Blue Skies and a Lemon Tree: A Story About Mindset Shifts, Gratitude, and Digital Detoxing

Wanna hear a joke?

I’m a digital marketer, but I don’t like social media all that much.

I know, try to figure that one out.

I used to enjoy social media when I was just a little bit younger. With time, age, and experience, I realized that I don’t like it, and I don’t really need it.

People meet me and they tend to like me. I’m a big kid. I have lots of energy and enthusiasm for life. I get this big doofy grin on my face when I’m happy.

I wasn’t always like that. Time was, I was a mean-spirited, cynical, toxic little turdface.

It runs in the family. I come from a long line of grumpy, negative, mean old curmudgeons. Dad’s like that. Grandpa was like that. As they say though, bitter people hold onto life like weeds. My grandpa lived to be a ripe old age.

I’ve had to learn to check my crappy attitude at the door and be grateful for the good things in my life to attract the kind of opportunities I wanted. When I started doing that, the doors to success opened up to me.

I had given up hope for a better world and turned to nihilism to cope. The thing is though, being a nihilist is not a very good career or business move.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve had to filter out any content that isn’t relevant to my life, my interests, and what I do for a living. If it’s not about content marketing and SEO, generative AI, travel, gaming, technology, or the digital nomad lifestyle: I don’t know, I don’t care, and I don’t want to hear about it. Don’t @ me.

I’ve learned to unplug from social media and be very selective and intentional in how and why I use it, and you can too. I promise you, it will be the best thing you’ve ever done for your productivity, your happiness, and your sanity.

Let me tell you a little story about blue skies and a lemon tree.

Manifesting Works

The term manifesting is bandied about a lot on social media, both in LinkedIn thought leadership and Instagram mindfulness porn.

It sounds corny, but it’s true. That sh*t works.

Last year I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, a book about manifesting.

Honestly, I thought it was just alright. It comes across very much like an “old rich white person’s” book, of the kind that our parents would have thought was good career advice. It’s a little hammy and outdated, and even tone-death by today’s standards.

That said, there was one piece of advice I took away from that book which I thought was profound and insightful, and it made me stop and think for a while after.

In a later chapter of the book, the author talks about how the thoughts in our brain take a physical and chemical form, that of neurons and synapses firing and sending electric signals throughout our brain. When you state your thoughts or intentions or write them down on paper, you bring them into the world. Writing down your hopes and dreams literally makes them more real.

It’s a cliche, but it’s true. Visualizing your success and believing it will happen makes it more likely to happen.

It hasn’t been corroborated by science yet, but in my own lived experience it’s true. I’m about to show you proof.

The Boring Apocalypse

It was the early months of the pandemic, June of 2020.

Like millions of others, I lost my job to COVID. Not just any job either, but my very first remote job. And my first chance of fulfilling my dream of being a digital nomad and traveling the world.

I was working at a Canada-based travel startup as a freelance SEO specialist. My very first fully remote role.

There was a specific reason why this job was special to me. For years my heart’s desire was to find a remote job that would let me work from anywhere.

Pack a suitcase, get on a plane, and go anywhere. See anything. Do everything. Be anyone.

Live in exotic, wild, far-flung places. Do really wild stuff. Eat really weird food.

Live a life filled with travel, adventure, and new experiences.

That was the life for me. None of the other traditional life paths made sense to me. I’m not the settle down and marry type. Climbing up a corporate ladder didn’t seem like a good use of a life to me.?

As soon as I realized what it was, I knew that’s what I wanted. It was the reason I became a digital marketer in the first place.

This remote job was my first chance to make that dream happen. I was planning a two-month stay in Playa del Carmen to give it a trial run.

I had a plane ticket. I had a reservation at an Airbnb. I was literally in the middle of packing my suitcase when I came home from a coworking space one day, and my mom was watching the news in the living room.

Disneyland had shut down. The NBA was canceled. Major music venues in nearby San Francisco were closing.

I had a feeling in my gut that I knew what was coming.

Sure enough, two weeks later I had to pull the plug on Mexico. Soon after that, the startup I was freelancing for had to let me go. Their business was dependent on people buying plane tickets, and all of a sudden, people were not buying plane tickets anymore.

Boomer Mother vs. Millennial Son

To say that I was not in a great place mentally was an understatement. COVID had sabotaged dreams and goals I’d been working towards for years. Being almost 30 and living rent-free with my mother didn’t feel super great either.

Like many other millennials, I used to be fond of doomscrolling. Info about the rise of the far-right in America, riots and protests erupting in every major city, the looming threat of climate change Godslaughter. Like so many others I was bombarded with minute-by-minute real-time updates about the collapse of civilization.

Honestly, a part of me wished the world would hurry up and explode already.

Why couldn’t we have one of the fun apocalypses? The ones where there are giant kaiju monsters and roves of drooling ravening zombies, nuclear bombs exploding, buildings on fire, heads being bitten off, and people running around screaming in terror?

Nope. It had to be viruses, quarantines, social distancing, and the entropic decay of late-stage capitalism.

The end of the world sure was a lot more boring than I thought it would be.

Over time, it got to me. I couldn’t get it out of my head: I was trapped here, and there was no way out.

