This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. It's fun Friday, my name is Jaffsan Du, ever wondered how he keeps the smile on his face and the skip in his step. CulturePop's Met Amatich follows a plan and it's all his own. It's digital happiness, Matt's plane.
So Matt, would you like to tell us about your road to happiness then? No. Sure's over. And anything, that was a really good session.
As you know, I'm known for being very light-hearted and positive. Listeners already know that just hearing my voice through a speaker is enough to vanish feelings of depression and hopelessness. If Pfizer could legally turn me into tablets, they would box me up and ship me all over the world. I'm not joking.
So with that in mind, I have devised a comprehensive plan for digital happiness that anyone can follow and use to improve their life. So I present to you all the seven digi signs. That sounds a little bit more familiar. Did you rip that off of somewhere else?
Right, you're sounding less like a disciple and more like a hater right now. I am the feel-good messiah. All ideas are mine. Thus, I am incapable of theft.
So shall we begin? I'm honestly regretting getting up this morning. And maybe you shouldn't have. And that's actually kind of point one.
Point one is switch off. Get less involved. Let yourself be bored. Now, we have covered this on the show before, and we've mentioned there's a great series on the Reply to Self podcast, which is called Board and Brilliant.
So let me just test. What was the first thing you did when you woke up this morning and keep your answer clean? Yeah, well, I checked my phone for WhatsApp messages because generally I sleep quite early, and there's a whole bunch of messages that I missed out. OK, but why?
I mean, the thing is our addiction to screens is actually really hard to understand. I mean, you say you sleep early, but in the time between sleeping and waking up, what actually important actually happened. Very rarely something important. Exactly.
You know, the world worked perfectly well before we had personal devices and the internet. It's like when you got your first car and you wanted to spend 24 hours in it, driving around, but the novelty wears off really, really quickly. What does your car spend most of its life doing now? Being here in the office basement for many hours of the week.
Yes, exactly. But that addiction to our screens carries on with constantly glued to them. You know, and admittedly, I don't always follow my own advice here. As I've said on the show before, I wake up every morning to check that President Trump hasn't declared war on someone overnight.
But, you know, it doesn't mean that we can't afford to slow down the way that we use these devices. I went to a workshop at the Kula Lumpa Festival a few months ago. And at the end of that session, the moderator, Professor Horn from the University event, Vienna, suggested that we all go outside and we sit down and we close our eyes for 10 minutes and we just let the rest of our senses take over. Wow, heavy.
Well, not thoroughly. I mean, just it's actually just normal just to listen and to smell and to feel the sun or the breeze on your skin. Actually, I was talking to Avin before the show and he was saying he goes downstairs just to feel the breeze on his skin, just to feel some sun on his face. Now I know where he goes off every 10 minutes in the hour.
Right, exactly. Because the office is a bit too hellous and it does sound hippie-ish but it was actually a really cool experience because our brains are often so overstimulated. Sometimes you have to disconnect and switch it off. You have to let your mind go idle for a while.
Assuming we all log back on eventually, man, what's your second step to this digital Nirvana? Really easy, be honest. We're all guilty of curating our lives to some extent, especially when it comes to social media. And we forget that the friends whose posts look so amazing.
They're just as stressed and miserable as we are. They're just marginally better at editing the misery out of those pictures. So again, why do we do it? We look at all the feeds we follow.
They seem to show lives that are more exciting and more glamorous than our own. But it's all kind of a con job. It's those wonderful filters that all the photo apps have. They're really just there to pimp up your life.
If I look at my phone, the number of apps I have to predify and process images is snutling. I think I've got over 20 sitting on my phone. I think I have the bother seeing two of them. Yeah, exactly.
And I don't even post a lot. Actually, you do. Yeah. Exactly.
You can follow me on at CulturePop if you want to see how little I posted on Twitter. But again, there was a photographic world before filters and image stabilization. And back then, all of our photos looked like some big blur with someone with big red demon eyes. But at least those pictures were real.
They were from your actual life. They were from the days before you spent 10 minutes rearranging your designer, Nasi Lamat, around the table to make it look awesome while it's actually cooling down and going cold. It doesn't have to be awesome. It's breakfast.
But isn't it fun to pause these stuff though? Yeah, it really is fun. But a lot of people treat it very, very seriously. It's as though we're all the star of some movie.
