Which could you live longer without: alcohol, caffeine, or meat?

Coming off a 10-day juice cleanse on January 21, 2022, I wanted to see which of the three I could avoid the longest. None of the three were necessary for survival, and giving up one or all of them could have health benefits.

I didn’t expect that I’d still be without one of them one year later. Definitely not caffeine. But here I am, caffeine-free, with no plans to resume using it.

A little background. I hate the taste and smell of coffee, having grown up in a home where my father woke early and began chain-smoking and pounding coffee. My first breath each morning was coffee and cigarettes. I’ve never tried either of them.

We did not have soda in our home, which was not uncommon in the 1970s and ‘80s. I picked up a severe Diet Coke habit in college that continued into my early thirties. But when our first child was born in 2002, I decided I did not want my children to see me drinking diet colas like water. Neither of our children drinks soda regularly.

The idea of a coffee and soda-free guy dropping caffeine might not seem like a big deal. Think again. For 25 years, I relied on drinks and powders that were virtually non-existent until the late ‘90s to fuel my workouts and serve as an everyday substitute for coffee and soda.

First came supplements and drinks laden with ephedrine and caffeine. I covered Major League Baseball as a sportswriter for USA Today in the 1990s and as a freelancer in the early 2000s. I figured if players could use these products to get through long seasons, it could help me with workouts and also the grind of being a baseball writer, which includes the same crazy hours and marathon travel as ballplayers without the compensation and first-class accommodations.

Sports leagues banned ephedrine after it was linked to the deaths of several athletes. I gave it up, too, but like players, I turned to energy drinks or “shots,” along with pre-workout powders that contained, among other things, high doses of caffeine. I train most mornings, but I’d mix a pre-workout drink even on days I did not since it provided mental clarity and alertness.

I was as addicted to these drinks and powders as people who consume coffee daily, which is at an all-time high of 66 percent of American adults. But I worried that these substances, like ephedrine, might have long-term side effects.

One night in November 2019, I had bad chest pains and drove to the hospital. Tests revealed nothing, but it was enough to scare me cold turkey from my daily energy shot (or two) habit. But I still had a daily pre-workout drink routine.

Now that’s gone, too. I don’t feel any less energized or sluggish. Like many bad habits, it’s more the addiction to the routine than the benefit it’s providing. I sleep better, drink more water, and consume more fruit.

It’s funny. I graduated college in 1991 when the workout supplement industry barely existed. Few young adults drank coffee. As hard as this might be for younger people to believe, I can’t recall seeing someone drink coffee during my college years, which I spent mainly in a student newspaper office where we routinely stayed up until 1 a.m. producing the next day’s edition.

There was Jolt Cola, introduced in 1985 with the slogan “all the sugar and twice the caffeine,” but it never was that popular.

What changed? My theory is that as people became less active and food became more processed, providing fewer nutrients, people turned to caffeine for the energy they weren’t getting from exercise and diet. Plus, the percentage of adults smoking cigarettes dropped from 25.5 percent in 1990 to 12.5 percent today. No doubt some of those ex-smokers and would-be smokers substituted caffeine for nicotine.

As recently as the 1980s, people viewed coffee as an old person’s drink. Television commercials of the time featured seniors drinking Maxwell House, Taster’s Choice, and Folgers. Then Starbucks blew up in the early 1990s, attracting a younger demographic. There also was the 1994 debut of the TV show “Friends,” featuring six twenty-somethings and set mostly in a New York coffee shop.

Coffee raises blood pressure and heart rate, making you more awake. Because it’s a stimulant, it’s also habit-forming, which helps explain why so many people say they can’t function until they’ve had their first cup of coffee in the morning.

Many Millennials and Generation Zers, unlike their Gen X counterparts, have grown up drinking coffee, thinking it’s normal. It’s been a drastic shift in 20 years. In 2003, I was in an early morning business meeting at an up-and-coming fitness company with 25 employees, all born in the late ’60s or ‘70s. A visitor asked if there was any coffee available. An awkward pause hung over the room as if the poor guy had requested permission to smoke. Someone ran out for coffee.

These days the company has 4,000 employees over multiple offices, and coffee available everywhere for its still-young staff, now born mostly after 1985.

I don’t miss caffeine, though it’s sneaky. Most chocolate has caffeine. A few months ago, I woke up from minor surgery and took a drink of soda a nurse had provided to settle my stomach. I jolted awake, thinking my non-caffeine streak was over.

Alas, it was just ginger ale.

 

 

 

 

 

Could you lose a ton of weight this year? Literally, one ton: 2,000 pounds.

This is not about body weight, of course, but belongings. This year, could you sell, donate, and discard 2,000 pounds of stuff?

Automobiles don’t count. Nor does a set of weights since a collection of dumbbells, barbells, and weight plates usually run 300 to 500 pounds. (Plus, there’s nothing easier to sell used online than weights.) Major appliances don’t count either since they’re usually replaced with a newer model.

But everything else goes toward the 2,000-pound mark. Furniture (both indoor and outdoor), tools,  small kitchen appliances, toys, sporting goods, knick-knacks, canned food, blankets, old media (CDs, DVDs, tapes), and clothing counts. So do books and magazines – that’s at least 200 pounds for most households – along with excess school/office supplies, and paper of all sorts that can be scanned (if necessary) and/or shredded.

Keep a running total with each trip to the donation center, recycling bin, or landfill. Use a scale for easy-to-weigh items like books but otherwise make realistic estimates of weight. Losing a ton means dropping 167 pounds of stuff a month or between 5 and 6 pounds a day.

Here’s the catch. You also must add the amount of weight brought into the home. Trips to the grocery store do not count. Nor do home repair/maintenance items. But everything else must be added. New clothes, household decor, additional TVs, books, and paper. Think back to Christmas. How many pounds of stuff came into the house?

Possessions weigh us down and it doesn’t occur overnight. It happens daily when we bring in 5 or 10 pounds of stuff but don’t get rid of anything. Much like making an effort to lose body weight, when we become mindful of everything placed in the body, it’s necessary to keep a log of the in-flow of stuff to lose a ton of weight and make significant changes.

How much weight can you lose? I’ve thought of this recently after cleaning out a one-bedroom condo after a family member died. He was not a pack rat or hoarder, just someone with all of the typical things a household needs. In such a situation, it’s hard to find a home for an iron and ironing board, toaster, microwave, coffee maker, dishes, flatware, brooms and mops, coolers, framed wall art, and furniture of all sorts. Most of it went to donation centers. For bigger items, I found people online to take them away.

Could he have dropped a ton of weight? Probably not, though he did have a few minor collections. Like some seniors, he did not have much of his life digitized, so there were a couple of hundred pounds of paper, files, magazines, and books.

This is not about making things easier for your loved ones when you pass, though that’s a noble byproduct of this exercise. Instead, think in terms of how much lighter you’ll feel after dropping a ton of weight. Much like losing 10 or 20 pounds of fat, eliminating 2,000 pounds of household excess will be a life-changing accomplishment.

The toughest part of decluttering or living lean for some people is unloading a collection. It’s both time consuming and emotionally challenging.

I’ve sold my sports memorabilia collection in stages and recently unloaded the last third of it, keeping just a handful of baseball cards and a few pieces of memorabilia I accumulated from the age of 6 until I stopped collecting about 25 years ago.

