Note: This entry starts day 1 of 15 consecutive days I intend to practice a tiny experiment, sharing how I am trying to learn how to help parents and educators with their kids video game obsessions.

5:39AM

I just woke up, grabbed my cup of bullet coffee (two “pats” of butter - why is a small quantity of butter called a pat? and not a blob, or a bill, or a slice? - well that and one tablespoon of MCT oil, and french roast coffee.) Then I sit down at the kitchen table to start my morning routine. The kitchen window is open, and the birds are a riot of joy outside. Chirping, hooting, tweeting, and singing. It is social hour in the Novis neighborhood for the avian folk. I love the trill of life and the cool air. Better enjoy it, the heat is coming soon. It always does, but at 5:30AM the sun is just up and the day has begun with a gentle fresh breeze.

My half of the kitchen table is a mess. That’s my mind externalized. I cleaned it up last night, but I have my iPhone, portable keyboard, four fountain pens (two black, two blue - sometimes there are more colors like green, red, and yellow), a bible, AirPods, and my morning pages journal. Strangley there is a business card from SportsClips with the name Marcia on it. I wonder why they give these out. I never see the same stylist twice. Partly because I don’t really care who cuts my hair (I’ve had the same “do” for decades and it’s simple), but partly because they never stay. It’s always a new crew there. The steady turnover at these places is remarkable. Why waste the time and cost of giving them business cards?

On second thought, looking at the kitchen table, this is not so bad. Yesterday my cartoon drawing kit was out here and bunch more keyboards. For me, keyboards like pens are an obsession. If I can find the perfect pen/keyboard/notebook/device I can write the perfect story… or so the distorted thinking goes. On a “good day” I can cover every inch of my half of the table with piles of papers, journals, pens and electronics. Today I can actually see the placemat and the kitchen - what do you call it? cloth? cover? Let the caffein set in, it will come to me.

So, usually I begin the day with several steps.

  1. Open Obsidian on my phone and make sure it has the Daily Note populated.
  2. Glance at my Habits list, and then start working my way through the top three “chains”

The list looks like this:

Habits

  • Daily Devotional
  • Readwise Review
  • Bible Study
  • Write
  • Yoga
  • Exercise
  • Walk
  • YNAB
  • Meditate

I don’t know why Daily Devotional is first and Readwise second because I always start with Readwise. It has my current longest streak. 450 days. Readwise (from readwise.io) is how I get my book highlights from my kindle to Obsidian (my digital second brain). Every morning it surfaces six quotes. I often copy a few of those quotes and paste them into my Daily Note. Spaced repetition and connection to relevant information is a great way to enhance learning. Or so the theory goes. Seems to work for me. But it is only part of how I learn.

You may notice there is both Bible Study and a Daily Devotional. The Daily Devotional is really my reading streak on Kindle. Every year I pick one or two books that I can read a page a day. One of my all time favorites is [[The Daily Stoic]] by [[Ryan Holiday]]. But past books have included, [[The Intellectual Devotional]], [[A Calendar of Wisdom]], and sometimes I will take a book that is just very hard to read and chip away at it over a year. Such as [[Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain]]. This year I have two, [[Jesus Calling]] by [[Sarah Young]] and [[The Daily Laws]] by [[Robert Greene]]. Bible Study is really about reconnecting directly with my faith through reading the Bible - I have read a lot of the “good book” but not all of it. For this, I usually go to the App Our Daily Bread where I pick up a passage for the day and a short story. I like this for two reasons. The obvious one is that it connects me with my own religious heritage and upbringing - my family was “loosely” Presbyterian. And second, they tell stories in five sentences or less every single day. I find that fascinating.

So there, I read to start the morning, then usually comes the writing. The Morning Pages. Started by [[Julia Cameron]], I have modified my morning pages to be 2 pages (instead of three), making it easier for me to find a notebook that is thin enough to travel with me. Twelve weeks of three pages a day at 8.5"x11" paper is a thick notebook. But this is my best chance of the day to use my fountain pens. I rotate them every day, so I get a chance to use some small part of my collection (horde - if you curate it’s a collection. If you keep your stuff in an unwieldy pile, you horde - I do a little of both. The very best pens make it to the kitchen table. The rest sit in display cases or cookie tins - waiting to be sold some day on ebay.) I tell myself a lot of stories about the things I’m going to do. For some reason I find that easier than dealing with the reality that 1. I have wasted money, and 2. I am never really going to do that, and 3. I should probably clean up my mess and let this stuff go.

