Ty Kesten Was Not Afraid of Dying - He Was Afraid of Not Living

His mother describes him as “the coolest person ever,” and his legacy now lives on through the 1Six Foundation.

---

One Western Pennsylvanian mother, Lynnette Kesten, has made it her mission to celebrate and honor her son, Ty, through the 1Six Foundation which has raised thousands of dollars for charity.

Her world changed forever when Ty passed away at age 17 in a fatal motocross accident, when he was in the final lap of his race. Even in the thick of her and her family’s initial grief, a desire to inspire positive change as a result of his death was nurtured to fruition. The foundation is named after Ty’s instagram account and his racing number, 16. 

Despite being a small operation,1Six has raised over $130,000 for numerous charities since its inception in 2016, just months after Ty’s passing. Some of the organizations who received donations thus far include Make a Wish Foundation, Humane Animal Rescue, American Heart Association, and Brookline Teen Outreach, among many others. 

The Kesten family is surrounded by a supportive group of close friends and family, who were there for them in the aftermath of the accident. On Fridays, a group of them would get together at the Kesten household, and one night their friend, Steve Hays, thought they should do a golf outing and start a foundation in Ty’s honor.

Lynnette admits that they had no idea what they were doing and, in fact, they’d never even been golfing. She’s immensely grateful to Steve for all he’s done to help carry on Ty’s name ever since.

1Six has hosted events like Painting with a Twist, comedy night, a dance, and a Halloween party. They do fireworks for the 4th of July and have annual golf outings. Before the pandemic, there were about 5-6 events every year, which they are hoping to work toward again.

Merchandise is available year round on their website, and each purchase funds a charity, inspired by special causes that were dear to Ty, like helping children and animals.

1Six will host the next golf outing event on September 7th. Guests can take part in Chinese auction baskets, purchase merchandise, and enjoy an epic bar on the 16th hole, organized and run by Tina Fisher. Guests also have a chance at winning golfer gifts thanks to Brad Englemore from Shenanigans Bar and Grille. 

“Ty was not a golfer, but this has been our longest running event,” Lynnette says, “and it's always a good time.”

There are just a few lucky humans out there on this Earth who got to personally know Ty, who was an active motocross-enthusiast and daredevil. His passion for the sport came early on in his life, and he’d always been a natural at “anything on wheels,” his mother tells me. His dirt bike was like another kid’s video games, and he’d even build his own “jumps” (hilly ramp-like formations on a track), exhibiting no fear. 

His courage was a living testament to his motto, “I’m not afraid of dying, I’m afraid of not living.” Lynnette would constantly observe her son engaged in random shenanigans, enough to grab the attention of neighbors, who eventually got used to his lively spirit, just shaking their heads and laughing every time he would do something wild.

She tells me about the third time Ty broke his collarbone and how she caught him doing backflips on his bike on the trampoline, his arm snug in its sling. There were tennis balls on the bottom of his bike where the wheels should have been. 

“This was my life every single day,” she says. “I would wake up wondering what inventive crazy thing my son would do that day.”

Ty was “always outdoors, even in the winter.” He was a protective big brother, always looking out for his little sister Tommie.

“No boys were allowed to like her,” Lynnette says, and “he would always make her laugh if she was having a bad day.”

He was described as “everyone’s best friend,” by one of his friends. Ty was well-liked by his peers and a joy to be around.

As a mother, Lynnette finds it incredibly difficult to speak about her son in the past tense, which is something she had to do to share his story with me. 

“It’s basically groundhog day, every day,” she says, emphasizing how deep and unimaginable the grief that parents who have lost their children experience. Eight years later, the anniversary of Ty’s passing doesn’t get any easier. She still thinks about where her son would be today and the man he would have become.

“We are still not through our grief, and we never will be.”

In 1997, Lynnette and her husband lost their first son, Tommy, who was stillborn. Having lost two boys, she remarks that people often expect her to know just what to say about loss.

All she really can say is “just do the best you can with the cards you have been dealt.” 

She wants others to realize “how short and precious life is.” She encourages smiles and laughter and having fun whenever possible. That will be a lifeline for difficult moments. 

“I would also say stay close to the people that meant the most to your person.” 

Most of Ty’s friends still keep in touch with Lynnette and her family. They don’t go so much as a week without talking or meeting. 

“Each of those boys remind us of Ty in some way, or some memory of Ty, and that brings us the utmost comfort and happiness,” Lynnette says. 

“I can't stress enough how thankful we are for anyone who has played a part in his beautiful life.”

