Socializing with my friends online is my life. The moment I wake     1     I check through all my social networking     2     (app), reading my emails and posting updates. I have 500 friends online and I live with several roommates, but I feel lonely. It seems that I have an active social life,     3     (attend) parties and playing sports, but I’m absent-minded because I     4     (strong) obsess over my phone.

Social networking     5     (be) the master of my life. Though sometimes I set deadlines    6     (tear) myself away from my phone, I fail again and again. Spending so much time socializing online. I always feel     7     (depress) and alone. As a result, I can’t finish what I should do in my real life.

It is common that at parties or at a family holiday, most members fix their eyes on their phones,     8    they think is normal rather than rude.

What is most worrying is that it is     9     (possible) to drop my phone. I need it for my studies because my teachers and classmates need to contact me. It is     10     problem that we are so close but really so far.

3 . Janet, now 37, was playing with her new pet dog, Stitch, who jumped up, grabbed her sleeve, and tore several holes in her sweater with its sharp teeth. Instead of throwing the sweater away, Janet decided to repair it.

She turned to “visible repairing,” an idea of repairing clothes that leaves an obvious fix. She added bright flowers and other small designs to damaged clothes. “Every time you do a repair, it’s like having bought a new piece of clothes,” says Janet.

Actually, repairing is a great opportunity to realize the urgent (迫切的) need to reduce waste. Sadly, we have become used to replacing things instead of repairing them — and the rubbish is piling up. Worldwide, we throw away 92 million tons of cloth every year. Electronic waste is another growing problem: About 50 million tons of it is created each year around the world.

The good news is that fixing things can help deal with the waste problem. There are some solutions. Due to information online, the popular how-to site iFixit.com , a database (数据库) with nearly 100,000 repair brochures for everything from electronics to clothing, has promoted more than 100 million repairs. In addition, since the first Repair Café opened in2009 in Amsterdam, more than 2,700 cafés have been set up to offer in-person fix-it help in various countries. Organizers set up events, and volunteers with repair knowledge bring their tools. They will try to fix whatever people bring in, for free, and teach visitors how to do repairs themselves.

Fixing things is part of a larger change toward a circular economy —the idea that instead of throwing away things once they are broken or out of date, we reuse or repair them, keeping them out of the landfill (垃圾填埋场) for as long as possible. According to a 2023 report from Circle Economy, a Netherlands-based NGO, if the world changed to a circular economy, we could lower the amount of waste by a third.

5 . The cultural products we create reflect the times we live in. “Works of popular culture, we reasoned, should reflect the extent to which nature occupies our collective consciousness (集体意识), ”   says psychologist Dr Selin Kesebir. “If novelists, songwriters or filmmakers have fewer encounters with nature these days than before, or if they don’t expect their audiences to respond to it, nature would feature less frequently in their works.”

The researchers drew up a list of 186 nature-related words belonging to four categories: general words relating to nature such as cloud, or sunrise; names of flowers; names of trees; and birds’ names. Then they analyzed how often these occurred in the output of popular culture. They looked at English-language fiction, pop songs and film plots, each of which featured thousands of examples.

The results were consistent across books, songs and movies. “The space taken by nature has been decreasing in the collective imagination and cultural conversation since the 1950s. Nature features significantly less in English popular culture today than it did in the first half of the 20th century” says Dr Kesebir.

Why? Some people suggest it’s the growth of cities that has fuelled the change. “Urbanization swallows up natural areas and cuts people off from their natural surroundings,” says Dr Kesebir. But, she goes on, the growth rate of cities over the 20th century is gradual, but the data shows a marked change from the 1950s onwards. So it’s not just the fact that fewer of us are living in rural areas that explains the decline (减少).

More likely, she believes, we’re seeing the impact of technological change leading to more indoor recreational activities. Yes, TV, video games and the Internet are to blame. “These technologies may well have been substituted for nature as a source of joy, recreation and entertainment.”

Books, songs and films shape our culture as well as reflecting it, says Dr Kesebir. “The declining cultural attention to nature means a muting of the message that nature: is worth paying attention to and talking about. It also means a loss of opportunities to awaken curiosity, appreciation and awe for nature.”

6 . We, modern humans, spend 90% of our time inside, traveling between homes and offices, schools and apartments, restaurants and gyms. I’ve been hearing this statistic so much that I started to wonder if it was an urban legend. It’s not! The best reference for the statistic appears to be The National Human Activity Pattern Survey (NHAPS).

