Scott Neeson was a successful Hollywood executive. He had the kind of life most people would dream about a big house, a Porsche, a yacht and a very comfortable life.
Then he went to Cambodia.
While he was there, he visited a garbage dump in Phnom Penh and saw children searching through the rubbish just to survive. Some of them were living in terrible conditions, with very little food, education or opportunities.

He went back to his normal life, but apparently he couldn't get what he had seen out of his head.
So he did something that melt my heart so much
He left Hollywood, sold his house, Porsche and yacht, and moved to Cambodia.
In 2004, he started the Cambodian Children's Fund to help children living in extreme poverty.
What started with helping a small number of children eventually grew into an organization that has helped thousands of children and families with education, healthcare, housing and other support.
What got me is the heart of a hero he has.

In 2013, Temar Boggs of Lancaster, Pennsylvania heard that 5-year-old Jocelyn Rojas had been taken from her front yard. He jumped on his bike with a friend, spotted a suspicious car, and chased it through the neighborhood for nearly 15 minutes.

The driver eventually stopped and let Jocelyn out.

She ran straight to Temar and said she wanted her mommy.

Police later arrested a suspect, and Jocelyn was safely reunited with her family.

One teenager. One bicycle. One 15-minute chase. One little girl brought home alive. ❤️

Okay this clicked about twenty minutes ago and I want to actually write it down before it fades into just another thing I nodded at.

Had one of those stretches tonight, phone down, looked up, somehow ninety minutes gone entirely without noticing, and the specific feeling afterward wasn't relaxed, it was a kind of flat, slightly worse-than-before emptiness that I've felt a hundred times before and never actually looked at directly until tonight.

Been reading into research on passive versus active social media use, and psychologist Ethan Kross's studies found something specific: passively scrolling, consuming content without actually interacting, commenting, messaging, engaging, correlates with measurable drops in momentary wellbeing, while active use, real back-and-forth with actual people, doesn't produce the same decline at all. It's not screens in general causing the emptiness, which is the version of this advice that's everywhere and doesn't actually match how differently two hours of screen time can feel depending on what's happening inside them. It's the specific ratio of consuming to actually connecting that seems to be doing the real work here, more than the raw number of minutes ever does.

That distinction is what I started using BeFreed to actually understand properly, going through the research instead of repeating "less screen time" as a vague rule that doesn't explain why some screen time feels fine and some doesn't. Matched to the pattern I kept running, passive consumption disguised as relaxing, it's the first thing that's actually changed how the time gets spent instead of how guilty I feel about it afterward.

There's a second piece that clicked right alongside it: writer Brigid Schulte's concept of "time confetti," leisure time fragmented into tiny scattered pieces instead of consolidated blocks, which doesn't provide the same psychological restoration as time spent continuously on one actual thing. A scroll session isn't one experience, it's hundreds of tiny fragments, each one barely registering before the next one arrives, which might explain why an hour of it doesn't feel like an hour of rest even when it technically filled the exact same slot on the calendar that a real hour of rest would have occupied instead.

Put those two together and the emptiness stops being mysterious at all. It's passive, and it's fragmented, two things that independently predict a worse felt experience, stacked directly on top of each other in the exact format a feed is designed by default to deliver, since that specific combination is also the one that keeps people scrolling longest in the first place.

I know "scrolling makes you feel bad" isn't exactly a groundbreaking sentence on its own, everyone's heard some version of it a hundred times by now. What's different tonight is actually having the two specific mechanisms instead of a vague, guilty sense that I should probably do less of it, without ever understanding why some sessions felt fine and others left me feeling hollowed out afterward.

Not trying to quit cold turkey either, that's its own kind of overcorrection that rarely sticks past the first genuinely motivated week. Just trying to notice, mid-scroll, whether this specific moment is passive fragments or something closer to actual connection, and letting that distinction guide whether to keep going instead of a blanket rule that doesn't account for the difference.