That represents two decades of collecting, both as a kid and a young adult. Plus, as a full-time baseball writer throughout the 1990s, I accumulated lots of items such as press passes, schedules, press pins, yearbooks, and other odds and ends.

The collection didn’t generate the money I’d hoped and I could have raised more if I broke it up and listed the items myself on eBay. But I didn’t want to take the time to deal with listing items, emailing, packing, and trips to the post office. The extra time would not be worth the additional money. Instead, I found a buyer online who specializes in selling sports memorabilia on eBay and sold everything to him. The collection consisted of several thousand cards, some going back to 1949 and many from the 1960s, plus dozens of autographs and oddball items.

I spread the collection over the dining room table and the buyer spent an hour looking at it. We haggled a bit and I got him to raise his offer about 10 percent, but that was as far as he’d go before I accepted.

Sure the collection was worth something – and I received a fair price, although again less than I’d hoped. In the end, though, it was just cardboard and paper that had been sitting in my closet for 18 years. That’s how long we’ve been in our current house; the collection took up space in the closets of previous homes. I dragged it from home to home and probably could have sold it for more years ago before the sports collectibles market softened in the early ‘90s.

It was just excess baggage. Over the years I’ve interviewed pro athletes at their homes for stories. What struck me most – aside from the size and elegance of these homes – is that most of these athletes didn’t have much of their own memorabilia on display. Some had collections of memorabilia for athletes they’d played with or against – or players they admired from a previous generation. But for the most part, they didn’t bother with their own memorabilia.

 I figured if athletes didn’t want their own stuff, why should I?

Thanks to the Internet and digital media, there’s no reason to stockpile books, magazines, music, movies, or memorabilia. As a kid without cable TV in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I turned to baseball cards as a primary way to follow baseball, a notion that seems preposterous in the digital era. After all, for more than two decades, the Internet has provided all the information a sports fan could want.

Collecting, whether sports memorabilia or anything else, has a downside. It produces a mindset that everything has value and that you should continue accumulating until you have the definitive collection. It takes lots of space, time, and money.

You spend a disproportionate share of your time on collecting stuff rather than experiencing things. Eventually you lose interest or no longer have space and must dispose of the stuff. That’s when you realize how much – or rather, how little – your prized collection is worth.

People don’t collect things like stamps, coins, and Hummel figurines like they did a generation ago and that’s good. No longer do they fill their homes with collectibles and knickknacks. Our society is more fast-paced, or at least screen obsessed, and people are less likely to spend an afternoon tinkering with Lionel trains or organizing baseball cards.

It’s important to appreciate the past, cherish and learn from it, but there’s no need to hold onto boxes of trinkets. Any of the thousands of cards and memorabilia pieces I sold can be found online. There was no need to even take pictures before the sale.

Before the buyer arrived, I looked over the collection spread across the dining room table. Some of the cards I’d obtained from childhood friends, two of whom are now deceased. I thought of the countless hours I’d spent accumulating the collection by attending card shows, buying packs at the supermarket, trading with friends, and following the market.

It wasn’t wasted time, of course. I loved following sports as a kid and that obsession, which included collecting sports cards and memorabilia, prepared me more for an early career as a sportswriter than any class I took in college.

To live mindfully and free of clutter, though, it’s necessary to let go of things that no longer make a contribution to your life and your future. Perhaps you have such a stockpile, whether it’s a collectible, hobby, or entertainment interest that stopped commanding your attention long ago. It’s time to say goodbye. Thanks to eBay, Facebook Marketplace, and other avenues, it’s never been easier.

I thought I’d feel sad when I boxed up the collection and helped the buyer load it into his SUV. Instead, I felt like a burden had been lifted. Plus I had a few extra bucks.

The memories, of course, I’ll have forever.

It’s just I no longer need huge boxes in my closet to remind me.

 

 

When the decade began, few people were reading books on electronic devices. Smart phone penetration was minimal. It still was common to see people reading physical books rather than phones in public.

That’s no longer the case as the decade comes to an end, something I was reminded of again in 2019 as I reached my goal of reading 100 books – 101, actually – after reading 61 in 2017 and 79 last year. The key was to  follow the advice of Stephen King in his book On Writing, which I re-read in 2019, and carry a book wherever I went to take advantage of the many opportunities throughout the day to read when forced to wait.

Of course, we mostly turn to smart phones to fill this void. Failing that any waiting area – doctor’s office, auto shop, airline gate – has televisions blaring. Many people in my gym check email and social media in between sets. We now have selfies in church and Instagram posts from yoga class.

In 2019 I often was the only one in a waiting area reading, though it did not go unnoticed. Our sons’ orthodontist noted I always had a book and soon we were comparing reading lists.

My goal with reading 100 books in a year was to see if I could retain some semblance of 2008-like focus and concentration, eschewing 24/7 phone addiction. The result, I’ve found, is that my threshold for entertainment has risen. I saw only two movies in the theater in 2019 and my television viewing consists of little beyond college basketball, where my alma mater created some compelling content by winning a national title.

I gave up on books if they didn’t reel me in within 50 pages. After all, reading an average of two books a week leaves little time for mediocre content. As always, my rule was that I had to read two-thirds non-fiction and that fitness and travel books did not count toward the total.

My reading fell into five categories:

YOUNG ADULT: There’s perhaps no greater parenting challenge than keeping teenagers reading in the world of smart phones and video games. I began reading young adult dystopian fiction with our boys years ago to keep them reading and found I enjoy the genre. In 2019 our oldest re-read the five-book Percy Jackson series, which I read for the first time. We also re-read the last three books of the Gregor the Overlander series by Suzanne Collins, which we find better than her Hunger Games series. We’ll read anything by the great Michael Grant. His three sequels to the Gone series lived up to the originals. His Front Lines trilogy, based in a world where women fought in World War II, seemed like a reach but proved believable. World War II is a popular young adult setting and we enjoyed the works of Alan Gratz (Grenade) and Jennifer A. Nielsen (Resistance).

We allow our guys to read almost anything, especially the works of Florida writers Carl Hiaasen and Tim Dorsey, who combined for just one book in 2019, though Dorsey’s No Sunscreen for the Dead was outstanding.

CHILD REARING: As the father of two teenage boys in the digital age, I’m frustrated by the stranglehold smart phones and video games have on kids. There’s no blueprint to draw from, no older parents to turn to for guidance since this is a largely a  phenomenon of the last decade. Sure we had video games during my childhood in the 1980s but those either required quarters or were nowhere as addictive as today’s games. Speaking of things that do not resemble the previous generation, the college admissions and financing process is nothing like it was a generation ago. With a high school junior, it’s required a crash course.

Fortunately there are plenty of authors cranking out advice on both of these fronts, including Diana Graber (Raising Humans in a Digital World) and The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell and John Gray. Cal Newport, a computer science professor at Georgetown, is one of my favorite authors and he covers both topics. His book Digital Minimalism is a must-read for anyone looking to break the chains of digital addiction. His book How to be a High School Superstar shows kids why they should avoid jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none college resume padding and become So Good They Can’t Ignore You, the title of Newport’s book about getting into any college.

Andy Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course Getting Kid into College followed his son’s one-year application process and Zac Bissonnette’s Debt-Free U explained how to get through college without debt. The scary thing is that though these two books are less than a decade, the costs have increased 50 percent. Anthony ONeal’s Debt-Free Degree, released this year, is an up-to-date take on the issue. Daniel Golden’s book The Price of Admission was published in 2006 but showed that the celebrity admissions shenanigans that came to light in 2019 is nothing new.

