#55: Take back your life by reinventing your relationship with your phone (Tim Kendall)

When Tim Kendall was president of Pinterest he’d come home from a long day at work and notice he was sneaking off to the pantry to look at his Instagram feed. Even when his two kids, 2 and 3, were excited to see him! “Facebook has a profile on me and understands timing that will maximize my time spent there,” he tells Lesley Jane Seymour, founder of CoveyClub.com. “They hold messages at bay. The pings and emails are carefully crafted and precisely timed to send to you.” He also noticed: suicide rates among teens up 30%, up 40% for females. He bought the app called Moment (https://inthemoment.io/) and created courses and programs to wean ourselves off our digital addiction. “We’ve duped ourselves that services like Twitter and Facebook will bring us connection. It does the opposite. It’s shallow and frivolous, not the high sustenance relational communications human beings need,” Kendall says.  “People do feel lonely; it’s fake sugar.”

For extra insight, Kendall recommends reading: “How to Break up With Your Phone” by Kathryn Price (https://amzn.to/2JqHxLq) and Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism” (https://amzn.to/2HazuAP).