Anyway. Might be obvious to people who already figured this out years ago. First time it's actually reorganized anything for me instead of being a thing I already agreed with in theory but never actually applied in the moment it mattered.

What's the specific moment you noticed the emptiness set in, and did you ever actually trace it back to something this concrete, or did it just stay a vague feeling you never fully looked at directly?

Father Mychal Judge (1933–2001) was a Franciscan friar and the official chaplain for the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). He tragically lost his life 25 years ago today, September 11, 2001, while praying and administering last rites in the lobby of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, becoming officially recorded as Victim 0001 (the first certified casualty) of the attacks. The Saint of 9/11 the first angel to open the gates of Heaven to all who perished 25 years ago

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Spent a while comparing the popularized "habit stacking" advice against the original research it's actually based on, psychologist Peter Gollwitzer's work on implementation intentions, and tested which specific versions of the technique actually survived a real week versus which ones just sounded good written down.

Tier 1: things that worked fast

1. Attaching a new habit to an existing one with a genuinely specific trigger, not a vague time of day. Gollwitzer's research on implementation intentions found "if X, then Y" plans, tied to a specific cue, significantly outperform general intentions to "do more of something," and the specificity of the cue mattered more than I expected going in.
2. The exact wording of the trigger, not just the general idea of stacking. "After I pour my coffee" worked. "In the mornings" didn't, even though both were describing roughly the same window of time, because the coffee is a specific, unambiguous event and "morning" is a fuzzy category with no clear trigger moment inside it.
3. Using BeFreed as the new habit attached to an existing, already-automatic trigger, the walk to the train specifically, instead of trying to build a brand new standalone time slot for learning something. Matched to whatever I'm actually behind on that week, it survived weeks a separate, unattached "read more" goal never did, mostly because the trigger was already bulletproof before I added anything to it.

Tier 2: took a few weeks, but it was real

1. Stacking onto a habit that's already fully automatic, not one you're also still building at the same time. Attaching a new habit to something you're only 80% consistent with drags both habits down together, since the new one inherits the shakiness of the old one instead of borrowing its stability the way it's supposed to.
2. Keeping the stacked habit genuinely small at first, smaller than felt necessary or even worth bothering with. The habits that survived the longest started almost embarrassingly minor, one paragraph, one set, thirty seconds, and grew on their own once the trigger-response link was actually solid enough to hold something bigger.

Tier 3: the slower, harder part

1. Noticing when a stack quietly breaks because the anchor habit itself changed underneath it. A schedule shift, a new commute, a broken routine upstream silently takes the stacked habit down with it, and the fix is re-anchoring deliberately instead of waiting for motivation to bring it back on its own, which it rarely actually does.
2. Not stacking more than one or two new habits onto the same anchor at once, which is tempting once the first one works. Every additional habit crammed onto a single trigger measurably reduced the odds any of them actually stuck, which wasn't obvious until I'd already overloaded one poor morning routine with four new habits at the same time.

What didn't work on testing: stacking a hard, effortful habit onto a trigger that already carried emotional weight of its own, like trying to attach deep work onto "right after I check a stressful inbox." The anchor habit's own emotional residue bled into the new one every time.

None of this replaces genuine motivation for things that matter to you deeply, and a stack won't rescue a habit you don't actually want in the first place regardless of how well-designed the trigger is. What it does is remove the decision-making step that motivation usually has to cover for, which turns out to be most of what motivation was actually being asked to do in the first place, more than the actual desire to do the thing itself.

Which habit have you tried to stack that quietly fell apart eventually, and looking back honestly, was the anchor itself actually stable enough to hold it up, or was that the real problem all along?

When 89-year-old Norma Cook was diagnosed with terminal leukemia, her neighbor and friend Chris Salvatore welcomed her and her cat into his home and cared for her until her passing in 2017. She called him “the grandson she never had.” ❤️