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Change Happens.

Published about 2 years ago • 2 min read

Hey everyone,

It's Jon. I'm writing to you from one of my favorite times of year. Everything is starting to turn green here in Austin and everyone is out and about.

Today I wanted to talk to you about change in our lives and especially the rate of that change. Over the last decade, things like technology have moved really fast. It's hard to even catch up at this rate (pun intended). Anyway, here's a snippet from my upcoming book "Enough." that I wanted to share with you.

Change Happens

One of the first lessons you learn in Calculus is about rate of change. You start to learn that although change might be a constant factor, the rate of change is usually not. I had learned about this early in high school and throughout college, but didn’t really realize how this affected the larger world we live in.

Consider the invention of the internet, before it, information traveled a bit slower and less reliably. They called it snail mail for a reason. But given the internet is now about 30 years old for the general public’s usage, let’s now consider our modern inventions of social media. Social media has information traveling even faster than ever. Posts are being shared to millions if not billions of people who now have access to the internet today.

In the last couple years alone more information has been shared than the 10 years before it. Even if you were on social media for 24 straight hours every single day, it’s impossible for you to keep up with the world as it never sleeps. Every minute there is 700,000 hours of YouTube being streamed, 65,000 photos being shared on Instagram, 5.7 million Google searches, and 150,000 Slack messages being sent.

The internet has grown faster than ever. Consider how many active users are on the internet over the last few years.

• From 3.6 billion in 2016 to 4.3 billion in 2018

• From 4.8 billion in 2020 to 5.2 billion in 2022

Now consider that the world population is around 8 billion as of 2022. That’s almost 65% of the world now being online. In a decade before it where the population was closer to 7 billion, only 30% of the world was online.

What this means is that there is a firehose amount of content being created every minute and more people than ever to consume it. You’ll never be bored if you don’t want to be. You’ll never be finished at work. And you’ll have so many choices as to where you decide to spend your time.

Over the last few years alone, I have noticed that my internet usage continued to grow with the world and with each of these services and platforms. Consider a decade ago, the average time spent online was 83 minutes. That’s just a little over an hour. Now fast forward to 2022 where that number is over 192 minutes. Over three hours! We have lost two hours each day over the last decade to our own devices. Pun intended. Consider our 24-hour bodies, where do we take these 2 hours from each day? Are they part of our work, sleep, or relaxing time?

My personal usage is typically being spent between sleep or relaxing. I’m spending another two hours in these two 8 hour time boxes on a smartphone. For what though? Am I actually gaining from it? My answer would be no. The knowledge I may obtain, the entertainment I’m provided, the dreams I’m being sold. All of this extra time that is being spent would better be spent with sleep or truly disconnecting in the first place.

P.S. I'm still looking for about 5 more beta readers! I'm so thankful to the many of you who have offered and I'll send an email soon with more instructions. Reply to this email if you're interested with a line as simple as "I'm in".

If you'd like to share book updates with a friend or family member, send them this link: https://jondouglas.dev/enough

Have a beautiful day,

Jon

jondouglas.dev

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