Welcome to the third edition of Airplane Mode, where less is more and the WiFi is always off.

Every week, we curate 3 impactful ideas for you to stop and ponder, taking you away from the algorithm and putting you back in control of your most valuable resource: your attention.

Use this newsletter as a signal to pause, breathe, and think, helping you realign with your purpose and clear out the ‘scroll pollution’ that clouds our brains every day.

Thank you for flying with 99 Lives 🐆✈️

Last week my friends sent a post in the group chat that blew my mind, even if it felt like something all of us already knew.

Back in 2020, researchers in Europe collaborated on a study about smartphone addiction (SPA) and brain function, looking at grey matter in key regions of the brain to see how SPA impacts this vital tissue.

(I thought I understood grey matter completely, but I didn’t. So, to review: it’s the tissue that processes and transmits information. It makes up 40% of the brain, is essential for memory, movement, and emotions, and is mostly composed of neurons.)

Now this study used MRI imaging to look at grey matter volume in specific brain regions linked to emotional awareness, memory, decision-making, and self-control.

And what did it find? People with smartphone addiction (SPA) showed significantly lower grey matter in ALL of these brain regions.

Reduced grey matter means less ability to think clearly, make decisions, regulate emotions, remember information, and adapt to new experiences.

The researchers identified SPA by looking at behavioral symptoms, like compulsive checking and withdrawal feelings, something I know myself and everyone reading this have felt many times. These are the same addictive behaviors seen in all other types of addictions.

I’ve written about this before (and will again), but this knowledge is too alarming to ignore, not only for us but even more so for the next generation.

We have no choice but to start seeing smartphones and social media as digital cigarettes at best, and digital heroin at worst.

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❓ QUESTION: Be honest, how many hours a day do you think you aimlessly scroll on social media?

I don’t know about you, but for me, the feeling of learning something you were completely oblivious to before is an exciting feeling, and a lot of things I learned reading The Culture Map by Erin Meyer still live in my head rent-free.

One of those concepts is the idea of how different cultures communicate, whether they are a low-context culture or high-context culture.

Low-context cultures are typically found in countries where communication is “precise, simple, and clear.” In these cultures, clarity is everything and messages are expressed directly, at face value. The United States happens to be the most low-context culture on the planet.

But communication in high-context cultures is the opposite. It’s more focused on “reading between the lines”. This means messages are often indirect and layered. The listener is expected to understand what is communicated more from what is not said, just as much as from what was said directly.

High-context cultures often have a much longer shared history, like Japan or China, where citizens have a broader and shared understanding, creating a cultural context that has been passed down through multiple generations.

When thinking about the United States, the reverse makes a lot of sense. “Americans” are a very young group, formed from the mixture of so many different cultures. Americans need to be clear and direct, because everybody’s family came from somewhere else, because there is very little shared history or tradition to rely on as ‘common knowledge’

This concept, first developed by anthropologist Edward T. Hall, has deep implications when traveling abroad and understanding other cultures, and even more so when building relationships with people from different countries.

For instance, a person from a high-context culture can get very offended by someone from a low-context culture, who is much more direct and repeats themselves often to ensure clarity. This can even be viewed by some as disrespectful, even when the person from the low-context culture thinks they’re being kind and respectful by double-checking or explaining again.

I am definitely no stranger to this and have already experienced this plenty of times while living outside of the US for the last decade.

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❓ QUESTION: Have you ever had communication issues that were hard to understand with someone from a different country?

The world is having a reckoning, particularly the Western world.

We are just beginning to realize that our world is full of inequalities, and many of us have been trying to right those wrongs and find a new balance. Social media has made this process both much more rapid and tremendously chaotic.

But in Western cultures, where individuality reigns supreme, this reckoning over empowerment is causing even more distance between humans than already existed in our individual-centric world.

This was all pointed out by Terry Real, the most badass therapist you’ve (probably) never heard of, and also the creator of Relational Life Therapy.

On a recent podcast episode with The Daily, Terry Real discussed how individual empowerment is causing a lot of difficulty in helping us find and keep love and improve our deteriorating social cohesion. He argues that we need to focus more on relational empowerment, in order to reconnect the broken aspects of our societies that are causing us so many issues.

Individual empowerment focuses on, you guessed it, empowering the individual, to stand up for themselves, assert themselves, and pursue their needs and desires independently.

Relational empowerment focuses on both the individual AND the other. It’s about standing up for yourself and staying connected to the other person at the same time, pursuing your needs while protecting the relationship. It is collaborative instead of adversarial.

This type of thinking comes much more naturally to those with cultural backgrounds from Eastern cultures, but we in the West truly need to look deeper and work twice as hard here, so we don’t lose the vital connections we have with the most important humans in our lives.

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❓ QUESTION: What are two steps you can take to move towards more relational empowerment in your life and your important relationships?

Thanks for reading the third edition!

You can count on Airplane Mode arriving in your inbox every week, just in time for you to switch off & reconnect with the topics that matter most.

Stay Curious 🐆