Lessons Learned From A Digital Fast

It's all about the gas tank.

Every day, you only have so much energy for thought, emotions, work and watching those really horrible daytime courtroom things on TV.

Stimulants like the Internet, politics, caffeine and dealing with flaccid Nazi progressives, but I repeat myself, use up that energy to no practical purpose. They are effectively entertainment.

My 7 day Digital Fast taught me that life was better without them. I could get just as much information by sampling them once in a great while, if at all.

Caffeine: By the end, I was down to 1 cup of coffee a day. The results were excellent. I had my cuppa in the morning and could be productive, but I didn't come home with chemical stress and anxiety from caffeine crashes. The last two days, I felt great driving home, something that was new to me. No kidding. I have a pretty great life right now and this little experiment showed me I was unhappy coming home because I was going through a caffeine crash.

Politics on the Internet: Curious about my 401K, I opened wsj.com this morning to see how things were going. On their front page was an article about Sean Hannity having ties to Argle Bargle. Golly! I'm sure that was important. It's all a bunch of high school gossiping. Yawn. I can definitely afford to tune in once every week or so. After day 2, I didn't feel much temptation to look at it.

Smartphone Games: I was seriously addicted to a brick breaker game on my phone when I started. It was one of the reasons I decided to try the Fast. I realized that it was just a space filler. I was desperately trying to fill every second of my life with stimulation, not realizing those stimulants were all draining fuel from me. I might play now and again, but I recognize them for the parasites they are.

Music: I still love it, but I love it now as a treat, not a constant companion. When I decide I've worked and thought enough, music is a nice way to force my brain to switch off. Now that I see it for the distraction that it is, I can find times when embracing that distraction is a good thing.

Social media: I don't miss Facebook or Twitter. Thanks to flaccid Nazi progressives making everything political*, there's a certain amount of anxiety to checking out relatively harmless Facebook. Even my religious Twitter feed can sometimes get polluted with politics. I refuse to surrender my time and energy to that.

Result: I feel GREAT! I started running again, too. I have a lot more energy and I'm not wasting nearly as much time on silly things. Coming home, I still have gas in the tank for wife kitteh. That's important.

I'm going to make a few changes here on the blog that I'll discuss later. For now, that's my lessons learned from the last seven days. I'm glad I did it.

* - Remember Mussolini's dictum: Everything inside of the State, nothing without. All of the marches and protests and politically-based mob actions on campuses and in the tech companies are Mussolini (and Peron and Obama and Sanders), straight up. The State is driven by politics and politics is arguing. The bigger the government becomes, the longer its reach through regulations, the more we'll be at each others' throats. Yay.