This morning, my phone delivered its weekly screen time report.

My average daily screen time was three times higher than usual.

Not good.

But not entirely surprising, either.

Given the geopolitical, political, and financial turbulence of the past seven days, I found myself consuming far more information than I normally would. Checking headlines. Following developments. Refreshing feeds. Trying to make sense of it all.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered a thought from Howard Lindzon that I've always loved:

"There's no such thing as information overload... only filter failure."

That one landed a little differently this morning.

Because the problem wasn't necessarily the amount of information available to me. It was the absence of a filter determining what I allowed in.

And when you don't have a filter, you'll let just about anything in.

I certainly did this week.

Which got me thinking...

What filters are actually worth having?

Some filters are built around trends. What's happening. What's changing. What's next. What everyone else is doing, buying, believing, or worrying about.

And while trends can certainly be useful, they're also constantly moving.

When we filter our lives primarily through trends, we inevitably find ourselves feeling behind. As though there's something we haven't figured out, something we're missing, or something we need to acquire before we can finally be at peace.

It's a filter that often leaves us living from a place of lack and scarcity.

But there are other filters available to us.

Connection. Grace. Spaciousness. Union.

These aren't trends.

They're truths.

They don't change with the news cycle, the markets, the latest technology, or the prevailing cultural mood.

They don't require us to keep up.

They simply invite us to come back.

Back to what matters. Back to the people we love. Back to the present moment. Back to the quiet recognition that life is not something we have to continually chase, conquer, or figure out.

Perhaps the most important thing about a filter isn't what it allows us to see, but what it gives us permission to let pass by.

We don't have to consume everything to be informed.

We don't have to react to everything to be engaged.

And we certainly don't have to carry the weight of everything happening in the world to care about it.

So this weekend, I'm making a small adjustment to my filter settings.

Less noise. More presence.

Less comparison. More connection.

And perhaps a little less screen time.

Whatever your filter settings look like these days, I hope you'll remember to keep one simple preference turned on:

TRUTH > TREND

Because trends will always tell us where the world is going.

But truth has a way of guiding us home.

Namaste,

Ashton