I don't even know who said it first, but it's a good axiom: the best things in life aren't things.

One of the things that I have enjoyed about taking my first Lenten journey this year is rediscovering my love of writing.

I have caught myself slipping. Picking up the smartphone out of pure habit to cycle through apps and websites. Grabbing the laptop to tinker or look something up on the web or whatever. I keep removing apps, using website blockers, etc. I just reinstall apps, pause website blockers, etc. But the impulse remains. There is a deeply ingrained urge, a need to stare at a screen – any screen. For any reason or no reason at all.

For the past 8 months I have been using the Day One app to keep a digital journal. It's a fantastic app with a lot of neat features. They even recently released a web app to allow you to create journal entries using a browser. Even so, I'm thinking about keeping a journal by hand again.

My favorite talk from the October 2022 General Conference was President Russell M. Nelson's: Overcome the World and Find Rest.

The latest technology craze is AI – artificial intelligence. From ChatGPT to Midjourney, the potential and promise of AI has captured our attention and imagination.

But I have the same concerns about AI as I have with virtual reality and the “Metaverse”, social media, smartphones – media and computer technology in general. We talk a lot about what we gain by embracing these technologies, but we talk too little about what we might be losing or giving up.

Yesterday I wrote about how I am planning to drastically cut back on the media I consume. One type of media I neglected to mention is podcasts.

I haven't been in a good place mentally or emotionally the past several weeks. In most of my free time I played video games or watched TV and had no desire to do much of anything else. Aside from alternating feelings of anxiousness and guilt, I felt mostly numb.