If you stop doing new things, you stop living.  You will get anxious, and notice that you fear death more.  The only way to relieve this anxiety, is to do new things.  Things you wouldn’t normally do.

I’ve been running once or twice a week, every week for the last 5 years. This is what I’ve learned:

1. Start slow and add 1 min to your run each time you go out. This makes progressing easy.

2. Don’t stop half way and stretch. This kills the cardiovascular benefit you get from keeping your heartrate up and also gives you a stitch.

3. There are two ‘walls’ that I know of so far, one at 20mins, and one at 40mins or thereabouts.  The 15 mins directly after you pass each one is amazing - you feel great and hardly feel like you are running at all.  This is when running is a pleasure.

4. Make it as pleasurable as possible.  Go out on a nice day.  Don’t try and do too much at once (see (1) above).  Run for the sake of running, not to achieve goals.

5. Believe it or not, a long run is a startlingly good hangover cure.  It wipes that bad-boy out.

6. Invest in good running shoes.  Go to Asics and let them blind you with science.

That is why no fear is so ruinous and so uncontrollable as panic fear. For other fears are groundless, but this fear is witless.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca in Letter 13. On groundless fears

Your thinking should be focused on what you do with your digital tool and not how to handle your digital tool. The less you need to think about how you use a digital tool, the more you can do with it.

Reading the news and watching tv makes people feel like they have no real power to change anything about the world around them. But shows like X-Factor, where the country can vote to control the fate of the contestants, show clearly that people crave agency. Agency and community. People are searching for communal catharsis. This is why we all use twitter even though it’s impact on most of our lives is superficial, let’s face it.