Notebook Dump 6/6
I’m competing next week. I’ll head up to Thomasville, NC, most likely tomorrow morning.
In the meantime, I’ve still been losing a shitload of shots every time I do a simulated putting round. Putting poorly makes golf really hard. I thought, for a while recently, that I’d been just playing bad golf. Turns out I’m striking the absolute shit out of the ball, but I’m just not making any putts. Golf feels really hard when you feel like you have to hit it inside of 8’ to make a birdie, especially when you just keep hitting approaches to 15’ all damn day and feel like you’re doing a pretty decent job.
So I’m going to go putt. As we get deeper into the season, the prospect of a weekly free newsletter is getting more and more precarious. But it’s still important to me to have something going on here, so I’m going to get varying degrees of creative. Hence, here’s something of a notebook dump: a few disjointed, random thoughts I’ve had this week.
I was sent a tweet this week from MyGolfSpy, the third-party golf-equipment testers:
This, to me, is extraordinarily silly. MyGolfSpy does extensive golf club testing, and this is admirable — how do you know how something performs if you don’t test it? But their business model is predicated upon these tests finding “the best equipment,” and that’s why people visit their site and view their advertisements and whatever.
Golf clubs are tools. Golfers are unique individual athletes. To say that any one player plays better with any one club because of “its inherent goodness” is silly. Obviously different clubs work better for different players. Obviously my mom shouldn’t use my driver and I shouldn’t use hers — this is why we get fit. Why are putters any different? Some people get fit for blades, some for mallets, some for zero torque. Sometimes players get fit into a mallet to help the face rotate open more on the way back, and then sometimes they learn that they start the ball on line way more consistently when they keep the face more shut going back, and they switch back to a blade. Sometimes they start putting a lot better for doing this. Sometimes they’re putting better, but they’re still not putting well, so they either need to practice a whole lot or identify something with the equipment that could help them putt better (I’m doing the former right now).
Without belaboring the point, this is my best direct translation of that MyGolfSpy tweet and how you should interpret most stuff you see on MyGolfSpy:
In 2026, we gave 79 cars speeding tickets on Florida state highways total:
26 souped-up Japanese sedans
29 German luxury cars
24 pickupsThat added up to more than 50,000 speeding tickets.
- The average Japanese sedan was going 36 over the limit
- The average luxury car was going 22 over
- The average pickup was going 19 overSo, on average, pimped out Honda Civics didn’t just go faster than luxury cars. They didn’t just go faster than pickup trucks.
They were in their own tier.
In fact, only one car out of the entire conventional field went as fast as the average Honda with an Instagram sticker on the rear window: the Ram 2500 👀
I’m about to say something that’s been said a billion times before, and I’m not going to say anything remotely insightful about it, but:
You see a lot of people on their phones in public places, and I’ve started wondering, “what if they were vaping?” It’s not far off, I don’t think; there’s a lot of open-mouthed scrolling, and people look pretty zoned out while they’re doing it.
To be clear: I DO NOT say this because I think I’m above it. Actually, the direct opposite is true — once I started noticing it in other people, I started noticing that it’s actually mildly uncomfortable to leave my phone in my pocket while I’m waiting in line or eating a meal. I find myself wanting a hit of my phone. It feels compulsive and dependent and shitty.
I understand that this is an accepted part of contemporary life, at this point — to the degree that parts of my life would cease to function if I got a flip phone. I was an Android kid in high school and early college, and I can attest that the amount of shit you get from people for “green texts” makes a non-iPhone pretty untenable in my circles — it would have a tangible negative effect on my social life, which is fucking stupid, but it’s also true. Also: swing videos, a metronome, stat-tracking. Also “being reachable,” which is a shockingly high bar to clear these days.
I have a whole bunch of timers and hurdles and content-blockers and whatever else on my phone, and it makes the thing tedious to use (on purpose). I get a lot of shit when I’m talking with someone and mention something that we need to google, and I say “I can’t get on the internet on this thing right now.”
But none of this really actually works. I find myself scrolling between news apps where I’ve already seen all the headlines in the last ten minutes. If I’m really stuck, I’ll get on google maps and look at aerial views of golf courses. It’s not even the content that’s on the device at this point — I’m dependent on the dopamine hits from the device itself, and I feel it sucking the life out of me.
To be clear, this isn’t to any “holy shit he’s not doing his work because he can’t get off the phone” sort of thing. I think it’s a very normal (if not better-than-average) level of device dependence. But I do wonder: when did this become an acceptable way to live your life?
Right now, I’m running: OneSec, which makes you wait thirty seconds or complete a puzzle or something before you can open an app; Brick (actually “Normal,” a free clone of Brick), which makes you unable to open certain apps without tapping your phone on a physical object first; Screen Time timers on Twitter, etc. that strictly limit my Twitter use to 15 mins/day (I don’t even know my Screen Time password, my mom set it, so I couldn’t bypass it if I tried); Blank Spaces, a home screen that’s more minimalist and theoretically less appealing to use. In my kitchen, I’ve got a Pelican case with a hole drilled in the side, and I’ve routed a charging cable through the hole, and I’ve fashioned a combination lock to the outside with duct tape — when I go to sleep (ideally, when I get home at all), I put my phone on the charger and lock it inside the box. I’ve read Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism and have implemented that protocol twice.
So it’s not like I’m not trying.