FINANCIAL/MINIMALISM: This is a blog about lean living, after all, and I enjoyed the books of two minimalist bloggers I follow: Joshua Becker (The Minimalist Home) and Courtney Carver (Soulful Simplicity). James Wallman’s Stuffocation: Living More with Less shows how consumerism is destroying our health and our planet. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson explains why we should follow the lead of the Swedes and deal with our crap now to reduce the burden on our loved ones later. Tanja Hester’s Work Optional is another compelling look at the retire early movement. Chris Hogan’s Everyday Millionaires is a modern look at The Millionaire Next Door.

BIOGRAPHY/AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Tom Hanks might win an Oscar for his portrayal of Fred Rogers but Maxwell King deserves an award for his thorough 2018 biography The Good Neighbor. I figured I knew everything about Tina Turner but she held nothing back in her 2018 autobiography My Love Story. When famous people cooperate with a talented writer’s biography, the result is usually awesome. That’s the case with Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk.

Leah Remini’s Troublemaker is the latest thorough takedown of Scientology. I’m a sucker for autobiographies of wacky folks and was rewarded with Manhood (Terry Crews) and Full Disclosure (Stormy Daniels). Mike Reilly has yelled “You are an Ironman!” at thousands of race finishers and his Finding My Voice is a great read about the triathlon subculture.

SPORTS: Though I’m no longer a full-time sportswriter, I still follow sports avidly and knew I’d need to read a lot of compelling sports books to reach the century mark.

I’ve now read most every noteworthy basketball book. My 2019 list included several that belong in the discussion for best-ever, including Alejandro Danois’ The Boys of Dunbar about the early 1980s high school team that included four future NBA players, including Muggsy Bogues; and The Miracle of St. Anthony, where future ESPN insider Adrian Wojnarowski spent a year (2004) with high school coaching legend Bob Hurley. I also re-read Loose Balls, Terry Pluto’s rollicking oral history of the ABA. I can’t believe it took me until 2019 to discover the historical sports narratives of Gary M. Pomerantz. I tackled his The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics and Wilt: 1962, the Night of 100 Points. (I also read what might be his best book, Their Life’s Work, about the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers.)

Other great hoops reads included The Last Great Game (Duke vs. Kentucky) by Gene Wojciechowski, Chris Ballard’s The Art of a Beautiful Game, Filip Bondy’s Tip-Off: How the 1984 Draft Changed Basketball Forever, Ian Thomsen’s The Soul of Basketball and Jackie Macmullan’s Basketball: A Love Story. I’ll read anything by the sports investigative tandem of Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict and got around in 2019 to Keteyian’s Money Players – Days and Nights in the New NBA and Benedict’s Out of Bounds – Inside NBA Culture of Rape, Violence, Crime. Sam Anderson’s Boom Town is a fascinating history of Oklahoma City and the acquisition of an NBA franchise. If you wonder how the NBA transformed in the last decade into a data-driven, three-point obsessed game, Kirk Goldsberry explains it well in Sprawlball – A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA.

Marcus Thompson has covered the Golden State Warriors for years and produced compelling biographies of Steph Curry (Golden) and Kevin Durant (K.D.) ESPN’s Brian Windhorst has built a career around covering LeBron James and his LeBron, Inc. is a fascinating look at how the player and his close-knit handlers manage his career. Jock autobiographies are notoriously sanitized but Lamar Odom was surprisingly candid about college recruiting, sex, and the Kardashians in Darkness to Light.

Other sports books I enjoyed included Darren Rovell’s Gatorade history First in Thirst and Inside the Empire, Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff look at the New York Yankees of recent years. I read two autobiographies by sports figures who cut their careers short over concussion concerns: Dale Earnhardt, Jr.’s Racing to the Finish and Mind and Matter, written by MIT mathematician and former NFL lineman John Urschel.

Rob Neyer’s Power Ball, the baseball version of Sprawlball, explains how data and the obsession over home runs and strikeouts have transformed baseball. Albert Chen’s Billion-Dollar Fantasy, an insider account of FanDuel, Draft Kings and the emergence of daily fantasy, is an impressive piece of reporting. Before 2019 I had never read any of Tony Dungy’s books, figuring that living here in Tampa Bay for 20 years I knew all of his stories, but there’s a reason Quiet Strength and Uncommon are best sellers. Also inspirational is Tom Friend’s telling of the story of baseball coach Rich Donnelly’s The Chicken Runs at Midnight and The Road Back, a book I re-read by Michael Vitez about a University of Virginia swimmer who miraculously survived a bike crash and became an Ironman triathlete (and later a physician).

My favorite book of the year was K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches. Tyler Kepner rounded up most every living pitcher of note, including several who notoriously shun the media, and crafted a compelling look at not only the art of pitching but the history of the game.

I re-read nine books in 2019, including Fun is Good, the business motivational book I had the honor of writing with baseball marketer Mike Veeck in 2004. Mike’s daughter Rebecca suffered from retinitis pigmentosa and Batten disease and was featured in the book. Rebecca passed away in September at age 27. Though she was blind at a young age, she read hundreds of books via books-on-CD. Reading 100 books with perfect vision, or at least middle-age vision and reading glasses, is a more modest accomplishment.

Here’s the list of 101 books read, in order completed. Not sure if I’ll reach 100 in 2020, but if you’ve read this far and have suggestions, please let me know.

*Fiction

*Gregor the Overlander/Curse of the Warmbloods – Suzanne Collins (Jan.1)

*Gregor the Overlander/Marks of Secret – Suzanne Collins (Jan. 2)

*Gregor the OverlanderCode of Claw – Suzanne Collins (Jan. 3)

The Good Neighbor (Fred Rogers) – Maxwell King (Jan. 7)

*No Sunscreen for the Dead – Tim Dorsey (Jan. 23)

*Percy Jackson/The Lightning Thief – Rick Riordan (Jan. 24)

*Percy Jackson/The Sea of Monsters – Rick Riordan (Jan. 26)

*Percy Jackson/The Titan’s Curse – Rick Riordan  (Jan. 31)

Best American Sports Writing 2018  – Jeff Pearlman, editor – (Feb. 10)

Troublemaker – Leah Remini (Feb. 15)

*A Time to Kill – John Grisham (Feb. 20)

*Sycamore Row – John Grisham (Feb. 24)

Racing to the Finish: My Story – Dale Earnhardt Jr. (Feb. 26)

Digital Minimalism – Cal Newport (March 1)

Everyday Millionaires – Chris Hogan  (March 1)

The Minimalist Home – Joshua Becker (March 3)

Full Disclosure – Stormy Daniels (March 4)

Golden: The Miraculous Rise of Steph Curry – Marcus Thompson  (March 7)

*Grenade – Alan Gratz (March 10)

Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too – Clay Travis (March 16)

Duped – Abby Ellin (March 19)

The Chicken Runs at Midnight – Tom Friend (March 23)

The Price of Admission – Daniel Golden (March 30)

On Writing – Stephen King – (April 1)

*Elevation – Stephen King – (April 3)

*Code of Honor – Alan Gratz – (April 6)

Inside the Empire – Bob Klapisch and Paul Solotaroff (April 12)