Even if you never knew Ty, you are now a part of his legacy, having read about his story. Let it be a reminder to love and appreciate those around you because life is short and unpredictable. Let it be a reminder to live life to the fullest, like Ty did.

If you are interested in getting involved with the foundation, you can send Lynnette a message on their website.

4 Techniques to Curb Your Phone Addiction

Reflection, detachment, intentionality, and human connection may be key in taking back control of your attention.

---

Many of us are stuck in a constant cycle of spending hours on our phone, feeling guilty about it, and then doing it over again because we feel as if we have no control.

Yet, I refuse to believe that we have to be ruled by our devices, which were originally intended to be useful tools. Our phones can be positive instruments for work, social connection, personal productivity, and even a little bit of free time.

Yet there is a growing problem with technology addiction.

It’s why I consulted my former professor, Clark Chilson, from the University of Pittsburgh to gain more insight into this problem and discover potential solutions. Chilson teaches religious studies at Pitt, yet ask any one of his students, and they’ll probably tell you they were personally impacted by his teachings, regardless of their religious affiliation or lack thereof. Every time I stepped into his classroom, I knew I’d be learning much more than what was on the syllabus.

Here is some of the advice he gave me on how best to foster a healthy relationship with technology.

1. Confront your screen time 

One way that we can break our technology addiction is to make ourselves uncomfortable. Go into your device’s settings, and check your screen time. How many hours are you really spending online every day?

This confrontation is similar to Naikan therapy in Japan, a structured self-reflection practice, sometimes used to treat addictions, in which participants are faced with a series of questions.

Chilson invites you to print out your screen time, or write it down somewhere that you will see every day. What are the consequences of spending that amount of time on your phone? How many hours do you want to spend on your phone today?

“The answer for most of us is I'd like to spend a little less,” Chilson says. “I'm giving a tremendous amount of my precious life to this object.”

Perhaps asking yourself a series of these questions can make you more aware of the ways in which your excessive technology use could be harming you.

2. Intermittent fast from technology

Have you heard of the recent trend of dopamine detoxing? It’s when you go a period of time without engaging in things that are instantly gratifying, like browsing the internet, checking social media, watching TV, playing video games, or engaging in any other kind of entertainment. Detoxes can last days, weeks, or even months.

Intermittent fasting may be a less drastic, more reasonable approach to help you release your attachment to your device. It can be hard to go without some form of dopamine for a whole week. But what if, every day, you set aside a certain amount of hours in which you refrain from going on your phone?

In a battle between his willpower and the internet, Chilson acknowledges that “the internet wins every time.”

“The best way not to get sucked in is just not to turn it on,” he says. “And because I can't live completely without it, I just don't turn it on before noon.”

Find a time frame that works for you (ie. 9am-9pm, 10am-6pm, 12pm-4pm etc.), and see if you can find the willpower to stay away from technology or a particular device during that time.

You’ll likely be engaging in a lot of urge-surfing, a mindfulness technique that promotes awareness of one’s own thoughts in order to avoid acting on impulse. Urges usually take the form of waves, where intensity increases and eventually subsides.

3. Use technology in a particular, intentional way

Chilson encourages us to leverage technology by using it intentionally. He suggests finding a podcast or video series that focuses on a hobby or skill that will lead you away from your phone. You can also use it to deepen your understanding of or connection with a particular tradition.

“Pleasure is a source of pain,” he says, drawing on a main tenet in Buddhism. “That's what we're doing on the phone and the internet. We're looking for pleasure.”

This access to pleasure is often constant, immediate, and well… exhausting.

We then experience a sense of wasted time, and perhaps a sense of guilt for using the internet in a bad way, or a sense of unease after engaging in negative online discourse with internet strangers. 

“If we want a wholesome mind, we have to put wholesome things in it,” Chilson says.

The major problem is that many of the things you may stumble across on the internet are not wholesome. They certainly exist but aren't as eye-catching as negative headlines.

Chilson believes it is essential that we monitor the kinds of things we put in our minds, by choosing what we watch or what we think about.

4. Have quality time with other human beings

“What being human entails is the need to be loved and to love and to feel like you belong to other people and they belong to you,” Chilson says. “And that is what we are losing.”

We are cultivating pleasure, not relationships, through technology. Instead, go out into the real world, find a like-minded community of people around you, and start cultivating genuine connection. 

Volunteer at the local church, food bank, or pet shelter, or start a new friendship with a person from the office or the classroom. Join a gym or a book club or sign up for an art workshop or cooking class. If you work from home, maybe even spend some of your time working at the library or the coffee shop down the road. There’s so many ways in our day to day lives that we can increase our social interactions.