The survey was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). “EPA’s main purpose for collecting the NHAPS data was to provide diary records that could be used as inputs for computer-based human exposure models,” says the study. In other words, in order to understand how humans might be impacted by pollutants in our various indoor and outdoor environments, scientists needed to know how much time we spend in different locations.

The survey was conducted by the University of Maryland’s Survey Research Center. The survey used telephone interviews to collect 24-hour retrospective (回顾的) diaries from each respondent (调查对象). Between 340 and 1,713 respondents were interviewed in each of the ten EPA regions across the 48 neighboring states. Respondents were generally representative of the whole nation for gender, age, race, and educational attainment.

Americans spend 87% of their time indoors and an additional 6% in an enclosed vehicle. These proportions (比例) are also fairly constant across various regions of the United States and Canada. The finding that emerges is that we are basically an indoor species. In a modern society, total time outdoors is the most negligible part of the day, often so small that it barely shows up in the total.

Is the study accurate? Probably not. It may not take into account some populations that spend a high proportion of time outside. As the study states, “Those who were away from a home for extended periods were not included in the survey. These individuals may be more likely than those who were at home to spend large quantities of time outdoors.” Also, the survey methodology also doesn’t account well for bits of time spent taking out the trash, walking to the car, or taking a smoke break outside.

9 . When I made the decision to quit my full-time employment, I never thought that I could get involved in an increasing global trend. I had to leave my relatively high-profile position for an unexpected move that hurt my pride and prevented me from getting promoted. Yet, I excused my departure by saying “I wanted to spend more time with my family”.

Curiously, after around two and a half years, my experience in what Americans refer to as “downshifting” has turned my excuse into an absolute reality. I have been transformed from a passionate advocate of Linda Kelsey’s “have it all” concept, which she has been promoting for the past seven years in the pages of She magazine, into a woman who is content to accept a little bit of everything.

I have discovered that abandoning the idea of “juggling your life” and adopting the alternative strategy of “downshifting” has benefits that go far beyond financial success and social status. Nothing could convince me to go back to the lifestyle Kelsey used to promote and which I had previously enjoyed: 12-hour workdays, tight deadlines, the terrifying pressure of office politics, and the demand of being a parent on “quality time”.

After the widespread layoffs (裁员) brought on by cost-cutting in the late 1980s, America started to move toward a simpler, less materialistic way of life as a response to the economic downturn. In America, simplifying one’s life is frequently done for financial reasons, but in Britain, at least among the middle class I know, we have different motivations for doing so. For the women of my generation who were encouraged to keep juggling, downshifting is not so much a search for a mythical (虚无的) good life—growing your own organic vegetables, and risking turning into one—as a personal recognition of your limitations.

10 . Nowadays, smartphones fill us with text messages. Social media attack us with endless notices. Many consumers are buying the latest digital devices, from tablets and fitness trackers to commercial drones. Simple living seems to be a thing of the past.

Thoreau would beg to differ. As a writer who claimed the value of simplicity almost two centuries ago, he went against his time. He lived during the height of the Industrial Age, distinguished by the rise of huge factories and powerful machines such as steam engines. Thoreau withdrew from city life to live alone in the woods. He brought with him only the necessities of life and wrote about this adventure in his book Walden.

In Walden, Thoreau is basically making a philosophical statement: We are not living deliberate or meaningful lives, thanks to modern technology. We created powerful machines to make life more convenient. Unfortunately, these machines have done the opposite. In his words, “Men have become the tools of their tools”.

When technology causes that much distraction and confusion, it may be healthy to simplify life by shortening these technological use. Personally, I’ve done so in two ways. First, I don’t use data on my cellphone. I only use it to call or text. Second, I quit most social media. As a result, my technology distracts me very little, which allows me to live in. less confusion and, therefore, more deliberation. Sure, that’s not as extreme as Thoreau-moving to the woods, but it’s a realistic move I can make toward a more meaningful life.

One final clarification: Thoreau’s message of simplicity isn’t about rejecting all technology. It is, however, rejecting technological consumerism, or compulsively buying more technology for the sake of having more technology. This is why Walden is such an important book for technology education. Simplicity means minimizing material distractions so as to maximize life’s meaning.