+
Heroes

Have 5 minutes? Playing with these apps actually makes other people's lives better.

True
Cricket Wireless2

Let's face it: There are a lot of silly smartphone apps out there. A lot. ‌

Enjoy Toilet Paper is an app that allows you to roll digital toilet paper — that's it. Is It Dark Outside? solves a problem you could figure out by peeking out a window (or actually goingoutside). Send Me to Heaven is an app that asks you to throw your phone as high into the air as humanly possible, AND PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO IT.

A man succumbing to frustration or merely partaking in the latest app fad? GIF via "Entourage."


But the converse is also true: With as little effort as it takes to swipe right on a potential love match or tweet our thoughts on the weekend's football games, we can easily create positive social change.

It sounds corny, I know, but there are actually dozens of apps that make contributing to the world around you just a click away. Here are five of them.

1. Budge

Are you someone who yearns for the attention of a crowd? A truth-or-dare fanatic, maybe? Or are you simply looking to feed your gambling addiction without all of that pesky guilt? Well then is Budge ever the app for you!

Budge is a game that turns the sense of competitiveness that friends and family members often share into an act of philanthropy. Users challenge a friend to anything they can imagine: a race, an impromptu game of trivia, a bare-knuckle boxing match (What? Some of us have really competitive friends.) — with the stipulation that the loser must donate an agreed-upon amount to a charity of the winner's choosing.

Image via iStock.

2. Give 2 Charity

Being that most of us have become attached at the hip (or hand) to our smartphones, you'd think an app that actually converts our phone usage into cold, hard cash would be a foregone conclusion by now. And thanks to the folks over at Give 2 Charity, it is.

Utilizing the location-tracking systems used by everything from Google Maps to Pokémon Go, Give 2 Charity monitors the amount of time you spend carrying or using your phone and transforms it into charitable donations. Every moment you're on the move with your phone is converted into points — 1,500 points earns $2. 3,000 points earns $5, and so forth — which can then be donated to the charity of your choice. Donating to a cause has literally never been easier.

Image via iStock.

3. Donate a Photo

The only thing more certain than the smartphone user's love of texting fire emojis to their crew is their love of taking pictures. Many of us live in a constant stream of live updates from our friends where no memory goes unsaved or unshared, and the people at Johnson & Johnson have figured out a way to turn this fascination with documentation into a charitable effort.

Simply dubbed Donate a Photo, this app (available on both Android and iOS) donates a dollar toward the cause or charity of your choosing for every photo that you donate through the app (up to one a day). Signup is as easy as connecting to the app through your Facebook or Twitter profile, and Donate a Photo will even provide you with an optional list of causes to donate to. Looks like those 4,300 pictures of your sleeping cat won't go to waste after all.

4. Feedie

Did you read over the description of Donate a Photo and think to yourself, "That's a great idea, but what if I wanted to replace the cat photos with photos of my food?" FEEDIE. THAT'S HOW.

Though only based in New York at the moment, Feedie is a groundbreaking app that allows the frequent photographers of food — foodstagrammers — to use their love of food to help those who don't have access to adequate meals. Simply download the app on iOS, take a photo of your food at any of the participating restaurants, and an entire meal will be donated to a nonprofit organization feeding schoolchildren in South Africa through the Lunchbox Fund.

Image via iStock.

Finally, an app that makes watching your pizza go cold as your friend struggles to find the proper lighting for a photo all worth it!

5. Charity Miles

If I have learned anything from the hundreds of Fitbit commercials I have watched from my couch, the best way to motivate someone is to present them with some sort of chart or metric of their progress. Something as regularly banal as how many steps per day you take instantly becomes a video game score when a physical number is placed on it, and Charity Miles mixes this kind of competitive fitness and philanthropy into one incredible concept. Fitlanthropy, I've decided to call it.

Image via Charity Miles, used with permission.

Again, the genius is in the simplicity: Charity Miles simply combines the tracking technology of a Fitbit — or any pedometer app, really — with cold, hard cash. All you have to do is download the app and take off, and Charity Miles will donate 25 cents for each mile you run (or 10 cents for every mile you bike) to one of over 35 charity organizations it's partnering with.

There's always a way to help out a person in need.

Thanks to the globe-spanning technological capabilities at our fingertips, it's become easier than ever before. So if we can find the time each day to take a photo, go for a run, or even click on our phone, then there's nothing stopping us from making a significant difference in the world.

It'll be less dangerous than playing Pokémon Go, in any case.

Sponsored

ACUVUE launches a new campaign to inspire Gen Z to put down their phones and follow their vision

What will you create on your social media break? Share it at #MyVisionMySight.

True

If you’ve always lived in a world with social media, it can be tough to truly understand how it affects your life. One of the best ways to grasp its impact is to take a break to see what life is like without being tethered to your phone and distracted by a constant stream of notifications.

Knowing when to disconnect is becoming increasingly important as younger people are becoming aware of the adverse effects screen time can have on their eyes. According to Eyesafe Nielsen, adults are now spending 13-plus hours a day on their digital devices, a 35% increase from 2019.1. Many of us now spend more time staring at screens on a given day than we do sleeping which can impact our eye health.

