Interesting books mentioned:
- What Technology Wants (Kevin Kelly)
- Lead Yourself First (Raymond Kethledge)
- Solitude: A Return to the Self (Anthony Storr)
- Solitude (Michael Harris)
- The Wanderer And His Shadow (Nietzsche)
- Reclaiming Conversation (Sherry Turkle)
- How to Live on 24 Hours a Day (Arnold Bennett)
- Benjamin Franklin's autobiography
My reading notes:
You see how few things you have to do to live a satisfying and reverent life?
He was clearly excited by how his life had changed during this period. He started volunteering near his home, he exercises regularly, he’s reading three to four books a month, he began to learn to play the ukulele, and he told me that now that his phone is no longer glued to his hand, he’s closer he has ever been with his wife and kids.
His decision to leave these services, however, was about more than a tweak to his digital habits; it was a symbolic gesture that reinforced his new commitment to the minimalist philosophy of working backward from your deeply held values when deciding how to live your life.
He has since quit that service and instead receives his news through a curated collection of online magazines that he checks once a day in the afternoon. He told me that he’s better informed than he was during his Twitter days while also now thankfully freed of the addictive checking and refreshing that Twitter encourages in its users.
In the end, he settled on posting one picture every week of whatever personal art project he happens to be working on.
As Dave explained to me, his own father wrote him a handwritten note every week during his freshman year of college.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
How much of his time must be sacrificed to support his minimalist lifestyle? After plugging in the numbers gathered during his experiment, he determined that hiring out of his labor only one day per week would be sufficient.
The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.
Thoreau’s new economics considers such math woefully incomplete, as it leaves out the cost in life required to achieve that extra $59 in monetary profit. As he notes in Walden, working a large firm, as many of his Concord neighbours did, required large, stressful mortgages, the need to maintain numerous pieces of equipment, and endless, demanding labor.
With this in mind ,assume you invest some energy to identify a more carefully curated set of online news sites to follow, and to find an app, like Instapaper, that allows you to clip articles from these sites and read them all together in a nice interface that culls distracting ads.
You can now stay up to date in a pleasing manner that has a limited impact on your time and attention during the week.
Amish communities are not relics of a bygone era. Rather, they are demonstrations of a different form of modernity.
... which claims that approaching decisions with intention can be more important than the impact of the actual decisions themselves.
He embraced the solitude needed to make sense of the demands placed upon him, and in this space he found the answer that would provide him the courage needed for what was ahead: And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth.
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone. (Pascal)
We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.
... regular doses of solitude, mixed in with our default mode of sociality, are necessary to flourish as a human being.
Writing in the 1980's, Anthony Storr complained that "contemporary Western culture makes the peace of solitude difficult to attain."
At the slightest hint of boredom, you can now surreptitiously glance at any number of apps or mobile-adapted websites that have beeb optimized to provide you an immediate and satisfying dose of input from other minds.
These teenagers have lost their ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks.
I sometimes start a walk with the intent of tackling one of these goals, and then soon discover my mind has other ideas about what needs attention. In such instances, I try to defer to my cognitive inclinations, and remind myself how hard it would be to pick up these signals amid the noise that dominates in the absence of solitude.
Thoreau once wrote: I think I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.
These notebooks play a different role: they provide me a way to write a letter to myself when encountering a complicated decision, or a hard emotion, or a surge of inspiration. By the time I'm done composing my thoughts in the structured form demanded by written prose, I've often gained clarity. I do make a habit of regularly reviewing these entries, but this habit is often superfluous. It's the act of writing itself that already yields the bulk of the benefits.
As Kethledge and Erwin report in their book, Dwight Eisenhower leveraged a "practice of thinking by writing" throughout his career to make sense of complicated decisions and tame intense emotions.
The key issue is that using social media tends to take people away from the real-world socializing that's massively more valuable.
Where we want to be cautious... is where the sound of a voice or a cup of coffee with a friend is replaced with 'likes' on a post.
As argued earlier in the chapter, these offline interactions are incredibly rich because they require our brains to process large amounts of information about subtle analog cues such as body language, facial expressions, and voice tone.
... so we end up texting our sibling instead of calling them on the phone, or liking a picture of a friend's new baby instead of stopping by to visit.
... it's difficult to resist checking a device in the middle of a conversation with a friend or bath time with a child–reducing the quality of the richer interaction right in front of us.
Face-to-face conversation is the most human–and humanizing–thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It's where we develop the capacity for empathy. It's where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.
... Turkle finds young employees who retreat to email because of thought of an unstructured conversation terrifies them ...
Face-to-face conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. We attend to tone and nuance.
... which center in large part on the idea of more space in your life for quality conversations.
