We got one here from Peyton. Peyton says, do you have suggestions for high schoolers? At my school, we have to check our email daily to receive updates from our teachers, and we rely heavily on our computers. Are there tips you would have for students like me? I do have tips for students.

The idea that you have to check your email once a day for updates from your teachers is not your problem. The fact that, yes, there's work you do during the school day on your Chromebook is not your problem. Here's the things that I'm going to tell you matter. And it's what you were doing voluntarily with your time and how you were voluntarily engaging with the digital world that matters.

So here are the rules. And I say rules. I mean, you can listen to them or you not. But I'm saying this is what I would suggest. If I was a high schooler and I'm thinking, I want a deeper life, I don't want to just be anxious and lost in my screen all the time.

Number one, don't play online video games. I'm not against video games in general as a distraction. But the ones where you're online and there's lots of other people on them-- in Roblox, I'm looking at you. The-- I don't know these things. Fortnite, I'm looking at you. World of Warcraft, is that still a thing?

Look, I don't know games. But the ones in which there's lots of people who are online on a shared server are some of the most addictive technologies ever created by man. If you study digital addiction, these can be the worst. These are the worst. It's not social media. It's not I'm on YouTube too much.

The thing that can cause I have to go to a rehab center level of addiction is actually these massive multiple online games. It's going to eat up your life. There's better things you can be doing with that time. You get very little return in the sense of connection, growth, resilience, character, skills.

You get nothing out of the time you spend when you're five hours in Fortnite. Don't do online video games. Second, don't do social media. You can use your phone to communicate with your friends. And this is the good news. And this is a change that has happened since when I first started researching my book, Digital Minimalism.

And today, back then, social media platforms were critical to teen socialization. Snapchat in particular was really big. That has changed today. The socialization has largely migrated off of social media platforms, especially for teenagers. They use text messaging and instant messaging tools. The social media platforms are more about distraction, entertainment, keeping up with cultural memes.

Just don't use those. Communicate with your friends on WhatsApp and text or whatever you need to do so you can make plans and know when the party is. But don't use the other ones. Yeah, TikTok is interesting. But TikTok is also designed from the ground up to be like one of those pods in The Matrix where you're in a bathtub full of goo and a robot alien has stuck a needle straight into your spine.

It's just engineered from the ground up to just press buttons and keep you looking at that screen. And God forbid, if you are posting on TikTok, they don't even try to hide what they're doing there. They are playing entirely with the weak spots of your adolescent brain to make you completely addicted.

Here's what happens if you start using TikTok. You post a few videos. They have this all figured out. They will wait until your second or third video. And then the algorithm is going to expose that video to a bunch of people's feeds. And what do you see? You see a big burst of views.

And you start to suspect, hey man, maybe I'm onto something. You know, maybe people dig what I'm doing here. I kind of have a bit of an audience. And oh man, the next one didn't get that. The next one didn't get it. The algorithm gives you another burst of views.

Oh, that one caught on. All right, man, this is important. Now I know I got my audience. I got to be on there. People really care about me. You are being 100% manipulated. They control exactly how many views you get. The algorithm has figured out how to titrate bursts of fake simulated popularity so that you think that you're one slot machine pull away from being an influencer.

All the while they are just, here's your pocket, money, money, money, money. So just don't use it, man. Just don't use it. Don't use social media. Don't use online video games. Counter this by aggressively going after autonomously chosen positive social pursuits. If you're in any way athletic, get on a sports team and get serious about it.

And you might have to do some exploration to find what sports team that is. I mean, if you look at my history, I played all the rec sports. I came from a family that said, you always got to be in a sport because otherwise you're bouncing off the walls.

And it's a pain. And I played soccer, I played basketball, I played baseball and I was terrible at all of them. But then at some point in high school, I realized I had the right type of leg muscle fibers to run. I got really in the track and track got me into crew.

And that made a big difference. So if you can do anything athletic and it might take some discovery, do that. If you're not athletic, that's fine. Find something else, a team, you can be involved in this when you work with other people towards building skills in the competitive situation where things could go wrong, but you feel the victories when you have the victories and you're working together on it.

And you need this in your life. Positive skilled social pursuits that you can put a lot of energy into and to give you a lot back in return. That's where you want to be spending your time. Do that and also spending time with your friends and figuring out how to be a social human being and going to those parties where you're not quite sure if you should be in the party and try to navigate that social difficulty.

That's just calisthenics for your social brain. You need to do that so that you're not weird when you're an adult, that's all great. Don't spend five hours on an online video game. Don't be tricked by the TikTok algorithm into thinking that you are six dance videos away from being Kim Kardashian.

You're not, you're in the tub of goo and there's a thing in the back of your neck. And I think this is easier now than it was five years ago because socialization as a teenager does not require you to be on these services. That now happens separately. So that's what I would suggest.

Honestly, even if you have a flip phone, get the phone where you can still text, but you can't go on apps. That's becoming the new counter-cultural thing, by the way, especially if you have some other thing you do really well, like you're an athlete or on the robotics team or something like this.

You're like, yeah, I don't bother with that smartphone stuff. That doesn't make you the weird loner anymore. That makes you kind of the cooler guy. So if you're doing that, and if you very strongly ignore my advice from earlier to say, "Deeple meeple" when you run into people, I think you'll be okay.

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