Did I mention I have ADHD? Well, I’m not hyper, so I like to think of it as Attention Deficit Disorder instead of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. And according to [[Gabor Maté]], it’s not really a disorder, it’s more of a deficiency, like if you are not strong, we don’t say you have strength deficiency disorder. I think the word disorder for ADD folk like me is more literal, as in we struggle to achieve order, so it’s short had for “our attention deficit produces disorder.”. I never use the term Neurodivergent to describe myself. That to me doesn’t really help anyone know who they are dealing with, including myself. Hey, I am this hard to understand unspecified thing! Good luck. No, if I share that I have ADD people get it. And it reminds me to use systems to constrain some of my less charming habits. However, I also recognize that with that “big beautiful brain” of mine, comes some gifts, like creativity, energy, and some serious focus when I’m chasing thought rabbits down dark and twisty holes.

When I am done with my daily reading (and keeping my three streaks alive), I will then engage in a variety of other dialy-ish habits, such as walking around the block while listening to an audio book, or doing yoga (I need to get better at this), meditating (again, could do with some improvement), using ynab.com (You Need a Budget) to keep my finances from going off the rails. I can’t have my bank accounts looking like the kitchen table. And yes, while walking is technically exercise, there is some strength training that will help extend my health span. According to [[Peter Attia MD|Peter Attia]] author of [[library/Outlive|Outlive]], maintaining your strength is a good way to stay healthy longer. For example “grip strength”, your ability to hold your own wait or carry weights is unexpected highly correlated with longer healthy life spans. Why? Because the theory goes, you can catch yourself if you start to fall. Breaking a hip is nearly a death sentence. The mortality rates skyrocket after a hip break and many are dead within 10 years. Plus, my Uncle Tom passed away in a fashion I do not want to replicate. Put another way, I’m not going out like that. I want healthy bonus years, not artificially protracted medically induced suffering in the name of staving off death at all costs.

Don’t want to die. Don’t want to suffer while I wait to die. Let’s keep this life as healthy and energizing as possible for as long as reasonably possible. That’s the plan.

So, a day starts with:

  • Deliberately taking in content and ideas I find interesting, spiritual, and reflecting.
  • Moving my body to keep it healthy.

You may (or may not) notice, that what is missing is a few things many people do when they first wake up. What I don’t do is

  1. Check social media (Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, TikTok, X)
  2. The news (Ground News, Wall Street Journal, Apple News)
  3. Email (Seriously I postpone this as long as possible.)
  4. Messages (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger)
  5. Watch any video (TV, YouTube, TikTok, etc)

The one exception is texts. Texts sit at the top of my communication hierarchy. I now have a family extended by love that includes four Gen-Z kids and talking on the phone is a rare and special occurance for me, a torture for them. But texting is how we all stay in touch. So those get a special pass. Hearing from people I love fits my above criteria to only ingest healthy, loving, interesting, stimulating, positive content first thing in the morning. The outrage porn factories can wait. They get enough of my mindshare as the day goes on - much more than they deserve.

This is how I start my day, and since this tiny experiment is about how I learn, and I started this blog post to focus on questions, I haven’t gotten to the important part, what exactly is it that I am trying to learn? Well, I’m going to save that for tomorrow. This post is already extremely long, but it gives you a glimpse into how I deliberately, and intentionally set about my day. The great thing about a morning routine is that my morning always starts the same (so far). I wake up. And I nearly always wake up at the same hour of the day - between 5am and 6am (that’s why I hear the bird song every morning, the hour after sunrise is peak song time in the Novis neighborhood.). This lets me begin my sequence with a surprising amount of consistency for someone with ADD. Evening routines are much harder because my days rarely end exactly the same way leading up to sleep. The trigger to do an evening routine is just not as consistent.

But, it is within this context, of deliberately trying to learn, and improve myself in small quantities daily that I will try to tackle a few big questions. These are:

The Big Questions

  1. How can I become a better story teller?
  2. How can I reach parents to help them with their childs video game addictions (or avoid it all together without giving up on video games completely.)
  3. How can I help the hundreds of thousands of young men who have failed to launch and become lost in video games (what the Japanese call Hikikomori, and Europeans called NEET - Not Employed, in Education, or Training).
  4. How can I connect with other people trying to push back against how some big tech companies are stealing young kids attention to fuel their business model and leaving anxious, isolated, depressed, suicidal husks of humans in their wake?
  5. How do parents think about, talk about, and experience these problems?
  6. How do educators experience, talk about, and think about these problems?

Story telling is top of the list, because humans respond better to stories than facts, logic, and reasoning. (I have spent years trying to understand why and I think I have a handle on that.). And when I can see the problem through the eyes of the person I am trying to help, it makes it easier for me to come along side them and give them useful tips and tools to help them solve their problems.

Okay, good start. It’s not perfect, but it’s a snapshot of how I think, how I work, and what I am trying to learn. And if you’ve read this, I hope I successfully painted a picture for you minds eye to visualize as you join me on this journey.