This conversation can take the form of a face-to-face meeting, or it can be a video chat or a phone call–so long as it matches Sherry Turkle's criteria of involving nuanced analog cues, such as the tone of your voice or facial expressions. Anything textual or non-interactive–basically, all social media, email, text, and instant messaging–doesn't count as conversation and should instead be categorized as mere connection. In this philosophy, connection is downgraded to a logistical role. This form of interaction now has two goals: to help set up and arrange conversation, or to efficiently transfer information (e.g. a meeting location or time for an upcoming event). Connection is no longer an alternative to conversation; it's instead its supporter.
It won't take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls , before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin's friend's Instagram feed.
... he tells them that he's always available to talk on the phone at 5:30 p.m. on weekdays.
If you write him with a somewhat complicated question, he can reply, "I'd love to get into that. Call me at 5:30 any day you want."
Coffee shop hours are also popular. In this variation, you pick some time each week during which you settle into a table at your favorite coffee shop with the newspaper or a good book. The reading, however, is just the backup activity. You spread the word among people you know that you're always at the shop during these hours with the hope that you soon cultivate a rotating group of regulars that come hang out.
I first witnessed this strategy in a coffee shop in a town near where I grew up. There's a small group of late-middle-aged man who set up shop on Saturday mornings and pull friends into their conversational orbit as they stop in the shop throughout the day.
I've also seen people deploy daily walks for this purpose.
The best and most pleasant life is the life of the intellect.
As Aristotle elaborates, a life filled with deep thinking is happy because contemplation is an "activity that is appreciated for its own sake... noting is gained from it except the act of contemplation.
... a life well lived requires activities that serve no other purpose than the satisfaction that the activity generates.
By the end of the day two... I miss everyone. I miss my bed and my television and Kenny and dear old Google. I stare hopelessly for an hour at the ocean, a coruscating kind of liquid metal; I feel the urge to change the channel every ten minutes. But the same water goes on and on, like a decree. Torture.
Harris felt uncomfortable, in other words, not because he was craving a particular digital habit, but because he didn't know what to do with himself once his general access to the world of connected screens was removed.
Pete doesn't own a television and doesn't subscribe to Netflix or Hulu. He occasionally rents a movie on Google Play, but for the most part, his family doesn't use screens to provide entertainment. Where he does spend most of his time is working on projects. Preferably outside.
I never understood the joy of watching other people play sports, can't stand tourist attractions, don't sit on the beach unless there's a really big sand castle that needs to be made, [and I] don't care about what the celebrities and politicians are doing... Instead of all this, I seem to get satisfaction only from making stuff. Or maybe a better description would be solving problems and making improvements.
If you leave me alone for a day... I'll have a joyful time rotating between carpentry, weight training, writing, playing around with instruments in the music studio, making lists and executing tasks from them.
Bennet, being an early twentieth-century British snob, suggests activities that center on reading difficult literature and rigorous self-reflection.
We might tell ourselves there's no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans and commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than we began. As Bennet would tell you–and Pete, Liz, and Teddy would confirm–if you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something–even if it's hard–you'll likely end the night feeling better.
Tabletop gaming creates unique social space apart from the digital world.
To meet with the same group of woman, who are all facing the same challenges of new motherhood, enables a level of interaction and support that's entirely missing when you walk into a fluorescent-lit gym with your earbuds blaring.
Another key aspect of the Mouse Book Club model is helping readers understand and discuss the books they're sent, enabling them to maximize the value they receive from their reading experience.
As I write this chapter, the company is also in the process of building an online system to help nearby subscribers find each other and organise real-world book club meetings.
I'm pointing this out to push back on the idea that high-quality leisure requires a nostalgic turning back of time to a pre-internet era. On the contrary, the internet is fueling a leisure renaissance of sorts by providing the average person more leisure options than ever in human history. It does so in two primary ways: by helping people find communities related to their interests and providing easy access to the sometimes obscure information needed to support specific quality pursuits.
The state I'm helping you escape is one in which passive interaction with your screens is your primary leisure. I want you to replace this with a state where your leisure time is now filled with better pursuits, many of which will exist primarily in the physical world. In this new state, digital technology is still present, but now subordinated to a support role: helping you to set up or maintain your leisure activities, but not acting as the primary source of leisure itself.
Practice: Fix or build something every week
But maximizing personal and financial efficiency isn't the only relevant goal. As I argued earlier in this chapter, learning and applying new skills is important source of high-quality leisure.
The leisure we're tackling here is meant to tap into our strong instinct for manipulating objects in the physical world.
It's too easy to be good intentioned about adding some quality activity into your evening, and then, several hours of rabbit hole clicking and binge-watching later, realize that the opportunity has once again dissipated.
The premise of this chapter is that cultivating a high-quality leisure life first, it will become easier to minimize low-quality digital diversions later.
Franklin was relentlessly driven to be part of groups, associations, lodges, and volunteer companies–any organization that brought interesting people together for useful ends captured his attention as a worthwhile endeavor. As we have seen, when he couldn't find such gatherings, he created them from scratch.
For each of the objectives of the seasonal plan, figure out what actions you can do during the week to make porgress on these objectives, and then, crucially, schedule exactly when you'll do these things.