Телеграм канал «Abby Wynne»

Please stop calling every ordinary human behaviour a fucking hack.

Sometimes you haven’t “optimised your morning hydration protocol”.

You’ve had a glass of water.

😂

Right, Gen X and those late millennials who caught the tail end of the analogue lunatic asylum, what have I missed?

What completely ordinary bit of your childhood has now been rediscovered, renamed and returned to society as something revolutionary?

And I’m fully expecting someone to tell me that hanging washing outside is now called solar-assisted textile dehydration.

If a radio stopped working, your dad or somebody else’s dad removed fourteen screws, spread its internal organs across the kitchen table and embarked upon a repair using a screwdriver, electrical tape and levels of self-confidence that would terrify a modern health and safety inspector.

Sometimes it even worked.

Sometimes you ended up with three screws left over and a radio that now picked up Radio Moscow whenever you touched the kettle.

But you had a go.

9️⃣ SOCIALISING OFFLINE

This is genuinely becoming a thing again.

People want real-world communities. They want to meet people face-to-face. They want activities where phones aren’t the centre of everything.

Good.

We called that having mates.

Meeting somebody required considerably less administration too. You might say, “See you outside Woolworths at seven,” and that was considered sufficient logistical detail to coordinate two adult human beings.

There were no seventeen messages during the afternoon confirming whether seven still meant seven.

Nobody shared a pin.

Nobody sent a live location.

If you weren’t outside Woolworths at seven, everybody waited for a bit, called you a cunt, then went without you.

Friendships survived.

Somehow we had social lives without creating a WhatsApp group called SATURDAY NIGHT 🍺🍺🍺 that accumulated 193 messages before collapsing because Dave couldn’t make the 12th and Lisa doesn’t like Indian.

10️⃣ DOING ONE FUCKING THING AT A TIME

This one isn’t even usually called a life hack yet, but give it time. Somebody will invent “mono-tasking” and sell a £900 retreat teaching people how to eat lunch without watching a video.

I remember listening to an album and that being the activity.

You put the record or cassette on and listened to it.

I remember watching a film without simultaneously holding another screen in my hand to find out what strangers thought of the film I was currently not watching properly because I was reading what strangers thought of it.

I remember eating without photographing the food first.

Going for a walk without logging the route.

Going somewhere beautiful and looking at the beautiful fucking thing rather than spending fifteen minutes trying to prove to everybody else that I had looked at it.

Again, I’m not pretending my generation possessed some lost spiritual wisdom. Half the time we were probably smoking indoors, drinking something radioactive and wondering whether three channels really needed to be excessive.

WE BUILT HALF THIS FUCKING PROBLEM.

That’s the bit conveniently missing from a lot of Gen X nostalgia.

We spent decades wanting everything faster, easier and more convenient. We wanted instant communication, endless entertainment, shopping without leaving the house, food at the door, music without changing a record, maps that told us where to turn, cameras with unlimited photographs and the entire accumulated knowledge of humanity in our pockets.

Then we got it.

And within about fifteen years we started buying notebooks, vinyl records, dumb phones, camping gear and fucking candles because apparently what we really wanted was 1986 with better central heating.

There’s something beautifully human about that.

We remove every bit of friction from life and then discover that some of the friction was doing something useful.

Waiting gave you patience. Boredom made you invent something to do. Walking moved your body. Being unreachable meant your brain occasionally got left alone. Repairing something taught you how things worked. Having fewer photographs often made the ones you had matter more.

And perhaps that’s why I find the whole “life hack” thing funny rather than genuinely annoying.

Because beneath all the ridiculous terminology, a younger generation is rediscovering some pretty decent stuff.

Walk more.

Get outside.

Eat proper food.

Talk to actual humans.

Put the bloody phone away.

Learn how to be bored.

Fix things.

Make things.

Spend some time without everybody on Earth being able to contact you.

That’s not a bad list.

Just do this 58-year-old Welsh bloke one favour.

Nobody turned the plate around three times under a ring light and explained that carrots contain fibre.

Leftovers weren’t called meal prep either. They were called, “There’s some fucking stew in the fridge.”

And it wasn’t portioned into seven identical glass containers with the macros written on the lid. The entire thing was in yesterday’s saucepan, usually covered by a dinner plate because the correct lid had entered the same parallel universe as odd socks and Tupperware tops.

We weren’t necessarily nutritional geniuses. We ate plenty of crap as well. But you could generally look at dinner and identify what had died or grown to make it.

I’m not convinced that’s a terrible starting point.

5️⃣ SWITCHING YOUR PHONE OFF

This might be the greatest reinvention of all.

A “digital detox”.

The delicious luxury of being unreachable.

A deliberate period where you disconnect from your device and allow yourself to exist without notifications.

We managed this for entire fucking decades.

The phone lived in the hallway, usually on a little table specifically designed for the phone, because furniture had evolved around the fact that the bastard was attached to the wall.

If you went upstairs, you were offline.

If you went to the park, you were offline.

If you went to the pub, you were offline.

If you drove 200 miles away, your precise location wasn’t being continuously transmitted to six relatives, three technology companies and an advertising algorithm that had noticed you once looked at walking boots.

You could simply vanish for a bit.

And nobody assumed you’d been murdered because your WhatsApp ticks hadn’t turned blue.

6️⃣ BEING BORED

I’m particularly delighted that boredom is apparently good for us now because my generation did enough of it to qualify for retrospective Olympic medals.

There were vast stretches of childhood where absolutely fuck all happened.

Sunday afternoon could begin at about quarter past twelve and, judging by how long it felt, finish somewhere around the following Thursday.