So…what now?

Breaking technology addiction requires habit building. It’s best to wean yourself off. It’s impractical to jump from constantly looking at your phone to never touching it at all. 

“The formation of a habit is what is really most important,” Chilson says. “With any discipline, though, it becomes easier once you get in the habit.”

Little incremental improvements are the most valuable because they are the most likely to be maintained in the long-term. We don’t need to be perfect or great - just better than we were before.

Chilson encourages us to use the time that we aren’t on technology to really think about our purpose. This is a lifelong quest that takes years to solve. So he leaves us, instead, with three more specific questions we can try and answer to get just a little bit closer:

What's your purpose for the next week? Are you bringing other human beings into your life? And how can we best live as a human being?

Is Big Tech Playing Us?

The free platforms we have all come to know and love have been buying our attention this whole time.

---

Has anyone else noticed technology’s unsettling grip on our present-day world? Every so often, you might find yourself at a get-together where one or most of the guests fiddle with their phone in the middle of a conversation like it's a kind of fix. 

Every so often, you might find that you are, indeed, one of these guests. It’s reminiscent of the way smokers step outside for a puff or sugar addicts reach for a pint of ice cream at midnight (I will admit that the latter is me).

Why is it that phone addictions aren’t taken as seriously as other kinds? Alcohol kills livers. Smoking kills lungs. Sugar rots teeth. Don’t phones rot our brains and kill our time?

Excessive phone use is sweeping the world. In the United States alone, 31% of adults and 46% of teenagers report being online “almost constantly,” according to recent research. Children are being exposed to substantial screen time younger and younger. Young adults are finding it increasingly difficult to break digital habits that have been instilled in them for years.

So, why does it matter? Well, my natural human instinct is to be revolted at the thought of living most of my life behind a phone screen. There’s something about “iPad kids,” “doomscrolling,” and being “chronically online” that feels so incompatible with living a fulfilling life.

Although the research is still young, there have been several studies drawing a correlation between increased social media and technology use and depression. 

One 2020 study identified several potential harmful effects of technology use, including reduced attention span, impaired emotional and social intelligence, social isolation, impaired cognitive and brain development, and disrupted sleep. 

Anecdotally, I have witnessed the ways phone addiction has contributed to unhappiness in my own life and the lives of people around me.

I spoke with my former professor, Clark Chilson, at the University of Pittsburgh to get a diverse perspective on the technological epidemic happening right under our fingertips. He specializes in religion in Asia, having taught courses at Pitt, such as Buddhism and Psychology and Popular Religion in a Changing Japan, since 2006. 

From a young age, he has always been interested in figuring out how we should live our lives. He knew that delving into religious studies was one way to address such a question. 

“We have to deal with the world that we’re placed in,” Chilson says. “The world did not look like this 30 years ago…It will not look like this 30 years from now.”

Let’s face it - technology exists. We use our phones as alarms, as navigation systems, as a way to communicate. It would be pretty impossible to live without them in this day and age. While our phones can be useful tools, most of the time we use it to watch Netflix, shop online, scroll social media, or play games. According to Chilson (and let’s be real - common sense), our phones are 90% a waste of our time.

“The algorithm is designed to suck you in,” he says, seeing phones as neither evil nor neutral. Perhaps we can call it chaotic neutral. 

Despite the constant pull of the algorithm, many of us are aware of our phone addictions, but let it happen, not caring about or giving thought to the way it could harm us. Chilson defines an addiction as knowing you would be better off not doing something, and continuing to do it anyway. Of course, this is a loose definition, but we can use it to assess the habits in our lives that may not be very good for us.

The “attention economy” is designed to keep us scrolling, tapping, or watching, all the while companies make a hefty profit. The way I see it, it’s like a giant industrial dairy farm but our brains are the ones being milked… no wonder our collective mental health is plummeting. What’s even scarier is that the possible long-term negative consequences of prolonged technology use are going unnoticed, or worse: ignored. 

It’s imperative that we all start questioning the world around us, the way it functions, and the way we function in it. Next time you think about picking up your phone, letting 10 minutes turn into a few hours, think about how it was designed and how those free apps may actually come with a silent cost (aka your precious time, potential, and peace of mind).

Rather than ask ourselves “How can I stop using technology?” Chilson proposes a different question: “How can I have a healthy relationship with technology?”

Finding this balance can be incredibly challenging, but the quality of our lives depend on it.