"Five minutes each week that might change your life."
In 2007, I could roll out of bed and bang out a 1,000-word article before breakfast. In 2025, I have to fight my own brain to write a sentence.
By 2015, I noticed focus had become a problem. I’d catch myself checking email or Facebook mid-draft.
By 2018, I was trapped in a digital hellscape. Creating anything meaningful didn’t just seem fruitless—it felt attentionally impossible.
It’s tempting to shrug and say:
“Well, that’s just modern life.”
But that’s like saying junk food is just part of a modern diet.
Just like Doritos and Mountain Dew wreck your body, push notifications and memes wreck your mind. And like junk food, the more you consume, the worse you feel.
People like to make excuses for why their attention is fractured, but the truth is, your attention isn’t being stolen—you’re just giving it away without a fight.
If you don’t take control of your environment, you’ll spend your entire life becoming a data point for mega-corporations to package up and sell to the highest-bidding advertiser.
When I write nowadays, I leave my phone at home, block everything on my laptop, and force myself to sit in painful, empty space before I can write.
Your life is nothing more than the diet of your mind.
What are you feeding it today?
See you Monday,
Mark
P.S. Here's what I feed my mind every morning: 1440. It's a free 5-minute news brief—human-curated, fact-driven, no clickbait, no algorithm deciding what you should care about. Just politics, business, science, sports, and culture. While everyone else doomscrolls their way through another outrage cycle, you could simply… read the news. Sign up for free and stop feeding your mind junk.
