I recently spent a day giving my two-year-old son a taste of the kind of childhood I remembered from the 1990s with a little help from ChatGPT. Unsurprisingly, that was a fairly screen-free experience, so I thought it might be worth trying something similar for myself. I asked the AI chatbot to give me a challenge of a couple of evenings of activities that would be similarly screen-free, and the result really caught me off guard.
Specifically, I told the AI chatbot to “Replace 30 minutes of mindless scrolling in my evening with a real-world challenge. The challenge should take about 20 to 30 minutes and get me away from my phone or computer.”
Using tiny challenges to make evenings more interesting
ChatGPT instructed me to walk through my home and find five ordinary objects with interesting stories attached to them. Once I found them, I was supposed to spend a few minutes writing down or thinking about those stories.
It was a little quirky, as might be expected. It did offer some exercise of the brain, so I gave it a shot. One object was a toy dragon from my childhood. Another was a souvenir from a trip my wife and I had taken years ago. A third was an old book that somehow survived multiple moves.
The challenge turned out to be less about the objects and more about noticing how much history accumulates around ordinary possessions.
The second challenge that evening was to pull three books from my shelves that I had not opened in years and spend ten minutes with each one.
I selected an old novel, a history book, and a favorite childhood read. Thirty minutes disappeared remarkably quickly.
Letting ChatGPT create a cabinet of curiosities
The second evening produced an entirely different set of challenges.
ChatGPT instructed me to create what it called a “cabinet of curiosities.” The task was to walk around the house and gather ten objects that seemed completely unrelated to one another. Once assembled, I was supposed to invent a fictional explanation connecting all of them.
The resulting collection included a guitar pick, a toy dinosaur, a coffee mug, a flashlight, a screwdriver, and several other items that had no business belonging to the same story. After some thought, I developed an elaborate tale involving time-traveling archaeologists.
I then took another challenge from ChatGPT.
The AI challenged me to build the most impressive snack plate possible using only ingredients already in my kitchen. This turned out to be a surprisingly entertaining exercise in creativity and a mildly alarming audit of what was actually sitting in my refrigerator.
None of these activities was life-changing, but they felt a lot more satisfying than just scrolling on social media. Social media often creates the feeling that every moment should be optimized, improved, or transformed into something extraordinary. These challenges operated on a much smaller scale. They were not trying to reinvent my life. They were simply trying to make an ordinary evening feel slightly more intentional.
The experiment worked because the challenges were small. They did not require special equipment, careful planning, or major lifestyle changes. They simply interrupted a habit and made my evenings way more memorable.
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ESchwartzwrites@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
