Soundtrack: “Maenam” by Jami Sieber
When the clock chimed midnight on New Years’ Eve and the calendar switched to 2025, I sat down at my kitchen table and scribbled a list in my journal. Not of resolutions, not really, but of small reminders of how I hoped to live my life in the coming year, slivers of guidance for my future self.
I could feel the world spinning off its axis – the disruption of AI, the dismantling of once reliable institutions, the rise of global authoritarianism, the anti-human strain roiling through our culture, the enshittification of well…everything – and I knew I required a firm, peaceful path to walk on or I would be flung into space.
To start, I wrote: “Reclaim my humanity and my identity.” To end, “Keep kindling on the fire of hope.” In between, I offered more practical advice. Things like:
- Sleep more (at least 7 hours)
- Limit scrolling to two hours a day
- Limit news consumption to two hours per day – fact based reporting and not analysis
- Call your friends, call your family
- Read 30 minutes per day or more
- No phone before noon or while making dinner
After thirty or so bullet points, a few trends became clear. To create a tranquil mindset for myself, I would need to increase my creativity, engage my curiosity, place myself more actively in social situations and remove the distractions that could prevent all of the former.
On New Years’ Day, I set about making changes to help accommodate these goals.
I deleted every social media app from my cell phone, turned on black and white mode so the screen would be less appealing, then downloaded a minimalist operating system to add some friction and disincentivize its use. Wherever possible, I split important functions out of my phone and into distinct, dedicated tools. For example, I collected all of my contacts in a notebook, purchased a simple calculator for budgeting, started using my DSLR for photos and an actual alarm clock to wake up – allowing me to leave my phone in a totally different room while I slept.
All of these efforts were collectively designed to eliminate the biggest distraction in my life (and likely all of our lives): the addictive, dopamine blasting computer in my pocket.
Yet I knew that the peace I desired could not be found purely through subtraction. I would also need to build routines and foster an environment that encouraged my higher aspirations.
It seemed natural to start with my mornings. I hoped to avoid the kind of trendy, hyper-rigid morning routines that plague the internet. I’m familiar enough with my own limitations to know that once I create an elaborate box, I will inevitably try to break out of it. Still, it seemed prescient to fix some of my more unhelpful morning habits: like my tendency to groan and say “Fuck” as soon as I wake up, an indicator of the general anxiety I feel as a new day begins.
Perhaps I’m alone in this, but in the moments after I awaken, I am deeply self reflective (maybe even self-involved). It’s difficult not to be. I think about everything I need to accomplish that day, everything that happened the day before, all of my bodies needs, all of the fresh horrors that may have occurred in the world overnight and how they might effect me and my future (both immediate and long-term). These racing thoughts often fade quickly, but the feelings they leave behind – uneasiness, irritation, overwhelm – can linger and sour the mood of the day.
I knew I needed to find a way to get myself out of my own head.
To start, I would force myself to smile the instant my eyes opened in the morning. Some studies have shown that smiling – even when fake or insincere – can stimulate happiness. I’ve personally had some luck with this technique in the past and regardless of its impact, I knew it would be better than my usual mantra of growls and curse words.
The more crucial step was one I was initially hesitant to introduce: prayer.
I’m not an overtly religious person, though I was raised Catholic and have no particular beef with God. I’m more of an “I don’t know / It’s not possible to know” than a “Hell no”. Certainty on any side makes me uncomfortable. Regardless, I’ve always taken the core message of my faith – to love thy neighbor – extremely seriously. As young as three, I would pretend to be a priest and pass out M&M’s to my family members, declaring, “The body of Price” (I couldn’t quite pronounce the name). It was my way of celebrating that message and demonstrating love to others.
That was the key to breaking out of my morning dose of self-involvement: pushing past the self altogether to consider the needs of other people. I would offer them my thoughts and intentions, while supporting them in other, more physical ways if possible, always with the goal to break out of the cage of my own identity to experience compassion for the greater whole.
Routine prayer felt absolutely alien to me. If I attempted to return to a strictly religious form of worship, I imagine it would have been a failure from the start.
Instead, I built my own structure, focusing less on connecting with a literal divine figure than with connecting to a sort of divine humanity. I hoped that by spending a few minutes devoted to friends, family, even strangers each morning, I could remove the barriers between myself and other people, pushing past my own selfish needs to live outside my mind, develop my sense of empathy, offer private nudges to the universe and at least acknowledge and witness those suffering.
With prayer concluded, I would get dressed, brush my teeth, do all my other morning tasks, then head out to the kitchen to make tea.
