An Attempt at Habituating Thoughtfulness

IMG_3924.jpg

Have you ever found yourself in conversation with a friend for the first time in a few months unable to remember the specifics of the last life update they shared with you? “What was the name of the person they’re seeing?” “What was the dim sum place they told me I needed to try?” “Didn’t they say they were going to get a dog? Where is the dog? When can I hang out with the dog?” This has happened to me more often than I’d care to admit, so I’m trying out a new system: I’m creating a note in my note-taking app for each individual I want to track, and after I see them I’ll add a new section with the date and a few bullet points covering life updates and specific things I want to follow up about next time I see them. If there are time-sensitive things I want to follow up about, I’ll add a reminder in my to-do app too. It’s amazing the response you’ll get when you text someone asking how their interview went after they told you they’d be spending the next week anxiously prepping for it. Nothing groundbreaking here, but kind of wild how impactful following up on something someone shared in passing can be.

"Hey, listen to your emotions"

I came across an anonymous post earlier this year titled “Hey, listen to your emotions” that shook me:

Bitterness shows you where you need to heal, where you’re still holding judgments on others and yourself.

Resentment shows you where you’re living in the past and not allowing the present to be as it is.

Discomfort shows you that you need to pay attention right now to what is happening, because you’re being given the opportunity to change, to do something different than you typically do it.

Anger shows you what you’re passionate about, where your boundaries are, and what you believe needs to change about the world.

Disappointment shows you that you tried for something, that you did not give in to apathy, that you still care.

Guilt shows you that you’re still living life in other people’s expectations of what you should do.

Shame shows you that you’re internalizing other people’s beliefs about who you should be (or who you are) and that you need to reconnect with yourself.

Anxiety shows you that you need to wake up, right now, and that you need to be present, that you’re stuck in the past and living in fear of the future.

Sadness shows you the depth of your feeling, the depth of your care for others and this world.

Inspired by this, I’ve started a morning routine of writing down a list of:

  • Everything I’m feeling

  • The emotion name(s) closest to capturing each feeling to train myself to recognize them

  • What each might be trying to tell me

  • How I can act on each in a way that moves me toward my goals and vision for myself

Acting on a feeling may literally mean taking action, but in many cases it just requires acknowledging it, processing it, and letting it go. Via The Untethered Soul:

In the yogic tradition, [an] unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. This is a Sanskrit word meaning “impression,” and in the yogic teachings it is considered one of the most important influences affecting your life. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life…If old energies come back up because they were unable to process them before, let go of them now. It’s that easy. Just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh or do anything you want. Just don’t push it back down. Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.

And Now for Something Completely Different

Thanks to Screen Time on iOS, I learned that I averaged 3 hours and 55 minutes per day with my fresh horrors device this past week. Instagram alone totaled 6 hours and 39 minutes. Twitter clocked in at 2 hours and 25 minutes. That’s over 9 hours on social media that I could have spent elsewhere. Extrapolating out for a year, we’re lookin’ at 468 hours.

Almost 20 days! 3 weeks! 5% of a year!

Why on Earth am I doing this? Mostly because I am a status-seeking monkey. After some introspection, I think these are the main reasons I use Instagram today in rough order:

  1. To keep up with friends and become closer with acquaintances

  2. To be entertained or distracted

  3. To seek inspiration from people I admire

  4. To craft a curated visual journal of my life (to signal my status for posterity)

Twitter shares a partially overlapping list:

  1. To seek inspiration from people I admire (and sometimes interact with them!)

  2. To be entertained or distracted

  3. To feel like I’m one with the zeitgeist (and to be an informed citizen)

  4. To craft a curated list of pithy thoughts, retweets, and likes (to signal my status for posterity — look, Mom, my tweets were on Techmeme thrice!)

Over the past month, while reading the excellent How to Do Nothing, by Jenny Odell, I started to run some experiments around my usage of these apps. I learned that when I post something, I’m much more likely to check back in to see the response. Like 10x more likely.

So, in an attempt to salvage that sacred 5% of my life, I’m going to try to change my relationship with the attention economy. I’m going to stop posting on social media. Instead, I will post here, on a domain that I own. The tradeoff is significant: folks will have to come here deliberately, but I hope once they arrive they’ll have a better sense of who I am, and that what they find here will spark more meaningful interactions with me offline. Maybe this space will even outlive the rise and fall of new forms of social media over the years. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And, since you still seem to be reading, here are some other changes I’m making. Maybe you’ll find them helpful too:

  • Turn on Do Not Disturb by default. Set up Favorites so important calls can still come through.

  • Disable social media, email, and news push notifications.

  • Check social media once a day, with a 10 minute maximum for each site or a combined 30 minutes. Don’t post. You can set limits systemwide for iOS and Android now, and I suspect we will see this for Mac in the very near future. In the meantime, there are other options.

  • Favor push over pull. Sign up for newsletters that come to you rather than going to the news. (Insert disclosure that I build things at a company that delivers a lot of email.) And then check personal email twice a day max. Prioritize quality over recency: books over news, but not at the cost of being disengaged. I’m continuing to experiment with this, but here’s what I receive in my inbox right now:

    • Breaking news alerts from The New York Times

    • Daily newsletters from Techmeme and Stratechery

    • Weekly newsletters from The Economist, The Browser, and kottke.org

    • Sporadic newsletters from other interests

  • Charge your phone outside of your bedroom at night, and get an old-school alarm clock. Relive the joy of subjecting your roommates and partner to phantom alarms when you’re out of town!

  • Consider getting an Apple Watch with cellular (and Do Not Disturb enabled) if you can, and leave your phone at home. The unforgivable (or nonexistent) state of Lyft, Uber, and Spotify on Apple Watch prevents me from doing this regularly, but I’m optimistic that this will get sorted with time. The camera also keeps me tethered to my phone. I struggle with this the most. Perhaps new form factors will help here some day, but they threaten to introduce other distractions.

  • Try to embrace and revel in the discomfort of sitting around with just your thoughts without pulling out your phone. In my experiments with this earlier this month, I found that time slowed down, I noticed little details, and that I was much more engaged in conversations. I not only saved a portion of that 5%; I seemed to stretch it out too.

Computers are bicycles for the mind. We can still decide where to take them.

Thanks for participating in this lil’ experiment with me. 🙏