I've become known amongst my friends for giving the same advice when it comes to most problems: "Uninstall Twitter and start going on walks."
I don't think it's only useful for intellectual pursuits: we rarely get enough alone time nowadays. And when we do, we're bombarded with stimulation and noise. There's no good opportunity to be alone with ourselves. Walking in a safe, familiar place without my phone has become one of my most important and cherished daily rituals -- I see it as an emotional cleansing.
I think it's a balance. For "emotional gardening" as I call it, disconnecting from tech / anti-social media and taking a walk is great. But if you still want to assess present reality and make good judgments about the future (or even just have some novel thing to talk about), these tools can still be great for absorbing information context.
I like the Digital Wellbeing app on Android. Set a daily timer for app usage and then it gets blocked once you're over the timer.
> I think it's a balance. For "emotional gardening" as I call it, disconnecting from tech / anti-social media and taking a walk is great. But if you still want to assess present reality and make good judgments about the future (or even just have some novel thing to talk about), these tools can still be great for absorbing information context.
I don't think Xitter is a good tool for assessing present reality and making good judgments about the future, either. (Actually, I took you to mean "directly obtain accurate information about the world and act on it," but maybe you meant "find out the worst of what people are currently doing and be prepared.")
Agree; at the root, I think it’s a misconception that being informed is better than being uninformed. We know too much about current events and we have far too little context for it; and our idea of being informed about the state of the world (which requires, I think, intake of context in vast excess to content) has been replaced with having an opinion about everything in it, or really, someone else’s opinion on it.
I don't think it's only useful for intellectual pursuits: we rarely get enough alone time nowadays. And when we do, we're bombarded with stimulation and noise. There's no good opportunity to be alone with ourselves. Walking in a safe, familiar place without my phone has become one of my most important and cherished daily rituals -- I see it as an emotional cleansing.