Soulful Simplicity – Courtney Carver (April 16)

Work Optional – Tanja Hester (April 17)

Running Outside the Comfort Zone – Susan Lacke (April 19)

Anger Kills – Redford Williams & Virginia Williams (April 21)

Quiet Strength – Tony Dungy (April 24)

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck – Mark Manson (April 26)

*The Brooklyn Nine – Alan Gratz (April 27)

Uncommon – Tony Dungy (April 28)

*Ban this Book – Alan Gratz (April 30)

Manhood – Terry Crews (May 3)

*Percy Jackson/The Battle of the Labyrinth – Rick Riordan (May 9)

LeBron, Inc. – Brian Windhorst (May 10)

*Percy Jackson/The Last Olympian – Rick Riordan (May 13)

Money Players – Days and Nights in the New NBA – Armen Keteyian (May 18)

Out of Bounds – Inside NBA Culture of Rape, Violence, Crime – Jeff Benedict (May 18)

All the Way – My Life in Four Quarters – Joe Namath (May 19)

Basketball: A Love Story – Jackie MacMullan (May 26)

Finding My Voice – Mike Reilly (June 1)

*Beach House – James Patterson (June 5)

KD: Kevin Durant’s Relentless Pursuit to be the Greatest – Marcus Thompson (June 17)

My Love Story – Tina Turner (June 21)

Sprawlball – A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA – Kirk Goldsberry (June 25)

Raising Humans in a Digital World – Diana Graber (June 29)

Boom Town (Oklahoma City)– Sam Anderson (July 10)

The Soul of Basketball – Ian Thomsen (July 14)

*The Fifth Assassin – Brad Meltzer (July 17)

First in Thirst (Gatorade) – Darren Rovell (July 19)

Boys among Men: How Prep-to-Pro Gen Redefined NBA – Jonathan Abrams (July 23)

*The Reckoning – John Grisham (July 25)

Profitable Podcasting – Stephen Woessner (July 25)

Elon Musk – Ashlee Vance (July 28)

Forever Green – Chuck Leavell (July 28)

*Foul Shot – Doug Hornig (July 29)

Killing the SS – Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard (August 3)

Darkness to Light – Lamar Odom (August 6)

How to be a High School Superstar – Cal Newport (August 9)

So Good They Can’t Ignore You – Cal Newport (August 14)

Loose Balls – Terry Pluto (August 17)

*Awakened – James S. Murray/Darren Wearmouth (August 19)

*The Brink – James S. Murray/Darren Wearmouth (August 20)

Mind and Matter – John Urschel (August 24)

K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches – Tyler Kepner (August 28)

Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course Getting Kid into College – Andy Ferguson (Sept.1)

*Resistance – Jennifer A. Nielsen (Sept. 2)

The Boys of Dunbar – Alejandro Danois (Sept. 7)

*Words on Fire – Jennifer A. Nielsen (Sept. 8)

The Miracle of St. Anthony – Adrian Wojnarowski (Sept. 15)

*The Whistler – John Grisham (Sept. 17)

The Art of a Beautiful Game – Chris Ballard (Sept. 27)

Tip-Off: How the 1984 Draft Changed Basketball Forever – Filip Bondy (Sept. 29)

One Million Followers – Brendan Kane (Oct. 2)

*Swimsuit – James Patterson (Oct. 7)

The Last Great Game (Duke vs. Kentucky) – Gene Wojciechowski (Oct. 11)

The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, the Celtics – Gary M. Pomerantz (Oct. 16)

*Black Book – James Patterson (Oct. 17)

*Mistress – James Patterson (Oct. 20)

Their Life’s Work (1970s Pittsburgh Steelers) – Gary M. Pomerantz (Oct. 26)

*Front Lines – Michael Grant (Oct. 27)

Power Ball – Rob Neyer (Nov. 5)

Billion-Dollar Fantasy – Albert Chen (Nov. 10)

*Silver Stars –  Michael Grant (Nov. 14)

Wilt: 1962, the Night of 100 Points – Gary M. Pomerantz (Nov. 15)

*Purple Hearts – Michael Grant (Nov. 17)

Debt-Free U – Zac Bissonnette (Nov. 21)

The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning – Margareta Magnusson (Nov. 28)

*Hero – Michael Grant (Dec. 1)

The Road Back – Michael Vitez (Dec. 5)

*Plague Land: No Escape – Alex Scarrow (Dec. 7)

Fun is Good – Mike Veeck and Pete Williams (Dec. 13)

Stuffocation: Living More with Less – James Wallman (Dec. 14)

*Calico Joe – John Grisham (Dec. 15)

David and Goliath – Malcolm Gladwell (Dec. 19)

Debt-Free Degree – Anthony ONeal (Dec. 22)

The Boy Crisis – Warren Farrell & John Gray (Dec. 27)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s a flashback in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” showing how Andy Dufresne tunneled his way out of a prison cell with a tiny rock hammer at night, covering the growing hole with a poster of Rita Hayworth and later Raquel Welch.

After each digging session, Andy collected the pieces of dirt and concrete and filled his pockets, concealing the evidence of his planned escape. The flashback shows him discretely emptying his pockets in the prison yard each day.

It took the fictitious Andy Dufresne, played by a young Tim Robbins, 19 years to tunnel his way out of prison by removing the barrier little by little.

I’ve found Andy’s process an apt metaphor for minimalism, especially my own life as I prepare to downsize from 20 years in the same home. It’s a prison of sorts, a home that’s been too big for too long for our family of four. I shudder to think how much more time and money we’d have now and over the last two decades by living smaller and investing more.

If the cost of anything is the amount of life exchanged for it, then my wife and I traded much of our thirties and forties paying for and maintaining a large home. There are perhaps three reasons for having a big home – huge family, many houseguests, lots of entertaining – and we can’t justify it on any of those grounds.

It’s not just the initial cost of the home in 1999, which was significant, but also the ongoing expense in terms of taxes and insurance, to say nothing of the time maintaining the home and a huge yard. In recent years, it seems we’ve welcomed more contractors and repairmen into the home than guests and family members.

As we prepare for the move to a smaller home in the next six to 12 months, I take an Andy Dufresne approach to each day, doing the equivalent of dumping my pockets each time I leave the house. If I’m going to make daily progress, stuff must go every day. Here are four areas where I do just that:

FREEBIES: It’s understandably difficult to unload things we paid dearly for, either emotionally because of the cost or practically in terms of finding a buyer. But why do we build our clutter prisons with freebie t-shirts and promotional items? I’ve stopped the inflow by turning down giveaways but still am amazed at how many freebies I continue to discover cluttering my home and my life. If it was free, it’s not for me.

FURNITURE: The less stuff we own, the less need for furniture. Why own massive bookshelves, entertainment centers and armoires? My next home, whether owned or (more likely) rented, will include built-in clothes drawers in closets. I no longer want or need to own a dresser. There is perhaps no other consumer category that costs so much, takes up so much space, and is so hard to sell at any price than furniture.

If sitting is the new smoking, as some suggest, why own so many chairs and couches? Prisoner Andy Dufresne couldn’t wait to get his hour of time outside each day. So why with all of our freedom are we so content to spend most of our time inside sitting?

