Read to the end if you're over 30.

Hello. It’s great to bring you a new edition of TimeMachiner this Tuesday. A big welcome to Ron, Jeff, Jessica, and my newest subscribers to TimeMachiner. Thank you for giving me space in your inbox. πŸ™πŸ»

The week has been a doozy in "Real Life Land" between politics, the environment, and the endless drumbeat of sobering news. However, there are bubbles of good to still find. As Jason Mraz says, Look for the Good.

A little league player showed kindness and compassion and every student in California public schools now gets free meals in order to fight childhood hunger. Our world can be a tough place when we are flooded with information that is meant to manipulate our feelings. Of course, I try to counter that here at TimeMachiner.

I used to be a news junkie. In fact, I distinctly remember reading the newspaper every morning in middle and high school while eating breakfast. Yes, I always started with the sports section (Go Isles!), I also flipped through the top stories in the first six to seven pages.

For decades I was hooked. Friday nights in high school when I didn't have anything going on, I'd watch TGIF, but stay tuned for ABC's 20/20. I was probably the only teenager who knew who Hugh Downs was. In college I was on the campus newspaper for a year, had CNN open all the time and even had the MSNBC "breaking news alert" program installed on my Windows XP machine. That is how I actually learned about 9/11 when I woke up that fateful morning.

News has always been important to me. It has changed a lot since the mid-2000s when "news programs" began taking up more and more airtime. Gone were the local broadcasts, replaced with eyeballs (including my own) focusing instead on the talking heads of cable news. Now you had national personalities with giant reach. Yes I did still actively watch the 6:30 NBC or ABC "national evening news" that came on right before Jeopardy!, however flipping to cable news at other times was my jam. This habit continued, entrenching me especially further from 2015 to 2021. You can probably guess why.

Then, after so many years, I kicked the habit. On a Getaway trip that is designed to strongly encourage you to disconnect, two things I did stuck with me. The first, was putting my iPhone on silent. The constant stream of sounds and audible alerts have been silenced from my life and it is bliss. The second was deciding that needing to be overly-connected to the news was no longer necessary. I could read a few headlines and move on. Yes, the administration change here in the US did help to calm down the constant chaos flooding out of DC, but there will always be news and spin designed to whip us up into a frenzy and stay to read more.

It has been a relief to remove myself from the news cycle. I can honestly say I feel the difference to my psyche almost like getting to breathe in more air after gasping for a moment. It is freeing.

While the world does have many issues going on, stepping back and giving our minds mental oxygen is a form of self care for me. Perhaps it can be the same for you.

Here's Today's Random Factoid: 1 out of every 200 men is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. Source

Poll of the week

Would you rather fight 10 duck-sized horses or 1 horse-sized duck?

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Results will normally be revealed in the following week's newsletter. However, I will be away next week. This poll's results will appear in the 8/30 issue.

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