I'm 30 years old and I feel like I should have my life together by now. I don't like my career. I'm not healthy and I'm constantly stressed about money. Do you have any advice or simple actions I can implement in my life on a daily basis to make progress and head in a positive direction?

Well, so the reason why I included this question in today's episode, which is really about our relationship with technology, is that I'm making the guess that the first obstacle to clear on the path away from the shallows in which Adam is mired and towards a deeper life, the first obstacle to clear away here is probably a harmful relationship with technology.

So for people of this age, you're in your 20s, you're in your 30s and you feel stuck, often one of the things that is keeping you stuck is these tools, is what's coming in over your phone and what's coming in over your smart TV. The reason why it keeps it stuck is because these tools are optimized to scratch the itches that are core to our humanity.

We want to connect to other people. We want to have efficacy. We want to do things that are recognized. We want to have standing in our community. We want to be inspired by beauty and on craftsmanship. All of these are deep human instincts that are wired to push our lives in more productive, deeper directions.

But there's apps on your phone and on your tablet and on your smart TV that can satisfy those urges just enough to keep you satisfied. Okay, I guess I'm okay to keep you stuck in your status quo. You're texting and on social media enough that you feel like, well, I'm not literally alone.

I'm talking to people. So you consider that it's scratched. You're making progress in a video game and that's just enough of scratching that itch. If I want to make something of myself and be recognized by my community that you're not forced to get up and do something. You're yelling at people on Twitter.

You have a tribe on there. We're yelling at the libs or we're yelling at the MAGA crowd. That kind of scratches barely this itch of like, I want to be involved in something bigger than me that matters. The itches are scratched just enough that you stay on the couch and you stay stressed and you stay like your life isn't put together and like nothing is happening.

This is the danger of these tools is that they prevent us. They prevent us from getting fed up enough to actually make changes. So this is why I want to say, let's start. Let's start with reevaluating your relationship with technology. And this is where I want you to do something like we've been talking about, like zero based technology budgeting.

Get all this stuff out of your life. Take a 30 day break from all of these optional tools. No video games, no social media, no YouTube, no streaming. Spend those 30 days aggressively self-reflecting and experimenting with analog activities that are meaningful to you. Figure out what's going on with your life.

Face and confront. This is Nietzsche looking into the abyss, what you're not happy about in your life, why? And then move past this to self-author what you want your life to look like in five years. So you have clarity about what you dislike now. You have clarity about what you would love in your life going forward.

You have clarity through your experimentation of what really is important or meaningful to you, what you really enjoy and what you don't. And then rebuild your technological life from scratch. Everything has to earn its way in for a particular purpose. I care about this. What's the right way to use technology to do this?

I care about that. What's the right way to use technology to do that? When you do the zero based budgeting, most of this stuff that's gunking up your life, Adam, that's keeping you quiescent, that's keeping you just satisfied enough that you don't get off the couch is going to be gone.

If you recognize, hey, I'm 30, I'm 30 and a man and I want to stand up and be a useful member of society and respected by my community. When you know that's really valuable to you and you know that there's some self-incrimination about you not doing that and you're trying to build up from scratch, well, what technology can help me do that?

You're not going to answer if you're being honest, well, I just want to make it to the next level in World of Warcraft or whatever. No, you're saying, no, no, okay, I need to actually do something here that's going to be meaningful. Can technology help me? Maybe it can help me find a group and connect to a group where I can then go in real life and join that group and make progress.

So it's going to completely reinvent your relationship with technology. So instead of it keeping you pacified, it instead becomes a tool you deploy in the construction of a deeper life. All right, so once you've done that, once you've cleared out the technological pacification, now we can work our way through what I call the deep life stack.

You can work your way through the layers of the deep life stack on your way towards a deeper life. We talk about this a lot, so I'll move quickly, but you would start then with habits and discipline. So pick a couple of areas of your life you've identified as being important and have a daily discipline that you follow, a habit you follow every day.

It should be tractable but non-trivial. This is all about just telling yourself the story of I can do things that are important even if I don't have to. I can make progress on parts of my life I care about because I think it's important in the long term even though I don't want to do it in the short term.

As part of that discipline stack, also start tracking in a central place. Here's the systems and habits and disciplines I follow. That thing is going to grow. That document will grow as you make your way through the stack. Then you move up to the values layer of the stack.

Now you really clarify and codify what you learned during your technology zero-based budgeting exercise. What am I all about? You need to have a code. This is what I'm about. This code is not just here's things I care about. It has to be a psychological/philosophical game plan not just for how do I excel but how do I make it through the hard parts.

