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12 Things to Do Instead of Picking Up Your Phone
This is the year to de-center your smartphone
For the sake of yourself and your country, it is time to get off your phone.
Yes, I know you needed to see the latest inquiries into January 6th, the most recent QAnon theories, the debunking of those theories and then the debunking of the debunking. Then perhaps you’ll want to check in on the stalled Covid-19 vaccination effort and compare the US rate of infection with that of, say, Myanmar. And then poof, before you know it, the 2024 elections will be ramping up and you’ll need to scroll and scroll and scroll.
But what do we get for all this scrolling and what could we have done instead?According to online analytics company Chartbeat, Americans burned 173 million hours reading about Trump on their phones over the last four years — more than twice as much time as they spent reading about him on their laptops or desktops. Those same 173 million hours would have been enough time to clean all of our beaches of plastic debris, or tackle any of our myriad personal goals.