You can see the problem when you look at the Mag 7 stocks right now:
NVIDIA is worth $5.2 trillion for making chips
Alphabet (Google’s parent) is worth $4.6 trillion for an array of mostly-free services tha make money for gathering your data
Apple is worth $4.5 trillion for making the iPhone in your pocket and all associated services
Microsoft is worth $3.1 trillion for making software for your devices and cloud-hosting web-services to support your scrolling
Amazon is worth $2.8 trillion for getting you to buy stuff on your phone, but also for AWS, again web-services for (among other things) scrolling
Tesla is worth $1.6 trillion for… promising robotaxis and not delivering them
Meta is worth $1.5 trillion solely for getting you to scroll on your phone for as long as possible to serve you ads
After some quick (highly-flawed but directionally accurate) AI research, there’s roughly $16.5 TRILLION dollars of market value that’s directly predicated on getting you to use your phone as much as possible. The entire economy is set up to make this possible: social media platforms are deregulated under Section 230, supply chains for iPhones source 2,700 components made of 75 elements (2/3 of the periodic table) mined in 30+ countries and get it to you for (sometimes under) a grand; in 2025, I’m pretty sure there was more AI capex spending than on all consumer spending combined.
$16.5 trillion dollars and ~5.8 billion smartphone users. That means that that nearly $3,000 of market value is predicated on you using your device. For US users, throw in our consumer premium and you get over $14,500 (I think this figure is similar for a lot of the developed world). Make that the top half of US earners (I assume most golfers and therefore most ITW readers), and that number goes to over $20,000.
Put another way: if you stopped using your phone today, the market loses it’s $14,000-$20,000+ stake that its invested in your phone usage.
Not to mention, most of the features that keep us hooked (new features, more addictive scrolling feeds, etc.) can be deployed at nearly zero marginal cost. If these features are developed for one person, it costs next to nothing — not even pennies, way less than pennies — to serve that software to the next person, and the next, and the next. It’s not just that our attention is being bought — it’s being bought in bulk at a steeply, steeply discounted price.
So that $14,000-$20,000 stake is a bit misleading in this sense. Really, you’re up against all of tech capex — all the money spent on honing these platforms for maximum profit. For 2026, the Mag 7 alone are expected to spend $725 billion in capex, all of which is deployed at you at little more than the cost of electricity.
So you’re up against hundreds of billions of dollars of spending to protect the market’s $14,000-$20,000+ stake in you continuing to use your phone — a stake which they’ll deploy those hundreds of billions of dollars to turn into $22,000, then $25,000, then $30,000, then $40,000….
And we wonder why it’s so hard to stay off the damn things.
There’s a stat that I’ve heard (but haven’t vetted) that depression and anxiety rates are increasing among kids and this correlates pretty well with tech/social media adoption — but that the most depressed and anxious kids are those who don’t use social media. They feel left out as they watch their friends and peers using the services. I wonder if this isn’t only half of the problem — if there’s a population who finds life online unfulfilling and tries to avoid it in favor of the real world, but who finds that, after so much of the world has been sucked online, there’s not as much real world left to experience. If the real world they seek doesn’t really exist anymore.
All of this is basically a thought experiment designed to make me sad — basically, this:
— which is a pretty dumb way to think about and go through life. So I’ll ask instead, if anyone’s found some good ways to stay off their phones, keep me posted.
I talked about my putting earlier. It hasn’t been good. And I’ve been addressing this the best way I can: hitting a shitload of putts.
The game is called drawbacks: you hit a putt, and then, if you miss, you pull your next putt 3’ further from the hole than it ended up. You end up hitting a lot of 4’-6’ers, and hitting a lot of these gives you a lot more confidence in the putter. I play a bunch of holes of this, and I keep some stats to see if there’s any patterns.
I’ve been thinking about Zen in the Art of Archery, a book by the German professor Eugen Herrigel. Herrigel went to Japan for six years to study Zen Buddhism, primarily by studying Kyudo, a form of archery. The book, according to Wikipedia, “is credited with introducing Zen to Western audiences in the late 1940s and 1950s.”
The advice seems almost stereotypically simple most of the time: the goal is not proper technique but to have no technique at all, let go of your entire concept of self, etc. etc. I’ve only read the book once, and the whole thing seemed so simplistic and difficult that I couldn’t even comprehend what was going on.
Flash forward today, and I’m saying, to hell with everything I’ve learned and/or taught myself over the last year with regard to putting — I still suck at putting, so clearly it’s not helping. And I’m trying to stand over putts and focus on my breathing and the hole, and I have no technique or process beyond this.
I still go through the same routine I’ve always gone through, because that’s deeply engrained by now. But, if you asked me any “how do you” or “how are you” questions, I’m trying not to have an answer for you. Except I’m not trying, because trying anything would be a technique….
My college teammates used to call this “the tingle.” It developed as a sort of countercultural push to some of the statistics-based strategy advice we were given in college; instead of doing what the numbers told you to do, you’d “tingle it.” “Tingling” a putt can be considered directly antithetical to AimPointing a putt. You might not even bend down to read a putt you were tingling. Or you might. Who knows.
This is one of my favorite videos in the history of the internet:
Please watch it, because I think Will Sennett captures the essence of “tingling” better than I ever could. It’s also a core part of my subconscious (one of my most listened-to playlists on Spotify is called “Murder and Sprinting”, and I say “listen to the wind” at least once a week).
But, in any event…. Technique be damned, I’m tingling all my putts now. I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.