I treated this process as one final ritual before starting my day. It was a moment of quiet, focusing intently on each step to hone my attention: boiling the water, choosing the right tea bag, waiting for the pleasant whistle before pouring the liquid into a mug, tipping in the sugar, watching the milk billow (my favorite part). In the winter months, I would stand at my apartment window and watch the birds in the snow as the kettle simmered on the stove.
The point of this exercise was to break out each task into its raw parts, only shifting focus when the previous step was complete. Never thinking of the past or the future. This simple act of tea-making cemented me in the present.
With a smile to brighten my mood, a prayer to take me out of myself and tea to ground me in the present, I would have the strength to implement my other more important goals.
And for a time, that’s exactly what I did. I read more books in January and February of 2025 than I had in the two years prior. I watched full length movies without any desire to pick up my phone. My social media consumption dropped well below an hour and a half per day. I met with friends I hadn’t seen in years. When possible, I tried to call them instead of text them. I wrote and wrote and wrote.
In my journal, I reported on my progress:
“What’s striking is how much I’ve regained in this process: attention, meaning, creativity, identity. It’s as if I have been meandering through a foggy forest and the mists have finally receded to reveal the trees, the underbrush, the flowers and a grove thriving with life…
Ideas wind through my mind like ducks on a river: smooth, effortless, ready to fly. I keep taking notes. Small kernels that could become something with a little love and sunlight. I feel free…
I can think again.”
The awakening I felt was profound, a reminder of what my life was like before everyone else’s thoughts were so easily accessible. It was like a spring cleaning for my soul.
But given the ambitious set of standards I was holding myself to, it’s no surprise that it only took a few months to start buckling under the weight.
One of the things I told myself when I began my experiment was that flexibility was going to be the key to success. These weren’t rules I was establishing, but guidelines. Rules would be too easy for me to want to break.
Yet flexibility can go too far. Habits fell by the wayside as new pressures developed: travel, work, family obligations and – to be honest – a general anxiety about the current state of affairs in the US and around the world. Beyond that, to achieve certain goals, others had to be de-prioritized. For example, by spending more time with friends, I would have less time to read and write. This was all a natural consequence of life’s ebbs and flows.
Regardless, much of the slippage was on me.
As the seasons changed and the temperature rose, hot tea became less appealing. On a long vacation with a friend, I stopped praying and never went back to it – even though it worked wonders for my spirit. I downloaded Reddit to participate in the conversation around a wrestling Pay-Per-View and never deleted it again, which led to a huge resurgence in screen time. Books sat on my coffee table unread. Weekly visits with friends ceased. My voracious need for news brought me back to a myriad of content creators and commentators on YouTube.
All of the creative energy I started the year with seemed to drain out of me, replaced once more by the anxious whirl of other people’s thoughts, feelings, opinions and dreaded hot takes.
I admit all of this not as a vessel for guilt or shame. I am human. Establishing new habits, breaking old ones, escaping the addictive nature of modern technology, all of these things are extremely difficult. But I do have agency and just as I stumbled, I can catch myself.
Consider this as an attempt to re-direct my energies back onto a path that brought me the moments of tranquility I require to keep myself grounded in the face of life’s chaos. My new routines brought me contentment, clarity and fulfillment, so it’s worth taking an accounting of what went wrong if I want to find my way back to that state of mind.
That brings us to today. In the last few weeks I’ve come to recognize just how far from the goalposts I have strayed. Slowly, I have tried to re-introduce the things that were working for me.
Reddit and Bluesky are off my phone once more. If I want to scroll, I have to do so on my laptop. I’ve introduced severe limits on Youtube (1 hour a day) to keep myself from falling down that rabbit hole as well. At dinner time, I’ve stopped listening to news reports and when I’m tempted, I blast punk rock instead. Forty-five minutes before bed is book time, no matter what, and I’ve already finished two this month. I try to make time for silence and boredom, to let my mind wander, at least a couple times per day.
I’m sure the tea will creep back onto the stove as the mornings get cooler. Yet I still haven’t brought myself to pray again. Perhaps that should be my next step. Perhaps not.
The truth is, I’m not striving for perfection with all this. I recognize that my thinking may seem meticulous, but the last thing I want is for my attempts at inner harmony to create inner discord. Too much structure, too much order will only wear me out. I will inevitably mess this up, relapse, avoid the challenging things that bring me the most joy. Because let’s face it, short-term pleasure is way fucking easier that disciplined satisfaction and the world today is built for short-term pleasure.
What matters is not that I find peace and stay in it in perpetuity. That’s impossible. Rather, I must accept that I am flawed, that peace is temporary at best, and that when I slip-up it’s not the end. I can always find my way back. And hopefully with practice, it will get easier each time.
Yours,
Rob the Protopian Punk
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