“Oh my god, I am trapped on the other side of a giant metal wall with the mass shooters and tiki torch nazis. I gotta get the hell outta here.”

My poor mother would hear stuff like this from me a lot. She didn’t like it. I don’t blame her.

My mother is the best human being I know—a living saint. Every single good and decent thing there is and ever was about me, I get from her. It was from my mother that I learned everything I know about what it means to be kind and compassionate, to sacrifice for others, and to put the needs of those I love before mine.

But, bless her soul, my mother is also a baby boomer. That means that we disagree on political and social issues frequently and often.

I lean so far to the left that I would be disqualified from most government jobs. My mom is a centrist liberal. I’d say America sucks and I wanna get the hell outta here. She’d get upset. It caused friction and hurt feelings.

It must not have been very nice to be around. Mom, if you’re reading this, I love you and I’m sorry.

When the battle between the tiki torch nazis and the people trying to stop them reached Portland, the news broke out that military police had shot pregnant women at the protests with rubber bullets.

That’s when I had a major freak-out.

I ran into my mom’s home office and showed her the headline that flashed on my screen.

“Mom, it’s getting bad now. I’ve been trying to tell you that this was coming. America isn’t safe anymore. This country is becoming a dystopia. We need to get the hell out of here, now.”

Instead of arguing with me, my mom did something a little different this time.

She gave me a faintly sad look, gestured around the room, and said:

"Travis, does this look like a dystopia to you?

We have running water. We have electricity. We have food in the fridge. We have a roof over our heads.

Are things really so bad?

What do you see when you look around you?"

That made me stop, and think.

I put away my phone. I went to my room. I looked out of my window.

You know what I saw?

I didn’t see tiki torch nazis shouting “The Jews will not replace us.”

I didn’t see stormtroopers shooting at pregnant women.

I didn’t see black people being strangled to death in the street.

I didn’t see kids in cages.

The only thing I saw when I looked outside my window was blue skies and a lemon tree.

Unplugging

I realized two important things that day.

The first thing I realized was that 99% of the content you see on social media and the news cycle is socially engineered to provoke a fear or anger-based emotional response.

It’s made that way on purpose by people who know what they’re doing. It’s used to drive engagement on social media, and eventually dollars in corporate bank accounts.

Do you know how I know that? Because I happen to be a content marketer, and that’s pretty much what I do for a living.

It doesn’t reflect reality. It’s just not true. Or at least, it’s not happening to me or anyone I know, not directly anyway.

When I realized that, I made a decision. I was going to unplug. At least for a while. Maybe for good.

I unfollowed everyone on Facebook. Everyone. All my friends. All my groups. Everyone.

I went through my Twitter and ruthlessly blocked anyone I saw posting political content. Everything except local healthcare news so I can be aware of local COVID restrictions.

From that moment and to this day, my screen is a no-politics zone.

I can’t deal with it anymore. It’s just not good for my mental health. If something important happens, I’ll hear about it from someone else.

It’s worked out pretty well so far. I only heard about Shinzo Abe’s assassination a year ago from my girlfriend at the time.

I used Newsfeed Eradicator to block any social media content from my wall or feeds

Now, most of the time, I look at my wall and see this:

It was one of the best things I did for my productivity as well. I can now use social media with intention, to engage with the communities I’m a part of and interact with my friends.

No more noise. No more toxic negativity. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t need it.

Then I realized the second thing. When I unplug from social media and block out noise and negativity, I can more clearly see the obvious: that I have a wonderful life filled with an abundance of good things.

I had so many things in my life to be grateful for, and I couldn’t even see them because of all of the darkness in the world vying for my attention.

Sure, life might not be going how I wanted it to at this point. But who is? COVID ruined things for everyone. Everybody lost someone or something to the pandemic.

I had access to opportunities here in Silicon Valley I couldn’t get anywhere else. For all the shit I talked about it (and still do), it made me who I am today.

The Result

Do you know what happened after that?

I got an offer for my dream job.

A freelance gig at a content marketing agency. I was writing blog posts for startups at twice the pay of the job I lost, at a work culture with people I fit in with, and had a boss who was way cooler than I am.

Then a month after that, Barbados introduced the Welcome Stamp Program. I now had a clear pathway to location independence, and it was based right out of the Caribbean, my favorite part of the world.

“This is my chance. I need to take it now, or it’s never gonna happen.”

I did. And while most people were trapped on all four sides by plague-ridden death, I spent the rest of the pandemic drinking rum and learning how to scuba dive.

I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that was a coincidence, or the universe responding to the shift in my mindset towards gratitude.

But I’ll tell you one thing: it pays to have a positive attitude. In my case, literally.

Midjourney Prompt: Create an image in a digital watercolor style depicting an individual sitting under a flourishing lemon tree, gazing out over a horizon where the digital realm gracefully transitions into natural beauty. The sky evolves from a digital grid to a vast, clear blue, while the ground beneath transitions from tangled wires to vibrant, lush grass. Next to the serene figure, a closed laptop rests, symbolizing a peaceful moment of digital detox. Highlight the fluidity and expressiveness of watercolor to convey tranquility, the seamless blend of technology with nature, and the joy of present-moment awareness. Use soft gradients, subtle color blending, and a dreamy quality to bring this serene garden vibe to life.