The shops were shut. Television was often shit. Nobody had anything new to tell you because you’d seen everyone yesterday and there hadn’t been enough time for fresh gossip to develop.

Eventually you got bored enough to use your imagination.

You built something. Broke something. Climbed something. Drew something. Rode your bike somewhere. Took an electrical appliance apart and discovered, usually too late, that understanding how an object comes apart bears almost no relationship whatsoever to understanding how it goes back together.

You could also just sit there thinking.

No input. No feed. No algorithm hurriedly shovelling another piece of content into your brain because it had detected three seconds of dangerous mental silence.

Looking back, boredom probably did us quite a few favours.

7️⃣ MAKING YOUR OWN COFFEE

Every few months I see another financial “hack” explaining how much money you can save by making coffee at home.

Fucking hell.

Next week: SAVE THOUSANDS BY NOT HIRING A TAXI TO TAKE YOU TO THE TOILET.

Coffee at home wasn’t a financial strategy. It was where coffee came from.

You boiled a kettle, put coffee in something, poured water on it and drank the result. Depending on the decade and the household, it could range from perfectly respectable to something resembling hot brown gravel, but nobody charged you £5.40 for it or asked your name.

There was also no size discussion.

You owned a mug.

That was the size.

8️⃣ REPAIRING SOMETHING INSTEAD OF THROWING IT AWAY

Apparently we’re rediscovering repair culture, which is one of the better things to come back because the idea of throwing away a perfectly usable object because one tiny piece has broken has always struck me as fucking insane.

We repaired stuff largely because new stuff cost money.

If trousers ripped, they got stitched. If furniture wobbled, somebody investigated why.

From Ian Callaghan on Facebook


GEN Z HAVE DISCOVERED “LIFE HACKS”, WHICH IS FUCKING MARVELLOUS BECAUSE APPARENTLY I’VE BEEN LIFE-HACKING SINCE ABOUT 1975 WITHOUT REALISING IT. 😂

I’m 58. I’ve now reached that entertaining stage of life where things I remember as completely ordinary bits of existing on planet Earth disappear for thirty years, come back with a shiny new name, and are presented to me by somebody on social media as though humanity has finally solved a problem that baffled us since we crawled out of the primordial soup.

You know the sort of thing. Some enthusiastic youngster explains that they’ve started going outside shortly after waking because exposure to natural daylight helps regulate their body clock. Excellent discovery. We had a similar system when I was a kid. My mother opened the bedroom door and shouted, “GET YOUR FUCKING ARSE OUT OF BED, YOU’RE LATE.”

There was your circadian intervention.

Nobody wore blue-light glasses. Nobody checked their cortisol curve. You went outside because school, work, the paper round, the dog or life itself was waiting outside, and strangely enough the enormous burning thing in the sky took care of the light exposure without requiring a fucking subscription.

So in the spirit of helping preserve the historical record before somebody patents breathing through their nose, here are my...

TOP TEN GEN Z “LIFE HACKS” THAT WE JUST CALLED LIFE.

1️⃣ WALKING TO PLACES

This is apparently exercise now, which came as a surprise to those of us who grew up walking everywhere because our parents weren’t operating a 24-hour Uber service.

If you wanted to see a mate, you walked to his house. If you wanted sweets, you walked to the shop. If you missed the bus, you walked considerably fucking further than you had intended and learned a valuable lesson about getting out of bed five minutes earlier.

Nobody got home and announced they had “hit their steps”. We didn’t know how many steps we’d done because our watches had two hands and told us whether we were going to get bollocked for being late.

Your legs hurt. That was the fitness tracker.

2️⃣ DRINKING WATER WHEN YOU WERE THIRSTY

Hydration has become astonishingly complicated.

People now leave the house carrying drinking vessels large enough to supply a UN refugee camp because apparently spending forty minutes in Tesco requires the same logistical planning as crossing the Sahara.

There are hydration reminders, electrolyte sachets, smart bottles, mineral drops and enormous containers with motivational messages printed up the side telling you how well you’re doing.

At eight in the morning: YOU’VE GOT THIS.

At ten: KEEP GOING.

At midday: DON’T GIVE UP.

It’s fucking water, Brenda, not the north face of the Eiger.

We had a tap. You turned it on, put water in a glass and drank it. In summer, being the highly evolved creatures we were, we sometimes drank straight from the garden hose while somebody’s dad shouted not to kink the bastard.

I survived without once knowing the mineral profile of the Monmouthshire mains supply.

3️⃣ GETTING MORNING SUNLIGHT

I genuinely do this now because I understand the physiology and there’s good sense behind it. What makes me laugh is the idea that going outside in daylight has somehow become specialist knowledge.

For most of human history you woke up and encountered the morning because roofs notwithstanding, there wasn’t much bloody alternative.

As kids we were thrown out into it.

School started in the morning. Jobs started in the morning. Paper rounds happened in the morning. Dogs needed walking in the morning. There was no discussion about whether you felt aligned enough to receive your first photons of the day.

You opened the curtains.

Nature assaulted your retinas.

Job done.

4️⃣ EATING FOOD MADE FROM FOOD

This one has travelled so far around the circle that eating an egg now feels countercultural.

“Whole-food eating” is apparently a lifestyle category.

I grew up knowing it as tea.

There might be some meat, potatoes, vegetables, gravy and whatever else was available.

A very dry and crispy artichoke! Looks like a sunflower.

A quick hello to you all!

I find her slightly annoying, but also funny. Maybe you'll enjoy her too. It's a great message. I love the image of the glass cracking, not being able to hold for much longer.

https://youtu.be/OilVC8h6FYU?si=I4l9UW3MRZ1IPBN4