PAPER: The two most important minimalist tools are a quality shredder and scanner (or scanning service). There are few documents that must be kept in physical form. One of the biggest challenges is “sentimental paper” such as love letters, photos from the pre-digital era, children’s artwork, report cards, and perhaps your work product – all of which can be scanned. I’ve spent much of my career writing for magazines and recently had more than 1,500 pages of articles scanned, eliminating the need for five thick binders of articles in plastic sleeves (The scanning service kept the articles and I donated the sleeves and binders to a back-to-school drive.)

ENTERTAINMENT: Like many people, I’ve stopped purchasing books, CDs, and DVDs because of digital accessibility. I prefer reading physical books, but read only what’s accessible through the library, which is most everything if you’re willing to wait, at most, a few weeks. Each trip to the library I bring a bag of books I no longer need to donate toward the library’s monthly book sale.

I’ve donated CDs after uploading the ones I want to digital files and DVDs as well. There’s no longer a need to own entertainment. Heck, Andy Dufresne entertained himself for years at Shawshank with only books from the library and a rock hammer to carve a chess set out of rocks. He made beautiful chess pieces and the project proved a good cover story for his real need for a rock hammer.

I’ve purged all physical entertainment, but kept my Shawshank Redemption DVD. There might soon come a time when a DVD player is obsolete; I already can find the film on-demand. But rather than keep it concealed in the (since discarded) entertainment armoire, I display it on my mostly empty bookshelf, a visual reminder to keep tunneling to freedom every day.

 

 

Could you lock your phone in a safe for 9 days and nights?

That’s what I did earlier this month when I boarded a cruise ship for the first time in nearly 10 years, leaving it in the cabin safe for the duration of the cruise.

During our last cruise in 2009, I did not have a smart phone. Social media barely existed. Nor did many of the apps now part of everyday life.

My then-phone did not include an international coverage option. My wife and I phoned home just once that week, using a calling card (remember them?) and then only by navigating an ancient pay phone in Cozumel, Mexico.

These days, wireless companies are happy to sell you a cruise ship package. The cruise lines provide an expensive WI-FI option or a slightly cheaper “social” WI-FI package that provides access to social media sites only. Or for $5, a cruise ship app that enables the user to check activity schedules, make dinner reservations and create a list of friends on board to instant message.

I wanted no part of any of this. Nothing against friends that post hourly updates from their vacations, including cruises, but I want less digital media in my life, especially on vacation. So I turned the phone off for the duration, even in Cozumel, which my wireless provider now includes for data and voice.

I’ve written about my frustrations with cell phones, from the people who text and scroll through social media feeds in church, yoga class, and the gym to the ones idling at stop lights in front of me long after the signal turns green. As a parent of teenagers, I worry about how screen-addicted kids will function in a world where success often depends on extended focus, deep work, and mindfulness.

So I wasn’t about to spend my nine-night cruise, including four days at sea, staring at a screen to communicate with friends and family not on the cruise and keep up with politics, sports and everything else back home.

As a result, I read three books, worked out twice a day, attended classes on meditation and juggling, watched four comedy shows, twice sung karaoke (badly), competed in two costume contests, attended a class where I made props for those costumes, interviewed five people, and learned the following four things from ditching the phone.

TIME SLOWS DOWN: Sure I was on vacation and on a cruise ship where the phone would have been useless had I not paid for WI-FI anyway. (Those who bought it found it unreliable.) But I’ve been on vacation in the USA where I’ve been guilty of checking email, sports scores, and social media. Those vacations, in many respects, seemed just as hurried and frazzled as non-vacation time.

Without a phone, I had an abundance of time since I didn’t fill all of the gaps with the phone or the Internet. I’ve succeeded at this in recent years by carrying a book everywhere I go, boosting the number of books read. Not having a phone gave me a sense of mindfulness and purpose. I improved my juggling and meditation skills, finished second in a costume contest, created a new workout, and at times found myself staring out at the ocean for 10 to 15 minute intervals.

CAMERAS WORK GREAT: Phones have replaced cameras, but this was no excuse to use a phone on the cruise either. I brought along my 9-year-old DSL camera, finally using non-automatic features consistently, perhaps because I had plenty of time to practice them. We spent plenty of time in and on the water during shore excursions, so a Go Pro camera was more than adequate and actually better than a phone camera.

Did I take fewer photos? Probably. But when you’re not looking at every moment as a recordable, sharable event, you live in the moment and enjoy it more.

WORK WON’T MISS YOU: None of us are irreplaceable at work. They can get along without you. If you have a full-time employer, there’s no reason to go without a phone on a cruise; they know you’re gone. I’m self-employed and occasionally get rush gigs that need to be done within 48 hours. I was afraid I’d miss out on a couple of those.

In reality, I missed nothing. I told my main clients I’d be gone and nothing was waiting via email or text that I could not deal with on the day I returned.

NO INFORMATION DIETS TASTE GREAT: Cruise ship cabin televisions have news channels, though we kept ours tuned to that screen that tracks the ship’s position. The sports bar on our boat featured four ESPN channels, though they were tweaked with more international programming. I did pop in a couple of times to check college basketball scores, but otherwise I missed everything that transpired during that nine-day stretch.

Actually, I didn’t miss anything.

 

 

 

 

 

After reaching a goal of reading 52 books in 2017 (finishing with 61) I set out to read 100 in 2018. The idea was not just to read more, but to remain mindful and focused in a culture that seems hell bent on having every second occupied by noise and distraction.

It’s not easy. We live in a world where people bring smart phones to church, yoga class, and the gym, three places where presumably they’re trying to engage in mindfulness. It’s impossible to wait anywhere – medical office, airport, auto shop – without being surrounded by blaring televisions. Sports event operators have determined that loud sound effects must continue at all times, even during play. Every store and restaurant plays music – loudly – without interruption.

Even the public library has thrown in the towel. My local branch has a room set aside for kids to play video games. This has become so popular that they have added computer monitors in the newspaper and magazine reading area since, apparently, there are so few readers of those items that they won’t mind hearing kids shouting at screens as they play video games.

So the library, a place once meant for quiet reading, is now a Fortnite gathering place.

Reading 100 books in 2018 would prove challenging. My rules were the same as 2017. No skimming. Fitness books, cookbooks, and non-narrative travel books would not count toward the total. The vast majority should be non-fiction.

I fell shy of the century mark, finishing with 79 (55 non-fiction, 24 fiction). Unlike the 61 books of 2017, I read more fiction and included some shorter books. (My 79 books ranked only second in my house as my school librarian wife, as usual, read more than 100).

Here’s what I learned from those 79 books and the process of reading them:

EVEN FEWER PEOPLE READ BOOKS IN PUBLIC – I made it a point in 2018 to look for people reading books in public. I eat a lot at Chipotle, a place where you’re likely to wait in line. Not once did I see someone reading a book, though one young cashier would comment on what I was reading, as if to say how cute it was that this guy her father’s age still read books.

I took my older son to get his drivers license – the one place guaranteed to require a wait – and saw nobody among the 100-plus people in the DMV waiting area reading a book.

The one place people still read books? That would be airplanes. Maybe it’s because we don’t yet have 100 percent Wi-Fi saturation. Perhaps it’s because using electronic devices is not yet allowed for entire flights. Maybe it’s because people know to bring reading material for the inevitable delays. I still was usually among the only ones reading a book in a terminal, where Wi-Fi is now universal.

