What is a modern superpower? According to World Population Review, the United States, China, the European Union, India, and Russia were considered global superpowers as of 2022. But you didn’t come here for geopolitics, so I’d like to introduce a very different idea about modern superpowers.

I’m a licensed social worker, and I’ve been working in the mental health field since 2015. One perk of being a therapist is that you get to learn all kinds of skills for navigating life’s challenges.

I’ve gravitated toward Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced “act”). Broadly speaking, CBT involves skills to manage thoughts, feelings, and behaviors more effectively. ACT is a mindfulness-based offshoot of traditional CBT with an emphasis on living by your values. I pass these tools onto my clients, and I use them in my own life.

Over the last decade, health problems have limited my ability to use a smartphone without significant pain. As a result, I’ve had to rethink the role of my phone and other devices in my life. The modern world is built around smartphones and constant connectivity, so making these changes has been challenging at times.

At the same time, drastically reducing my phone usage has been liberating. My attention has improved, I’ve developed a deep reading habit, I consistently get 7 to 8 hours of sleep, I can comfortably be alone with my thoughts, and social interactions are much more enjoyable.

My anxiety has decreased significantly, in large part because I’m no longer perpetually “on-call” for an unpredictable stream of communication and alerts. I’ve developed a much stronger sense of control over my self-image, especially since I disconnected from social media. My mind now has the space to harness the real power of all those CBT and ACT tools.

A Growing Disconnect

I started to notice a pattern as I made these changes, especially in the last few years. When I would mention to people that I was doing a lot of reading or that I had developed good sleep habits, they would respond with some version of “I would love to be able to do that, but it’s impossible.”

I noticed a big discrepancy between what people want out of life and what they think they can realistically accomplish. I would hear people complain about the things they see on social media but then watch them stay stuck in a cycle of never-ending engagement with it. A life without any sort of attention span started to become a given. And I began to sense a pervasive atmosphere of anxiety, dissatisfaction, restlessness, and lack of meaning in life.

This led me to start thinking and saying things such as “reading books feels like a superpower these days” or “being away from my phone is my superpower.” All those skills I learned as a therapist also began to feel like superpowers. Even the ability to sit in a doctor’s waiting room for 10 to 15 minutes without looking at my phone and just being alone with my thoughts started to seem like a rare ability. It began to feel like I had stepped out of the Matrix.

The Tradeoffs of Technological Progress

Technology has moved incredibly fast in the past couple decades, and for all the good that has come from that, just about every area of well-being has been negatively impacted as well. As a result, I’ve come to believe that abilities such as healthy thinking habits, emotion regulation, reading books, focusing on one thing at a time, being fully present with other people, and getting enough sleep truly are superpowers in today’s world.

The behaviors and norms we’ve accepted have put an unreasonably low ceiling on the quality of our existence. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Stepping out of the norm of nonstop immersion in the digital world creates conditions that can unlock a deeper and more meaningful life.

Reading books expands your mind, stimulates deep thinking, and improves your attention. Conversely, doomscrolling or watching endless TikTok videos leads to shallow and overly simplistic thinking, exploits your emotions, and shatters your attention.

Focusing deeply on something important for an extended period of time instills a sense of fulfillment, confidence, competence, and accomplishment. Contrast that with the feelings of frustration, ineffectiveness, and exhaustion that come from constantly multitasking and interrupting something important to check your phone or smartwatch.

Perhaps most importantly of all, being fully present with the people around us strengthens a feeling of human connection, which is one of our most fundamental needs. The loneliness epidemic is real, and healthy boundaries with the digital world go a long way toward reclaiming the kind of real-world social connection we all need.

Time-Tested Ideas, Applied to Today’s World

Technology isn’t getting any less addictive, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers aren’t going to stop designing devices and platforms that capture as much of your attention as possible. So if you’d like to spend less time on your phone, start reading books, be more present and engaged with the people around you, improve your sleep, get a better handle on your thoughts and feelings, and reclaim your attention, I’d like to help.

My aim here is to draw on my professional and personal experience to propose ideas for living a good life in a rapidly changing world. CBT and ACT skills are not only great for improving one’s mental health; they also offer useful tools for developing a more intentional approach to how you use your phone, social media, and the multitude of other technologies and platforms that have intruded on daily life. I’ll show you that it is possible to reap the undeniable benefits of modern technology without letting it intrude on the important parts of life.

Some of the self-improvement and mental health content that has sprung up in recent years has reduced the complexity of modern life to oversimplified platitudes that don’t translate to anything helpful or practical. You won’t find any of that here. This isn’t about quick fixes or life hacks.

