A little over a year ago, I read the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport. It’s an amazing book and it’s main takeaway is this: Make sure that you are using your technology and not letting it use you.
In other words: If a piece of technology is not the single best way to achieve one of a select few goals that you care about, then don’t use it.
Solitude deprivation
In one of the chapters, he talks about “Solitude deprivation”. According to Cal, it’s:
A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.
Cal Newport
In other words, it is constantly getting “input” and information from the outside. Constantly listening to an audiobook, checking your phone or hearing a “ding” from your email.
According to Cal – and common sense, some would say – humans are not made for this amount of constant stimuli. We were made to get a small amount of stimuli most of the time and for short amounts of time (when a lion attacked) we would get a lot of stimuli.
In the modern life, we (or, at least I) have flipped the balance: Now we are getting stimuli constantly. And that keeps us not only from being productive, but also from being happy.
I’ve noticed multiple times that some of my best ideas come when I am not actively thinking about work. It might be in the shower, while taking a run, going for a walk or while driving.
In his book, Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday calls that state of being “stillness”. The state of being present and calm in a difficult situation. The state of just… being.
Always optimizing
A (big) part of me is very much non-still. It wants to ALWAYS optimize EVERYTHING. If I am taking a walk, I COULD listen to an audiobook (on 2x speed, of course) and learn something important.
If I just went for a walk, it might end up being a (gasp) waste of time. And we can’t have that!
I’m slowly but surely getting better at taking breaks. At not checking my phone constantly. At blocking myself from visiting websites that I know are a huge time sink. At taking a walk without my headphones in.
But it’s a difficult habit to break.
(After all, these services are made SPECIFICALLY to optimize the amount of time that we spend on them. Hundreds of engineers are working overtime to make me use 10 seconds of usage time to my phone. But more on that in another blog post. Until then, this video is great)
Being constantly distracted
But I know that being still and not getting input from the outside works. I know it helps me. Whenever I feel exhausted, I think: When was the last time I just sat down and just… existed? The last time I took a walk without headphones? And usually, the answer is a couple of weeks.
And in those couple of weeks, I have usually gotten fewer great ideas and been less creative. All for what? To be a bit more efficient with my walking time? To optimize everything a tiny bit more?
I could choose to meditate – and I do that once in a while – but I think integrating stillness into my life more fully would yield a better result. An athlete can’t smoke on a daily basis and quit once she has to train for a competition. She quits smoking at day 1. She builds the habit over time.
That’s what’s keeping me away from meditating: I feel like it might only be lessening the side effects, not changing the root cause: That I’m distracted. I’d rather get to a point where I wouldn’t need to meditate. But until I get to that point, meditating might be a good solution.
I’m working towards a place where I can answer “today” when I ask myself the question “when was the last time I did something without external stimuli?”
I have a feeling that that would probably make my life better.