READING IN PUBLIC CAN BE DANGEROUS: My sons swim and play basketball. Which means I spend a lot of time at practices and games/meets, which have a lot of down time. Swim parents understand the grind of spending five hours at a morning swim meet session to see a child swim for perhaps 7 minutes, less if they compete in sprint events.

This year, however, being a sports parent became dangerous. On two occasions at AAU basketball tournaments, I somehow managed to focus on my book intently enough to miss the escalating arguments around me. Thankfully I looked up in time to move, avoiding getting caught between opposing team parents coming to blows.

BOOKS ARE CHEAPER ALL THE TIME: This is because with fewer people competing for books at the public library, it’s easier to reserve and quickly receive new releases. As an author, I’m not proud to say that I checked out 74 of the 79 books I read from the library. But this is a blog about lean living, after all, so it makes sense to save money and avoid accumulating. Plus I left Amazon reviews for many books and those are more valuable to authors.

READING KEEPS KIDS READING: We had two teenage boys in our home for the first time in 2018 and keeping males of that age reading books is a challenge. As much as I’d like to think they follow my example, I’ve realized the key is to read quality young adult fiction together. Our older son even dusted off and re-read his five Gregor the Overlander books, perhaps the best of the many young adult series we’ve read over the years and arguably the best work of Suzanne Collins, better known for The Hunger Games.

We also read the final five of Alex Scarrow’s nine-book Time Riders series, which accounted for four of the five books we could not find in the library and thus purchased. We also enjoyed the first two books in Scarrow’s Plague Land series, Michael Grant’s two prequels to his terrific Gone saga, and the addictive historical fiction of Alan Gratz (Refugee, Prisoner B-3087, and Projekt 1065).

I always let our guys read anything by Florida writers Tim Dorsey and Carl Hiaasen, who unfortunately combined for just one new book in 2018. Dorsey’s Pope of Palm Beach was outstanding.

Mira Grant’s zombie apocalypse trilogy (Feed, Deadline, Blackout), which features as heroes a group of ass-kicking teenage bloggers who master the new media world and the world in general, was the dark horse hit of the year in our house.

As for my solo reading, it fell mostly into three categories:

CHILD REARING: As the parent of teenagers in a screen-addicted, micromanaged, helicopter-parent world in which little from my own childhood seems applicable, I’m always on the prowl for good advice. I found plenty this year in Ron Lieber’s The Opposite of Spoiled, Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology, The Trouble with Boys by Peg Tyre, and The Self-Driven Child by Ned Johnson and William Stixrud.

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales should be mandatory reading for every parent with minor kids and ranked among the more disturbing books I read all year. Sara Zaske’s Achtung Baby about life as an American raising kids in Germany was a fascinating look at how Germans raise kids in a hands-off, free-range manner most U.S. Gen X parents will recognize from their own childhoods. And Lenore Skenazy’s Free-Range Kids details how we no longer let our kids do anything without adult supervision.

After reading Dave Grossman’s Assassination Generation: Video Games, Aggression, and the Psychology of Killing, which analyzes the link between videogames and violence, especially school shootings, I plan to read the rest of his work in 2019.

FINANCIAL/MINIMALISM: This is a blog about lean living, after all. So I read Scott Trench’s Set for Life: Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream, Crash Proof 2.0 by Peter Schiff, Vicki Robin’s Your Money or Your Life, and Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money. I read Charles Long’s How to Survive without a Salary, figuring most of us must at some point.

Tim Wu’s The Attention Merchants is an exhaustive chronicle of how marketers, entertainment producers and Silicon Valley types have stolen our attention over the last 200 years. It might have been my most thought-provoking book of the year. If we think in terms of what we give our attention to – how we pay attention – it changes how we use our most precious asset: time.

There were a barrage of books and articles in 2018 on how to focus in a screen-addicted world. Cal Newport’s Deep Work is a good start.

William McRaven’s Make Your Bed and Carl Hiassen’s Team Rodent were the shortest books I read all year. McRaven’s was little more than a print version of his compelling keynote speech, but a powerful message. I read Hiassen’s epic takedown of Disney when it came out in 1998 and this year it served as a  reminder of why I’ve never taken my kids to one of its theme parks.

SPORTS: Though I’m no longer a full-time sports writer, I still follow sports and in 2018 wanted to read some books that have long been on my list.

I understand now why some rank David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game as the greatest sports book ever. If you read that book on the late 1970s NBA and Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps book about Michael Jordan and his era (as I did in 2018), you’d have an in-depth understanding of the history of the NBA.

What a shame that the exhaustive reporting that Joan Ryan did for her 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes about the abusive and insular USA Gymnastics culture did not bring about change. Perhaps the horrors of Larry Nassar could have been avoided.

I’m a sucker for any sort of season-inside sports book where a talented writer follows a high school team. Amy Bass’s One Goal, which chronicles a team of mostly Somali refugees playing for a Maine high school soccer team, rightly ranks among the best sports books of the year. Hope: A School, a Team, a Dream by Bill Reynolds, published in 2017, shows that the hoop dream dramas chronicled in 1994 by Darcy Frey in The Last Shot, which I finally read, have not changed.

Other sports books I enjoyed included Chris Nashawaty’s Caddyshack: Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story, Jeff Pearlman’s Football for a Buck account of the USFL, Ben Reiter’s look at the success of the Houston Astros (AstroBall) and Baseball Cop by Eddie Dominguez. I didn’t think there was anything more I needed to know about Tiger Woods, but when you put the investigative team of Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian together (for a book called simply Tiger Woods), you get a lot of new material and a fresh perspective.

Michael Sokolove has an underrated career of quality sports investigative work. His latest, The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino, is an awkward title but a thorough expose on how corrupt and sleazy college basketball has become. Gilbert Gaul’s Billion Dollar Ball provides a similar look at college football.

My new favorite author is Mark Leibovich, whose Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times exposed NFL owners and the media who cover them as possessing similar egos. Leibovich mostly covers politics and his earlier book This Town, about the 2012 Presidential campaign, was just as entertaining. Who knew there were so many similarities between David Gregory and Adam Schefter?

As the parent of a competitive swimmer, I’m always looking for great swimming reads. Not sure we’ve had any iconic books yet in this field, though I read some solid ones in 2018 in Michael Silver’s Golden Girl (about Natalie Coughlin and the Cal swim team) and Anthony Ervin’s Chasing Water. Missy Franklin’s 2016 book Relentless Spirit left me thinking she would retire soon and two weeks after I finished she did just that.

Some books don’t fit into any of those three categories. Here’s the list of 79, in order read and date finished. My goal for 2019 is to (finally) read 100. If you’ve read this far and have suggestions, please let me know.

