking about how I use the web, and whether or not it’s actually healthy.

Brian Lam:

It’s the perfect time, with this abundance of pages to read and videos to watch, to consider Clay Johnson’s book, The Information Diet. In his words, the book is about “How the new, information-abundant society is suffering consequences from poor information consumption habits” The book also outlines a plan for metering the kinds of content that we consume, as we do with food diets that need to be balanced between junk food and healthier food that initially taste worse but will make us healthier and happier. (For every milkshake, I average out a glass of green kale juice.)

I can recommend reading Brian’s post in full, and also purchasing Clay’s book, which I’m just in the process of reading. Both are very powerful.

Spending so much time with my family and with my friends makes me feel even more committed to use the fantastic tool that is the web to create things that will enhance my relationships with them, to make (real) new friendships and to learn; deeply and properly.