This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast more what You Hear weekday afternoons on the Drive.
Carlos Whittaker is bringing hope to humans all over the world, and he's pretty good at it. He's an author, a podcaster, a global speaker, and he's written such books as How to Human and The Moment Maker and Get Your Hopes Up. His newest creation is called Reconnected. How seven screen free weeks with monks and Amish farmers helped me recover the lost art of being human. Carlos Whittaker, I just got to tell you we need this now, and we've needed it for a long time.
Absolutely, and I've needed it for a long time, which is why I did it.
I have done this exercise on a small scale, and I try to as often as I can. And I always thought it had to do with the fact that I work in news and as such, I have to know what's going on in the world all the time, and so when I get time off, I really do try to put that damn phone down and not pick it up.
Yeah, yeah, I get it. Listen, and everybody needs to do it, because what everybody knows is it's just not our friends in the news that are actually looking at their devices all the time. The normal human being is still not that you're not normal, No, no, no, it's guilty is charged, but they're still on their phones. I was averaging seven hours and twenty three minutes a day looking at my phone. The average American averages six to seven
hours a day. Lee, Can I tell you that is forty nine hours a week two entire cycles of the sun. Were looking at our phone three months a year. It adds up to and for me, if I live to be eighty five years old, that means I'll end up looking at my phone for ten years, ten years of my life. And when I saw that notification slide across my screen, that's when I just said to do something radical.
The notification about the time, how much time you've spent?
Yes, yes, you know, because we all get it on Sundays, right, Yeah, the notification comes to side, you have averaged this much time staring at your screen. And you know, I think that if the notification said you will lose ten years of your life if you continue this way, I think it would change our habits. But that's not what it says.
Well, I did find that I was happier, and I did find that I slept better. I found I was less consumed with what was not necessarily going on in the world, but but what other people were doing, and saying I was less consumed with it.
Yeah, absolutely, no, you are, and honestly, like I believe, you know, if you just look at the history of humanity, and again this may be a strong statement to say, but I just don't think we were created with the capacity to consume the amount of content we consume, to know the amount of stuff that we know. You know, you see the rise of mental health challenges in America.
You see all of these things, and it's no I think accident that when you look at that data, it lines up to when the smartphone was it became prevalent in our society. And so I just think, obviously, not everybody has to spend seven weeks like I did and don't look at a screen. You don't have to move into an homage.
Farm or mansiri.
I did that for you, and let me help you, let me help guide you with some of the lessons that I learned.
Well, let's talk about the initial motivation. You saw the screen thing, and you said to yourself, Holy potatoes, I've got to do something about this. But what got you? What focused you on? I'm gonna go hook up with some monks, I mean totally yeah.
That makes sense, you know. My I just started thinking, well, I could go to like a cabin for two months and I would probably lose my mind or end up like Tom Hanks on whatever that movie was, talking to a volleyball. So so let me, let me try to find some maybe subcultures in America that maybe look at phones less. And so I just thought, well, monks probably just walk around and pray all day. I'll go hang out with them. The homish. I think their technology freeish,
so let me go hang out with them. So that's really how I chose them. And let me tell you the monks it was seven that let's see, we prayed seven times a day, but it was twenty three hours a day of silence and so like that was very shocking to my system. I literally was like detoxing off of the drug of this phone for the first few days.
But then, oh my gosh, lee that fourth day, third or fourth day, it legitimately felt like an elephant stepped off my chest and I didn't even know that I wasn't breathing, and it was so good and it was so pure and so yeah, so that's how I ended up with the monks. But I'll go ahead and tell you monks have phone problems too, like like like like
they've got smartphones. I was. I remember spilling my heart to Father Francis one day in his studied, like day ten, and I'm like crying about something and his phone goes, excuse me, young man, And I'm like, did this monk just totally leave this conversation to answer his phone? So and he starts laughing, Oh, Carlos, I need to read your book too, and so you know, you know this
isn't just a problem that we have. It like everybody on planet Earth that I think is feeling this pain point, which is why I wrote the book.
It's called how seven free weeks I'm sorry, seven screen free weeks with monks and Amish farmers helped me recover the lost art of being humid reconnected. Carlos Whittaker is the podcaster and author, and he is the one who has brought it to us. Now, the part about the Amish, I think people would be I don't know, pleasantly, maybe not so pleasantly surprised. At least the Amish in Prior, Oklahoma, where I frequent, they do have cell phones, they just
can't use them on certain days, in certain times of day. Yep.
So I learned when I got there really quickly.
You know.
Willis is the farmer I lived with, and we were out there plowing and he's like, oh, you know what, I need to call my brother to find out what the weather's going to be. And I was like what, And he pulled out is his cell phone? And now the thing is he his order this order of Amish. If you own a business, you can have a flip phone. So it wasn't a smartphone. It was a flip phone. So you know, you know, I begin to ask, you know, a lot of questions to the Amos. Well, wait a second,
why do you why can't you use phones? Well this and that? Why do you have a generator to you know, to power this? And well? This is what I love about the Homos, and I think that we all need to ask this question ourselves. Whenever new technology is introduced, they ask themselves, is this technology going to bring us closer together? Or is this technology going to tear us farther apart. That is the premise for every decision that
they make. That's why they'll never have cars, because if Miss Sally's barn burns down and all her amised neighbors are five hundred miles away, they're not going to be able to be there for each other rebuilder barn. So though, that's the decision making process that they use, and so I begin to implement that in my life. Is this gonna bring me closer to my community or tear me farther apart?
That's a good that's a good chapter in this book, I imagine, because that that we need to ask ourselves that more and more and more constantly. Carlos Whitaker reconnected how seven screen free weeks with monks and Amish farmers helped me recover the lost start of being humid. Do we need to just limit our exposure to these devices that's not just phones, it's anything that's digital or the connections. Do we need to limit that or is will it spell our demise eventually?
So, so I think that that's a that's a very important question to ask. This is what what I found out. I found out that I actually did not. When I got back, I didn't like put, like you know, screen time alarms on my phone and set up all these rules. What what I found out and you're gonna find out when you read the book, is when I started to fall in love with what's on the other side of
the phone. When I start to fall in love with noticing again, wondering again, getting lost and finding my way again, noticing, savoring, a solitude, all of these things that are uniquely human that we have uniquely lost. When I finally tasted those things again, I just picked my phone up less. My phone time is gone from seven and a half hours a day to three hours a day. I haven't made a single rule, but I fell back in love with living life, and so I just think that's the thing.
Once we taste it again, you're not going to want to pick this thing up because it is so good on the other side of the screen.
Reconnected how seven screen free weeks with monks and Amish farmers helped me recover the lost art of being human. Carlos Whittaker, this is pushing my buttons. I think it'll push a lot of buttons if you read it and then start implementing some of the practices. Thank you for joining us, Thanks
Leaving, Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia presentation