*Fiction

*Refugee – Alan Gratz (Jan. 1)

The Opposite of Spoiled – Ron Lieber (Jan. 3)

*Prisoner B-3087 – Alan Gratz (Jan. 4)

*The Party – Robyn Harding (Jan. 4)

Set for Life: Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream – Scott Trench (Jan. 6)

*Projekt 1065 – Alan Gratz (Jan. 12)

Crash Proof 2.0 – Peter Schiff (Jan. 22)

*TimeRiders: Gates of Rome – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 2)

*TimeRiders: City of Shadows – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 5)

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell (Feb. 10)

*The Pope of Palm Beach – Tim Dorsey (Feb. 14)

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology – Adam Alter (Feb. 22)

*Time Riders: The Pirate Kings – Alex Scarrow (Feb. 24)

Your Money or Your Life – Vicki Robin (Feb. 28)

The Trouble with Boys – Peg Tyre (March 4)

One Goal – Amy Bass (March 11)

How to Survive without a Salary – Charles Long (March 14)

The Self-Driven Child – Ned Johnson and William Stixrud (March 20)

*Time Riders: The Mayan Prophecy – Alex Scarrow (March 23)

*Time Riders: The Infinity Cage – Alex Scarrow (March 30)

Getting to Us – Seth Davis (April 5)

The Attention Merchants – Tim Wu (April 10)

*Diary of a Wimpy Kid/The Getaway – Jeff Kinney (April 11)

*The Finisher – David Baldacci (April 15)

Make Your Bed – Willam McRaven (April 17)

Seal Team Six – Howard Wasdin (April 21)

Team Rodent – Carl Hiaasen (April 27)

Natural Born Heroes – Christopher McDougall (May 1)

Lou – Lou Piniella (May 12)

*The Keeper – David Baldacci (May 17)

Superfans – George Dohrmann (May 20)

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers – Nancy Jo Sales (May 22)

I’m Keith Hernandez – Keith Hernandez (May 24)

Tiger Woods – Jeff Benedict-Armen Keteyian (May 28)

The Day My Butt Went Psycho – Andy Griffiths (June 12)

*Plague Land – Alex Scarrow (June 24)

Hope: A School, a Team, a Dream – Bill Reynolds (June 30)

How to Raise Kind Kids – Thomas Lickona (July 1)

*Feed – Mira Grant (July 5)

Boundaries – Henry Cloud (July 8)

*Deadline – Mira Grant (July 19)

The Breaks of the Game – David Halberstam (July 22)

Caddyshack: Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story – Chris Nashawaty (July 26)

*Blackout – Mira Grant (July 28)

Media Madness – Howard Kurtz (Aug. 2)

Glow Kids – Nicholas Kardaras (Aug. 5)

Deep Work – Cal Newport (August 9)

Playing for Keeps (Michael Jordan) – David Halberstam (Aug. 12)

Achtung Baby – Sara Zaske (Aug. 18)

The Last Shot – Darcy Frey (Aug. 21)

Free-Range Kids – Lenore Skenazy (Aug. 25)

Winning Bigly – Scott Adams (Aug. 28)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – Michelle McNamara (Aug. 31)

*Monster – Michael Grant (Sept. 4)

Astroball – Ben Reiter (Sept. 6)

Baseball Cop – Eddie Dominguez (Sept. 10)

Freakonomics – Steven Levitt & Steven Dubner (Sept. 13)

If You’re in My Office, It’s Already Too Late – James Sexton (Sept. 16)

The Greatest Salesman in the World – Og Mandino (Sept. 19)

Until it Hurts – Mark Hyman (Oct. 3)

*Her Pretty Face – Robyn Harding (Oct. 10)

Football for a Buck – Jeff Pearlman (Oct. 13)

The Man I Never Met – Adam Schefter (Oct. 14)

The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino – Michael Sokolove (Oct. 18)

Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times – Mark Leibovich (Oct. 28)

*Plague Land Reborn – Alex Scarrow – (Oct. 31)

The Soul of Money – Lynne Twist – (Nov. 6)

Billion Dollar Ball – Gilbert Gaul – (Nov. 12)

This Town – Mark Leibovich – (Nov. 26)

*Villain – Michael Grant – (Nov. 29)

Don’t Worry, Make Money – Richard Carlson (Dec. 4)

Golden Girl – Michael Silver & Natalie Coughlin (Dec. 8)

Relentless Spirit – Missy Franklin (Dec. 10)

Little Girls in Pretty Boxes – Joan Ryan (Dec. 13)

*The Darkest Minds – Alexandra Bracken (Dec. 26)

Assassination Generation – Dave Grossman (Dec. 29)

*Gregor the Overlander – Suzanne Collins (Dec. 29)

Chasing Water – Elegy of an Olympian – Anthony Ervin (Dec. 30)

*Gregor the Overlander: The Prophecy of Bane – Suzanne Collins (Dec. 31)

 

During my senior year of high school, back in the Stone Age of 1986-87, a time when cash was king and debit cards were rare, I worked in what was then called a video rental store.

There I had a wonderful manager who taught me how to maintain a cash drawer. Bills were to face up and in the same direction with the top of the dead presidents’ heads to the left. Change was to be handed back in ascending order, counting up. If a customer gave a twenty for a $3.79 purchase, you’d start with the coins, then the picture of George Washington followed by Abraham Lincoln and then Alexander Hamilton (not a president, just a future musical inspiration) – all face up and in the same direction. After all, people wanted to put the cash back in their wallets neatly.

The “associates,” as we were called, counted off the change like this: “Okay, we have $3.79. Here’s four (handing back the coins), five (picture of George), ten (Abe) and twenty (Alex).”

“You’re showing respect for the customer,” my manager said, “You’re also showing respect for the business, your work, and the money itself. Don’t ever forget that.”

Thirty years later, I still haven’t forgotten. In fact, I think of it most every time a cashier hands me back change with the bills in random order, some upside down and facing every direction. Change rarely is counted back. Even at banks, money comes out of ATMs and from tellers in multiple directions.

Back at the video store, I prided myself on having a cash drawer that matched to the penny at the end of the night. This was in the heyday of video cassette rentals and I usually had more than $1,000 in cash in my drawer.

Now this might sound like the OCD ramblings of a middle-age man. “Dude, don’t you use credit and debit like everyone else? Use Apple pay. Who carries cash?”

Maybe. But this cavalier attitude toward cash is more a sign of a culture that no longer shows respect for the customer, business, work ethic, and the money itself. Customer service is a lost art. Nobody can handle cash – literally in the case of cashiers.

Those who benefit most from our consumer culture on steroids know that the greater the separation from your cash, the more you’ll spend. You’ll drop more with debit or credit since you can’t feel the cash leaving your hands. Cruise ships, theme parks, and cashless resorts understand this, giving customers charge cards and not accepting cash.

There’s even a movement by some in government to do away with cash altogether since, after all, cash is used in most illegal activities. Of course, if we eliminate cash we will leave an electronic trail on every deal, making everything taxable.

Such a move would take Americans further away from their cash, thus increasing consumer spending. Every financial guru encourages people to go on a cash diet. Spend only what you have on hand. Cut up plastic and pay with cash since it becomes more real. You feel the pain.

I learn a lot from standing in line at Chipotle. I’m fascinated by how so many teenagers have debit cards. Maybe they have jobs, though I haven’t seen a teen mow a lawn in 20 years. When our kids were a few years younger, we struggled to find babysitters. Teens are busy, though few seem to be working.

More likely, parents gave these kids debit cards, continually adding money. Thus teens rarely feel what it’s like to fork over cash – even of someone else’s money.

Since my teenage years working at the video store (RIP, Erol’s!), our national debt has soared to $20 trillion. Things that were fairly unusual in 1987 – car leasing, college loans, kitchen remodeling – have become standard operating procedure for many, who view consumer debt as the norm. If you can’t afford it, finance it. Sacrifice tomorrow for today.

Sure, income levels have hit a plateau or gone down. My college-educated video store manager once mentioned his $38,000 salary in 1987 – $82,000 in today’s dollars. There aren’t many retail managers making $82,000 today. (Again, RIP Erol’s!)