So how many times have you been out with friends and you've watched the ice cream melt in their dessert while they fuss around to take the perfect picture of it? So the image rather that the world sees, it's this incredible candy tower. But what they end up eating is this bowl of lukewarm dairy soup, which is kind of disgusting. So the experience of eating it has to be nicer than the experience of taking a photo of it.
You're not supposed to curate your life. You're supposed to actually live it. If you spend all your time storyboarding the next moment, it's not real. That's the reason we love watching docusopes and reality shows because the people are always awful.
I can't understand how anyone would watch things like the Kardashians and actually want to be them. They've sold their souls along with the image rights. Which brings us to sign number three. Yes, I kind of laid up a dunk shot with the Kardashian reference there.
Curating your media is one thing, but a lot of people take it a step further than that. So my sign number three, stop trying to be famous. I've been famous for a while now. And it's really not that cool.
I've got tennis elbow from signing all the autographs. I have to wear dark glasses all the time because the paparazzi flash bulbs have damaged my retinas. The physical toll of being famous is appalling. No one has ever asked for you for an autograph, have they?
Only the accountant and the tax man. Even when people ask for a head shot, I send one over a Mr Potato. Nobody's noticed yet. We do all look for validation through our social media feeds.
Carefully choosing an outfit and posting it. That's fine, but getting stressed out because one of your friends took two hours to like it and then only commented with a smiley or a stock emoji. Exactly, it's not real. It might feel real, but it isn't.
We've all been there. We've all posted something that we think will go viral, at least within our own social circle. And then we find out it's completely unqualified and it is a crushing feeling, but it shouldn't be because really it doesn't matter. Fame only works when the number of famous people is very, very small.
If everyone's famous, then fame is just normal and again nobody's famous. So leave it to the professionally vacuous to break the internet and get on with your life. Now before we jump into the break, give us a quick look at sign number four. Sign number four is very, very simple.
You should just consider that all your information is compromised. Now I know that sounds more scary than happy, but adjusting to this mindset really actually sets you free online. We give all kinds of personal information to all kinds of sites and institutions. Realistically, none of them can keep that information safe.
It's not that they don't want to. It's not that they're not trying hard enough. It's just that anything that's online is really not secure. So you can do things like keeping separate bank accounts and credit cards for your online transactions, change your passwords regularly.
I know it's a bind, but it also helps you to understand when and where the breach of your information happened. And it also helps you to understand if it's something that's ongoing as well. So once you compartmentalize all of these things, it makes it a lot easier to track. You can quickly see if you've been compromised online or offline, for example.
So you know what needs to be changed and you know what mistakes you've made in your behaviour. And the same goes for our photos and documents. If it's on a server or in the cloud, it's vulnerable. If it's on a computer or on a phone that connects to the net, then it's vulnerable.
And that's why it really is so important not to be famous or rich, because most of us aren't obvious targets. So for us, hacking fraud, identity theft, it's a numbers game. We're just one of the faceless millions who stay to get stolen. It's the one instance where it really is better to be a statistic.
Man, I'm a date from Culture Bot talking about seven signs to digital happiness. We'll be right back with three more signs after this. We'll be right back with the FMP. Because feelings matter, BFM 89.9.
And we're back. My name is Jafz Andru together with CulturePops and Matt Amatage. And we're talking about the seven digital signs for digital nirvana. And we talked about four already.
So you've got to switch off. That's completely switching off from your phones, screens and stuff. And then go dark. And then you've got to be honest as well.
Stop trying to be something that you are. And also which kind of leads to stop trying to hard to be a celebrity. And leads us to number four, which they hackers know who you are. Just accept the fact and move on.
That will lead you to a much better life. It leads you to freedom. It is the path to freedom. So let's carry on with the very strange path of happiness that you've laid out for us.
I can't wait to hear sign number five, Matt. Yeah, your sarcasm has not been missed. But I can rise above it because I have achieved my digital nirvana. And to me, you are nothing but a noisy avatar.
You're a bump in the continuing evolution of my consciousness. I'm really beginning to like all this guru stuff. I think we should do this more often. This is fun.
Okay, steps five and six are linked. Sign number five, very straightforward. Stop the cycle. In the same way that we feel pressure to take photos of our lunch.
We feel this pressure to constantly upgrade our devices. At the start of this digital revolution, it made sense because our devices weren't that good. Every time there was a new version, they were much better. They were more powerful.
They had a higher resolution. They had a better power consumption. That of faster processing. Whatever.
So we became addicted to it? Exactly. And it wasn't just us that became addicted. It was the manufacturers as well.
