Please, Someone Take Me Back to 1985!

I’m sitting down to write—not because I really want to, but because I just realized I spent the last hour doomscrolling absolute garbage on my phone. I can’t even tell you what I gained from that hour. Nothing stuck. Nothing mattered. That hour is just… gone.

And honestly, think about all the things I could have done instead. I could’ve read a few chapters of the book I keep saying I’ll get to. I could’ve spent some time with the older dogs here on the farm. I could’ve put a record on the turntable and let a classic country album spin while the world slowed down a bit.

But no. I let someone else’s algorithm turn me into a consumer of junk media.

I was recently reading The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer, and he dropped a statistic that made me stop and reread it three times: the average American spends 705 hours a year on social media.

Read that again—705 damn hours. And that’s just the average. Yikes. I believe it, though. I knocked out one of those hours tonight without breaking a sweat, parked on the couch on a Monday evening. What an absolute time suck.

The problem is, it’s a habit most of us share. What are we doing giving that much of our lives to other people’s highlight reels? Then we turn around and tell the people who seem to have it together that we wish we had time to do the things they’re doing. When you think about it like that, the math starts to get uncomfortable.

So I’ve decided I’m going to try harder to live in 1985.

Not because it was especially cool—though I still can’t not watch The Breakfast Club when it’s on—but because 1985 didn’t come with smartphones, social media, or endless streaming. Life required intention. You had to choose what you did with your time.

Now that I think about it, that hour on my phone wasn’t the only time suck today. I also finished the final season of Stranger Things with my 11-year-old daughter. Listening to her commentary about how those kids lived in the ’80s—without today’s creature comforts—was both funny and sobering. Trying to explain how we got through our days back then took me right back to a time when my brain didn’t feel so completely saturated.

Is it possible that the cure for everyone’s anxiety in this frantic world isn’t another app, prescription, or productivity hack? Maybe it’s as simple as riding your bike to the local gas station, buying some Garbage Pail Kids and a pack of shitty candy cigarettes, and giving your brain a break from the noise.

I’ll meet you there around two. I’ll buy you the Slurpee of your choice, but you’re on your own for the candy cigarettes.

I’m going to need all of mine to take the edge off.