Even if incomes had risen, could they possibly keep up with the insatiable appetite for spending?

They might — if we spent more time thinking about how we handle cash.

 

 

 

Since committing to living lean, I’ve discovered a number of people who watch little or no television. It’s probably no coincidence that these usually are wildly successful and happy folks.

In 2010 and 2011, I gave up television for Lent. I didn’t think I’d make it through Lent. I certainly didn’t think it would create lasting change. Instead, it’s been one of the best decisions of my life.

I always had made vague commitments for Lent – chocolate, sweets, pizza – but never followed through. But in 2010 and ’11, I made it all 40-plus days without television. The biggest challenge was daily life, where we now have televisions in places where it was unthinkable just 20 years ago: airports, doctors offices, gym locker rooms, auto service waiting areas, even taxis. Heck, those of us over 40 can remember when many restaurant bars did not have TV.

When you give up TV for Lent, you’ll miss the Academy Awards. In certain years, like 2010, you’ll miss the Winter Olympics. You’ll miss the best time of year for college basketball.

Actually, in 2010 and 2011 I didn’t miss anything. That’s why my wife thought it was lame of me to give up television for Lent; I don’t watch much anyway.

I have not watched a network television program regularly since the first season of Survivor in 2000. I have not seen a single episode of American Idol, The Walking Dead, Lost, Dancing with the Stars, 24, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or most anything else that has debuted in the last 15 years. I’ve enjoyed several series on HBO, especially Six Feet Under, Rome, and True Blood, but I’ve never watched Game of Thrones, its biggest current hit.

Since True Blood signed off in August of 2014, I have not watched a series of any sort. I’m told there’s some great stuff available. But I have no desire to watch since I’ve broken the habit.

I grew up in a home where my parents refused to get cable TV, but I still watched a fair amount of network programming. I can recite dialogue with any of the 200-plus episodes of M*A*S*H, for instance.

But gradually my viewing has diminished to almost nothing. Maybe it came with having kids or taking up endurance sports. Maybe it came with the lack of quality programming. Maybe it came from transitioning from being a full-time sportswriter to a journalist focused more on performance and fitness. Maybe it came with Disney purchasing ABC/ESPN and making it seem like an infomercial. Maybe it came with the transition of television from news and entertainment to talking heads yelling about politics and sports.

Because of the non-stop chatter surrounding sports, you need not watch the games themselves anymore to follow along. I have not watched an NFL game other than parts of the Super Bowl since 2007 and still feel like I can keep up with it by reading online for 20 minutes or so a day during football season. (Heck, millions of people watch six hours of NFL every Sunday but are too drunk to remember any of it.)

How much of our lives do we surrender to television? The DVR was supposed to let us spend less time watching TV since we could zip through the commercials. Instead, it’s made it convenient to record and later watch stuff we probably would not have back when it took some effort to program the VCR. Some actually brag about their binge viewing, a term that didn’t exist five years ago, as it it’s an accomplishment to lie in front of the couch for an entire weekend. (Yeah, but I saved time by watching it all at once!) Technology has advanced to where we now can watch TV anytime, anyplace, on a screen of any size.

Most people design their homes around television. There are home theaters, man caves, entire wings of the house devoted to wasting away watching television. Here in Florida, people have TVs outside, too. We once placed objects of importance on the mantel. It’s telling that many people now mount a flatscreen in that spot. Hey, it’s what they consider most important.

Nobody has time to work out. But everyone has time for television. Some people make half-hearted compromises, watching TV while plodding along on a treadmill or stationary bike, usually getting the predictable modest results.

If you want to discover more time, turn off TV. If you want to get better sleep, turn off TV at least an hour before bed. If you want to have more sex, take the TV out of the bedroom.

When I gave up TV for Lent in 2010 and 2011 many exciting opportunities came my way. Maybe that was coincidence.

Thankfully, my crash television diet instilled a new habit. Over the last six yeas, I’ve watched little beyond college basketball.

I haven’t missed much.

 

 

I play a game with people in the gym, though they’re unaware of it.

When I see someone near me fiddling with a smart phone, which happens pretty much every time in the gym, I see how many sets I can do in the time they’re playing with the phone. My record is 11.

That occurred one morning when I was doing a CrossFit-style WOD (workout of the day) consisting of pull-ups, pushups, air squats, burpees, moutain climbers, and crunches. I do four sets of each, non-stop, for a total of 24 sets. It takes just 20 minutes and it’s one of the toughest, though most beneficial, 20 minutes I spend all week.

One day I made it through nearly half the session while a guy played with his phone between sets of dips. I imagine he scrolled through social media and email, perhaps sent a text or two, or scanned the headlines.

Regardless of what he was doing, he was sabotaging his workout. Not only was he resting way too long between sets, he was bringing no focus or intensity to his training and, thus, likely would receive little benefit.

It’s a shame since he accomplished the hard part by getting to the gym before 6 a.m. He paid for the gym membership, after all, and at least on some level committed to training. But like so many people he no longer can disconnect from the digital world for even an hour. Instead of feeling the endorphin rush of training, he craves the dopamine fix of digital media feedback in the form of social media likes, text responses, emails and other notifications.

Instead of working out, he’s suffering from fear of missing out (FOMO) even at 6 a.m.

I’ve trained at the same gym for more than a decade, long enough to see the smart phone era evolve. I marvel at how people set their $700 phones down on weight benches or even the floor where they can be stomped on or crushed by dumbbells, both of which I’ve seen happen. Some people even carry around iPads to serve as nothing more than giant stopwatches.

Disconnecting from media has numerous benefits in the gym. When you focus more on the movement of your body, you train more effectively. It’s impossible to create intensity and focus when you’re stopping for minutes at a time to visit the world of social media and email. It takes several minutes to return to a focused state at a desk, let alone in the gym.

I train at 5:30 a.m. And since I live on the East Coast, there’s nobody that needs to reach me at that hour. That’s one reason I train at that time; nobody can steal it away from me. Turning to my smart phone would be no different than inviting business commitments into the gym with me. Not people who want to train with me; that would be fine. No, it would be like bringing work to the gym.

One reason CrossFit has soared in popularity is that it forces athletes to train non-stop. If you’re following the designated WOD, your goal is to do AMRAP (as many reps as possible) in the allotted time. Not only that, there’s a communal aspect to it where you’re pushing your fellow athletes.

Which isn’t to say phones don’t appear in CrossFit boxes. But thankfully the culture is one where it seems like a breach of etiquette to do so. That’s not as true in conventional gyms. I take a 5:45 a.m. spin class several times a week and I’ll often see folks checking their phones during class.

Then there’s yoga, which many people turn to in order to find that mind-body calmness that’s so lacking in modern society. You’d think people might leave their phones in the car or in a locker. No such luck. Instead of the lying or sitting on mats quietly before class, some will look at their phones. When there’s a pause in the practice – say for a water break – some will glance at their phones. Even in yoga, some cannot disconnect. No surprise since some can’t make it through church services without checking a phone.

Call waiting and digital media made it possible for us to screen calls and take them on our time. But we defeat that purpose by interrupting ourselves throughout the day to check social media and email.

Never is that more apparent in the gym, which should be a sacred time.

My CrossFit WOD is coming up tomorrow. My goal is 12 sets while someone near me is on the phone.

Sadly, it’s a goal I’ll probably reach.