Normally, you blink around 15 times per minute, however, focusing your eyes on computer screens or other digital displays have been shown to reduce your blink rate by up to 60%.2 Reduced blinking can destabilize your eyes’ tear film, causing dry, tired eyes and blurred vision.3

Keep ReadingShow less

Karlie Smith shows the meal she's bringing to the restaurant for her son.

A mom who admitted she packs her 2-year-old a meal when they go out to dinner has started an interesting debate on TikTok about restaurant etiquette and how it applies to young children.

The video posted by Ohio mom, Karlie Smith (unbreakablemomma on TikTok), has received nearly 600,000 views and has over 1,850 comments.

“Call me cheap, call me whatever, but if we’re going out to a restaurant, I’m packing my kid a meal," Smith, 21, said in her post. "I do this for many reasons. On Friday nights, my family and I get together, and tonight, we’re getting food out. My son is not getting food out.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Pop Culture

Man rewatches shows from his childhood and his recaps of the bonkers storylines are priceless

Rob Anderson's hilarious recaps of shows like "Mighty Ducks," "Beethoven," and "7th Heaven" might make you wonder how they got made in the first place.

@hearthrobert/TikTok

These plots makes zero sense.

While there are no doubt some timeless classics from our childhood that remain every bit as amazing as we remember, many are straight-up cringey upon a later viewing. Really, it’s to be expected as societal viewpoints change…sort of a marker of how far we’ve collectively come.

And so, what do we do with these problematic pieces of old-school pop culture? Well, we can certainly update them to better reflect a more modern attitude, but that also comes with a set of potential problems. Or we could simply never watch them again. Certainly an option given all the content out there. But then we might miss an opportunity to better understand what seemed to work for the mainstream then, and why it doesn’t work now.

And then there’s the third option—allow ourselves to be entertained by their cringiness.

That’s certainly the route taken by Rob Anderson. Over on TikTok, Anderson has taken ultra-popular movies and television shows from his childhood and given them hilarious recaps capturing how absurd some of the storylines are.
Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

18-year-old took her college savings and bought the restaurant where she was a dishwasher

Samantha Frye, the newest owner of Rosalie's restaurant, is proving there's more than one way to invest in your future.

Canva

There are many way to invest in your future

Eighteen year old Samantha Frye has traded college life for entrepreneurship, and she has no regrets.

Frye began working at Rosalie's Restaurant in Strasburg, Ohio at 16 as a dishwasher, working up the ranks as a kitchen prep, server, then line cook. All while working a second job, sometimes third job.

After graduating high school, Frye started college at Ohio State with plans of studying business or environmental engineering. But when she came back to work a shift at Rosalie’s for winter break, an opportunity arose—the owners had planned to sell the restaurant.
Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

Woman decides that she is the love of her life and marries herself at her retirement home

“I said, you know what, I’ve done everything else. Why not?”

77-year-old woman decides she's the love of her life and marries herself.

We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it's not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.

Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.

On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.

Keep ReadingShow less
Joy

12-year-old Texas girl saves her family from carbon monoxide poisoning

She knew something was wrong with her mom and brother, which wound up saving her whole family.

Fort Worth 12-year-old helps save family from carbon monoxide poisoning.

Carbon monoxide is called a silent killer for a reason. Many people don't realize they're experiencing carbon monoxide poisoning before it's too late. The gas is colorless and odorless and tends to have a sedating effect that causes people to sleep through the fatal poisoning. Having carbon monoxide detectors is one of the most effective ways to identify the gas before it's too late to get out of the house, but not every home has one.

A little girl in Fort Worth, Texas, experienced a terrifying encounter with the deadly gas, but her quick actions saved her entire family. Jaziyah Parker is being held up as a hero after she realized something was wrong with her family members and called for help.

The girl called 911 after she noticed her mom pass out. On the call with the dispatcher, Jaziyah says she thinks her mother has died before explaining that there was something now wrong with her baby brother, who was just 5-months-old.

Keep ReadingShow less

Drew Barrymore speaks during the FLOWER Beauty launch at Westfield Parramatta on April 13, 2019, in Sydney, Australia.

Drew Barrymore, 48, has been in the public consciousness since she starred as Gertie in 1982’s mega-blockbuster, “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,” a performance that earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. So, it makes sense that many people of a certain age feel as if they’ve grown up with her.

Barrymore has consistently starred in hit films and movies that are rewatchable cable-TV staples, such as “Charlie's Angels” (2000), “Never Been Kissed” (1999), “Scream” (1996), “The Wedding Singer” (1998), “50 First Dates” (2004) and “Fever Pitch” (2005).

Now, she’s an even more significant part of people’s lives as the host of “The Drew Barrymore Show,” which runs every weekday on CBS. So far, the show has been a big success, attracting an average of 1.21 million views per show, and ranks as the #4 talk show in syndication. It was recently renewed through the 2024 season.

Keep ReadingShow less