I’d like to offer something different by presenting what I think are some of the best ideas from CBT and ACT and applying them to the challenges of modern life. You don’t need a mental health diagnosis to benefit from these tools; in fact, they are largely rooted in ancient wisdom that has helped people for thousands of years and stood the test of time. Much of the mental health and self-improvement content out there also tends to underestimate or miss completely the role of technology, but it will be a focal point here.

A central theme I’ll be talking about is developing a sense of agency. The design features of modern technology have short-circuited self-direction by using basic behavioral principles to keep people engaged even when they know they should disconnect. Additionally, some of the recent ideas about mental health and wellness skew toward helplessness or unrealistic expectations rather than a healthy sense of self-empowerment.

I’ll be talking a lot about three interconnected ways to cultivate agency: an internal locus of control, a growth mindset, and self-compassion. I didn’t come up with these concepts, however I would like to offer my take on them and present a practical way to apply them to your life.

I’ll also point you toward the quality content that does exist out there, including blogs, books, and podcasts. I’ll try to direct you toward the people who can offer more expertise, explain certain ideas better than I can, or provide a useful counterpoint.

My Generational Perspective

I’d like to provide a little more information about my background for some context about where my ideas come from.

I was born in 1987, which puts me right in the middle of the millennial generation. I grew up with the 90s and early 2000s versions of the Internet, and in middle and high school I spent a ton of time (i.e. way too much time) on AOL Instant Messenger. I have a few early memories of cassette tapes, but the majority of my music listening consisted of CDs and eventually downloading music.

I got my first cell phone at age 16, which was a “brick” phone with pretty limited capabilities. After that I owned flip phones for several years and texted using T9 word. I was a little late to the smartphone, and after a few years of naïvely proclaiming that I only needed my phone to text and call, I got an iPhone toward the end of 2011 and have used iPhones ever since.

The original version of Facebook launched shortly before I started college in 2005, and I became a regular user through its eventual evolution into a worldwide social networking platform. I’ve never used TikTok, Snapchat, or Instagram (with one caveat below). I made Twitter and LinkedIn accounts several years ago but never used them. I’ve never owned a smartwatch or tablet.

I was a regular user of Facebook up until 2020, and I’ve been completely disconnected from social media in my personal life since then. I’ve reluctantly created Instagram and X accounts for distribution of my content, but my hope is to eventually not rely on any social media for my writing endeavors.

I write from the perspective of a millennial, and I’m skeptical of some of the common narratives about my generation being shortchanged by the older generations. I’ll argue that we are actually a lucky generation, because we grew up right before smartphones and social media hijacked childhood and adolescence, which left us better prepared for adulthood than the generations after us. I’ll also propose that we can harness some of our generational strengths by being more selective about how we use the modern screen-based technology and social media that entered our lives as adults.

I’m deeply concerned about the mental health crisis of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, and I’m a staunch proponent of initiatives to roll back the screen-based childhood that has become the norm and restore a healthy childhood and adolescence. I have a lot of experience working as a therapist with members of Gen Z both as adolescents and young adults, and I hope to present ideas that will be helpful for the members of this generation who are struggling with navigating early adulthood.

My Professional Background

My career began in 2011 as an Adult Protective Services caseworker providing assistance to vulnerable adults, and a few years later I transitioned to Child Protective Services. I then spent eight years working as a therapist at a mental health clinic in the same community.

Throughout those 13 years, I worked in a rural community that was very different from the place I grew up. Many of the clients I served dealt with lifetimes of poverty, severe trauma, and other kinds of adversity I was largely unfamiliar with. This was somewhat of a culture shock for someone who grew up in a middle-class suburban community.

I learned a lot from the clients I worked with over the years, and I’ve been inspired by their resilience and resourcefulness while facing genuine challenges in life. This has become especially valuable in my personal life as I’ve faced mounting health problems and limitations. These experiences have also played a big role in shaping many of the ideas I will write about here.

I currently work for a private agency and provide telehealth therapy. As a disclaimer, my writing here is separate from my role as a therapist and the company I work for.

Systemic issues undeniably affect many of the challenges people of all generations are struggling with in the modern world. There are several large-scale changes I’ll advocate for, and I recognize that not every person can radically change their life simply through individual effort.

However, I’m not a policy expert or someone with the ability to enact society wide changes; I’m a therapist who works with individuals and a guy with a blog. My aim is to present a wide variety of ideas to help anyone who wants to improve their life on an individual level.

The Beginning of an Exploration

I don’t claim to have definitive answers to the puzzle of human life, but I’d like to share the perspective I’ve gained from my personal and professional experiences. If you read my work, I hope you can take away something useful and leave behind anything that doesn’t work for you. I also hope that my ideas will evolve and improve, especially with input from others.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get started on discovering your own superpowers.