What's important to me and what's going to pull me forward through the parts that are really hard especially early on when I feel like nothing's going right. The code should tell you what am I going to do when things are going really well and how I'm going to live up to that.

You want to have your first draft of this code. If you're from a religious background you're going to find a lot of useful work there. If you're not you can find a lot of good useful work in philosophy. But you want to be really clear about what you're writing down here and don't worry about getting it right.

That can evolve. Then you move your way up to the control layer of the stack. It is now and only now Adam that you start to get organized, get the messy parts of your life together, get your finances in order, get your fitness in order, get your productivity systems running so you're not just all over the place, get your act together and work, build up that career capital so people start seeing you Adam as this guy gets it done.

He does it when he says he's going to do it and he does it at a high level. Why do you do that? Because that's going to give you leverage to start shaping your career towards what matters to you. But remember we're not getting our act together. We're four steps in here.

We've already started clearing out the technological pacification. We've done discipline. We've done values. Only now do we have the foundation we need to actually power through the difficulty of organizing our lives. Then you get to the final layer of the deep life stack is where you're going to have vision.

You begin planning to make your life more remarkable. The first time you go through this, you'll choose one area of your life and say, "How am I going to make that area of my life more remarkable?" Maybe it's a professional thing or maybe it's a fitness thing. I'm going to become incredible shape and become a Cameron Haynes style, deep back country bow elk hunter that's going to require me to train marathons daily or whatever it is.

Maybe it's an intellectual pursuit. You're going to take one part of your life and make it remarkable. This is going to take you about a year and you're going to be so much better at this point Adam. Then you just keep revisiting this. "Hey, as technology creeped back into my life in an unhealthy way, let me re-clarify in zero-based budget, work your way up the stack." Do that once a year.

Adam, you're like a year away from your life being a lot better. You're five years away from your life being something that people remark about. I have complete faith in that. But this is the new thing I'm adding now because I've realized this listening to you, my listeners. You have to think about the technology use like the same way you would think about perhaps an alcohol or drug problem if you were pursuing a deep life.

Until you solve that, you're going to have a lot of trouble with all the other things. You want to start with getting that technology monkey off your back and then we can work our way through the deep life stack. All right, I think we have time for one more question, Jesse.

Yeah, we got one more question from Julie. "How can I stay on top of current events while still living deep? It's so easy to get sucked into social media scrolling, but what about the news?" Well, Julie, I'm assuming you're not a network television news director. You're not someone who is sitting backstage at the NBC nightly news panning cameras and telling producers to go after stories.

You're not a news director, so you can chill out about the news. You don't need to know everything that's going on. You're not even really learning everything that's going on in social media. You're getting a bunch of takes on things that are going on. So my first thing I'm going to say is just chill out about feeling like you have to be up on everything.

You're not a news director. So what should you do instead? Just have a much more minimalist news consumption ritual. Take a weekly newspaper or even easier, go to Starbucks on Sunday. They sell the newspapers there, buy the Sunday paper, read it for an hour. That alone, you will be just as informed as you are now with a lot less stress.

Now, if you don't want to do that, there are news digest emails that you can get from newspapers with a digital subscription. There's news roundup podcasts that are both daily and weekly. Listen to some of those. Put on NPR when you commute to work and listen to morning edition.

They'll cut. There's a major story going on. You know, there's an earthquake somewhere or something's on fire. They'll tell you about it and that's enough and you know enough. Now I know this might sound radical, but let me tell you, uh, if we go back, what's this 2000, if we go back about 10 years, let me tell you who did adopt this approach.

The news consumption, everybody everywhere, because it was the only way to do it. There wasn't social media and you know what? People were fine. This idea that in 2009 people just stumbled around blindly. Like I don't know what's going on. Like who's the president really? That guy. All right.

I mean, okay. What's going on? Who, who, who died? Okay. Hey, I didn't know there was no place I could go where, uh, strangers were yelling at each other about the news. So how would I possibly know what was going on in the world? Somehow people knew what was going on in the world 10 years ago, even without social media services they could look at all the time.

So just go back and tap into that 2009, 2008 version of yourself. You'll be perfectly informed, but I'm glad you bring it up, Julie, because this is one of the last traps. I think people that have a pretty good relationship with technology, one of the last traps. It still snags them as this news thing.

It really is. Uh, I think it's a storyline of the services themselves. You gotta be connected. You gotta know what's going on. This is where everything's happening. It's not, there's plenty of ways to get enough news without having to be staring at your phone all day. Hey, if you liked this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.