In the olden days of ox carts, people would buy a fridge or a TV or a washing machine. And they expected them to last because they were very expensive. So manufacturers only expected to sell you stuff once in a decade. And that was back when stuff didn't even work very well.
We expected to have to repair stuff numerous times over its lifespan. Do you remember the days of changing the tube on your TV, not changing the TV itself? Wow. Yeah, exactly.
Not for me, I think. But I remember the days of one of those CRTVs that keep breaking down every six months. Exactly. And you take it to the shop and they put a new chip in.
And then it works again for six months. But now we're all in this kind of endless upgrade cycle, which again is pointless because most of the stuff is really well made and lasts far longer than our attention span actually once us are keep. iPhone 10 then, mate. I'm not in Russia.
I know we're going to talk about it after break. It'll happen eventually. But there's loads more urgent things to do first. And my iPhone 7, just like my 7 digi signs, is doing perfectly fine.
All right. What if people have to upgrade their smart TV because the OS, the software itself, isn't being updated anymore? Well, my views on smart TVs are well known on this show. If you have a smart TV, you really only have yourself to blame.
Get a dumb TV with a lot of ports and add all the other things on yourself. That way you get a genius TV. But that does bring me to sign number six, which is stop wasting stuff. And how will that make people happier?
Well, it might sound counterintuitive, but we all have these piles of unused digital machines. Oh, yeah. Exactly. So computers, we don't want to throw them away in case someone hacks the hard drive and turns out God knows what.
Phones with cracked screens and leaking batteries. Old consoles we can't buy games for anymore or we just don't want to play anymore. How many of our listeners still have a VCD player lurking somewhere in a cupboard or a draw? I do.
Exactly. And in this world of streaming, we don't even watch those super expensive Blu-ray DVDs let alone those dodgy cinema copy VCDs from the 1990s and early 2000s. Well, you could just throw them away. But that's the conflicting thing.
We don't know what to do with them. We know that putting them into landfills is not a good idea because there's a lot of chemicals and metals in them that can lead you to the water supply and poison land and all that kind of thing. It's worse because in most cases the devices still actually work and somewhere at the back of our minds we're thinking that someone somewhere should be making use of them even if it's not going to be us. So think of science five and six together.
When you're thinking about upgrading, what are you going to do with the technology that you have now? I can practically feel all the good vibes washing over me right now. So what's your final step to digital perfection? Relax.
Don't let things get so angry. If you get to the point where you want to write things in caps, close your computer, switch off the tablet, go and do whatever it is you do to relax, which is probably to snap selfies of yourself on the screen, which invalidates sign number two, but in this instance I think we can allow it. You have to ask yourself what is your anger actually achieving and why are you angry in the first place? One of the downsides of living in echo chambers is that people react completely disproportionately when they're confronted with a viewpoint that opposes their own.
But having different opinions is normal. That's how society's function. That's how progress happens. If people all have the same idea, we don't go very far.
So talk to the person. Try to see their side of the argument. Put forward your own side and if you can't come to a compromise, agree to differ. You can't help it if the other person is more on and you don't want to miss your lunchtime and photo-ups wasting time trying to change their mind.
So it goes back to sign number one. Switch off, literally and mentally. What if you're a troll and you're out setting out to upset people? As you said earlier, get a life seriously.
It's like the digital equivalent of burning ants with a magnifying glass. You really should know better. I don't care what your belief system is, there is a special place in the afterlife of trolls and it's not like a shrek movie. In all seriousness though, will your seven-step programme help people?
Okay, as much as I hope we've had some fun with this today, the points are actually real. At the heart really, I guess, is just one point that we can take our digital selves a bit too seriously. I'm asking that step back, asking why you're doing what you're doing and really simply, if doing something else would make you happier. If you post something, let people see the real emotion there, the joy or the sadness or the boredom.
Don't post it for likes, post it for passion because sometimes I think that's what's really missing from our online selves, the passions that make us interesting people. And those passions are not always photogenic, they're not always easy to articulate and they're not always pretty. But we shouldn't be afraid of that and we shouldn't be afraid that no one else gets what we say or likes what we do. Just like this show.
Oh, Matt Amity from College of Giving You Seven Signs of Digital Happiness. The Seven DigiSign. The Seven DigiSign. So we'll be right back with Geeksquacks after this.
We'll be feeling a lot more happy enough that if you've not, the next story's on. I know why. I feel I've just unloaded. We'll be right back.
BFM 89.9. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes. BFM 89.9.
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