👋 Hey friends,
I’ve been sick this past week, but I’m finally coming out of the delirium—and just in time. Today, Monday, October 20th, marks the end of our planning and analyzing phase and the start of the hard work: cutting out digital distractions.
Starting today, many of you are going cold turkey on Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Netflix—maybe even cutting back on email. I wish you luck. Know that not only am I right there with you, but hundreds of others are too.
We’re all going to face the same struggles—fear of missing out on what friends are talking about, the latest news, the memes. Then there’s the boredom, and the inevitable question: Is this really worth it?
It is.
So, in the rest of this issue of Life and Lab, we’ll talk about a few tips for surviving your first week—and I’ll share some updates from the Lab.
If you’ve followed the protocol, you already have a few tools written down: vivid descriptions of two worlds—one where you succeed, and one where you don’t (that’s the mental contrasting exercise). You’ve listed specific situations that trigger your digital habits, and you’ve written out your implementation intentions—the IF/THEN statements that help you replace those habits with better ones.
Lean on those when things get tough.
But there’s another challenge ahead. Depending on how much screen time you were clocking before this, you might suddenly find yourself with two… maybe even six extra hours in your day. That’s a lot of new, empty space—and it’s going to feel uncomfortable at first.
So, let’s talk about what to do with it.
Cal Newport talks about this extensively in Digital Minimalism: you need something—probably several things—to fill that newfound time.
Start with reading.
I don’t usually tell people what they should or shouldn’t do with their time—but in this case, I’ll make an exception. You should be reading.
Yes, it calms the mind, teaches new things, and makes you feel slightly superior the older and more obscure your books are—but that’s not the point. Reading works because it’s easy to fit in.
Ten minutes before bed? Read. Waiting for the bus? Read. Too tired for a run or a trip to the game store? Read.
Everyone in this cohort has been assigned Digital Minimalism as core reading, but I recommend having more than one book on the go—preferably in different genres. That way, when you get bored of one, you can switch instead of reaching for your phone.
Reading is great, but let’s be honest—most of us have low reading stamina when we first start. If you’re cutting six hours of daily screen time, you’ll need more than books to fill it.
The best way to sustain this new lifestyle is through social hobbies—activities that get you out of the house and involve a regular, communal commitment.
Things like:
a weekly run club,
Friday Night Magic at your local game store,
a dance class with your partner or friends,
or volunteering on Sunday mornings.
These kinds of hobbies anchor your week. They come with built-in accountability—you know people will miss you if you skip—and they quickly turn into communities. You’re far more likely to look forward to a run when you’re running with people you enjoy.
And remember: nearly any solo hobby can become social.
Learning guitar? Join a local music school and take weekly lessons. Or bring a friend and learn together.
The goal here isn’t just to “fill the time.” It’s to rediscover what used to fill it before every empty moment was colonized by a screen.
When you start to replace digital consumption with creation, play, movement, and connection, you’ll realize something profound: boredom isn’t a void—it’s an opening.
And that’s where real life sneaks back in.
It’s been a while since we talked about homelabbing in this newsletter. The 30-day cohorts have taken up a lot of my attention lately—but fear not! I’m cooking up plenty of new projects to build on stream and for YouTube.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been building a Jellyfin media server on stream.
Recently, I discovered that DRM circumvention—the process of making Blu-rays readable and playable outside of their intended players—is illegal in both Canada and the U.S. That means I can’t legally rip my own movies for the server.
Still, I plan to make a YouTube video about the process for those who live in jurisdictions where it is legal. I also want to talk about how absurd it is that we can’t legally back up media we’ve purchased and own—especially when Blu-ray discs are known to degrade over time (see: disc rot).
Frankly, that doesn’t feel like ownership at all. I might dig deeper into the legal movements around digital ownership and rights for the upcoming video—expect a mild rant.
It’s been a while since we built anything with the Kubernetes cluster, and I’m starting to feel the itch. I’m also realizing how little observability I currently have in my homelab—and that’s a bit anxiety-inducing.
So, it’s time to fix that. This week, we’ll be setting up Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring.
I don’t know much about these two yet, but they’re the go-to stack for homelabbers who want centralized insight into their systems—tracking performance, detecting issues, and visualizing everything in one place.
My plan is to feed in:
ZFS scrub data from the NAS,
performance metrics from Proxmox, and
cluster stats from Kubernetes.
That should give us a much clearer view of what’s happening inside the lab—and hopefully some foresight into potential problems.
After that, I want to follow up with Ansible work. The lab is finally getting big enough that the idea of manually updating every LXC and VM is starting to scare me. Prometheus and Grafana help us identify problems; Ansible will help us solve them—efficiently, and at scale.
As some of you know, I’ve been quietly soft-launching my Patreon. One of the new perks is that the last stream of every month will be a Patron Topic Stream—where supporters suggest and vote on what we’ll build or explore together.
For those of you already supporting the channel, go ahead and drop your ideas! I can’t wait to see what you come up with. I’m sure I’ll learn a ton stepping outside my comfort zone with your suggestions.
That really says it all! Thank you all so much for 10k subscribers. As I write this, it’s actually a lot closer to 15k.
This still blows my mind.
My Links:
Discord: https://discord.gg/gYMVfRYK
GitHub: https://github.com/NLaundry
That’s all for now! Thank you all so much as always for your time and attention. I know how valuable it is.
Good luck for those of you in the 30 day cohort and I’ll see you all on stream this Thursday!
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry
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