Accompanying Songs:
• On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter
• 1/1 by Brian Eno
• Slowlife by Novo Amor
Act I.
In the summer of 1845, a gentleman, writer and naturalist by the name of Henry David Thoreau made off to the woods and built a cabin near Walden Pond on land owned by his dear friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.
His book Walden, published nine summers later, recounts his experiences over two years, two months, and two days spent in that cabin, on a journey to pursue self-sufficiency, understand broader society through personal introspection, and embrace the art of simple living.
It is a classic tale many of us have heard from our English teachers, from free-spirited friends, or from Robin Williams himself in Dead Poets Society. If you’ve read these words before, I’d like for you to try, just for a second, to imagine it is the first time you’re reading them.
“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.”
“I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary,” Thoreau writes.
“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
Since learning of Walden many years ago, I’ve read this passage countless times and those three words never fail to stop me where I am.
To live deliberately.
Thoreau’s words embody a longing for the real, the true, and the necessary: a zest for life itself, paired with a crucial optimism for braving the harshest of thunderstorms, the pursuit of those truths murmured in the pitter-patter of the rain and revealed in the brilliant ripples of the lightning shows—taking in the whole and genuine meanness of life with open arms, as a student, and receiving the many joys as blessings made whole by honest retrospection. The deliberate life is the life worth living.
When I ask myself what greater fear I have than the fear of having not lived fully by the end of my time, I have a difficult time answering. There lies the question that serves as the source of both my anxiety and my sustenance.
This is the fear that moves me to call loved ones, to converse with and learn from strangers, to tell my friends I love them and to drive safe.
This is the fear that nudges me to use my precious PTO. To pick up a new hobby. Laughing, and trying to make my friends laugh. Spending a bit extra on experiences, jumping into freezing bodies of water, and diving deep into the works of Caravaggio and Tchaikovsky. Flying thousands of miles away for a dear friend’s wedding, and flying too close to the sun. Braving the elements to hike just a bit further. Pulling over to spend time with the starry patchwork of a night sky.
This is the fear that acknowledges and cherishes impermanence, where every second is revered as borrowed time.
Nevertheless, what I find difficult is to believe in every second, in the foggy, disorienting potpourri of noise, work, anxiety, busy calendars, stand-still traffic, crippling fear, and unspoken feelings, is that every second is borrowed time.
I envy those who were around many hundreds of years ago, before the chaos as we now know it. While it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the benefits of digital interconnectedness and globalization we boast today, I envy the way of life led by those who had no better and knew no better. I envy the still and quiet they must have had around campfires at night, planting themselves on a mountain bed before it was deemed a national park, tuning in to the familiar chorus of the birds, the rolling of the river and the buzzing of the bees, preoccupied by learning from and tending to those around them. I envy how robust their sense of immediate community must have been. Presence in each moment was their survival.
Perhaps most of all, I envy these earlier ancestors for having never experienced an endless avalanche of entertainment, where the reality of borrowed time is most often dismissed.
An ignorance to the state of the rest of the world was not their choice, but it sure must have been nice. In the age of climate change, political mayhem, artificial intelligence, and nuclear weapons, we’re aware now that we cannot personally afford that same ignorance should we care about the future of our planet and the people on it. Though these catastrophes are no one’s sole responsibility, once we gain awareness, it can feel difficult not to bear the weight of every crisis.
Yet, in small ways, we can emulate that still and quiet that was our ancestors’ guiding light. All is not lost.
We can choose presence—writing letters again, communing with Mother Nature, or casting personal journal entries into the ether, engaging in the ancient human tradition of stargazing, stowing away our devices wherever they allow us to be present, redefining our relationships to the digital chatter, checking in with ourselves, and bridging to our families, friends and communities by way of unmistakable care and affection.
Parsing our passing thoughts as atoms, refining them into values, ideas and ambitions, and with this clarity, living deliberately—a present life paves the way.
Act II.
This modern excess of noise and attention deprivation is the root of countless products and experiences we see today, sold and promised as the solution.
45 minutes ago, I received an email from Airbnb with the subject line: “Michael, the great outdoors awaits. Your move.”
The body preview read, “Think less screentime, more sunscreen. Warm breezes, golden sunshine, and nature in bloom—these are just a few of the reasons summer makes us feel so alive. Give yourself the chance to recharge with a much-needed outdoor retreat before Labor Day sneaks up on you.”
I can’t say I hate this email. It is vibrant, sunny, and sensory; good on the copywriter! It is just the right imagery to make me forget about the potential for insects, street noise, and the exorbitant cleaning fees of an Airbnb experience. On any other day where my brain wasn’t preoccupied with thinking and writing specifically about what this marketing email is selling, and why, I would be tempted to click through and window-shop A-frame cabins, mountain chateaus, and lakefront treehouses.
This deprivation also accounts for the proliferation of the wellness retreats of Silicon Valley and the silent retreats of busybodies; cabin culture and the marketed simplicity of tiny homes; spas and massage parlors; national parks, season passes, and airline commercials; the escape into reality television; the demand for vacation.
One of my best and most brilliant friends, Christian, recently mused, “Vacations are sold as getaways from everyday living, but serve to step into someone else’s version of everyday living.” This happens to be the exact reason why, in the last few years, I’ve been forced to reconsider why exactly I travel.
Christian’s thought reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s quote, “If you can’t be happy where you are, you can’t be happy anywhere.” If I’m always happier elsewhere, what does that say about the life I’ve built for myself at home? Where should one draw the line between healthy and unhealthy escapism?
The closest experience I’ve had to Thoreau’s experiment near Walden Pond is a trip to a Getaway house in February 2021.
Getaway is a startup specializing in tiny cabin rentals, built in the heart of nature to disconnect and rejuvenate. “Where Free Time is Second Nature,” the headline on their About page reads. “We want our guests to experience unscheduled, unstructured, and uninterrupted free time — not just for rest and rejuvenation, but to foster inspiration, creativity, and connection.”
On a sunny Wednesday, I drove two hours east from Austin, Texas to their Getaway outpost in Navasota, an hour northwest of Houston.
I arrived on a perfect winter afternoon and pulled off onto a gravel road stretching to my cabin, stationed in a sea of towering oak trees and showered with pools of shade. When I got out of my car, there was hardly a sound splitting the air. Leaves billowed across the ground and gentle wind tugged at the arms of the trees above. This was already a change from the hubbub of city living, and I was here for the next 18 hours.
The cabin design is brilliant: sleek yet rugged, embellished yet modest, and compact yet spacious. All four walls are built of dark wood panels, and the back wall hosts a giant glass window giving way to a view of the surrounding oak forest.
Outside, you’ll find a wooden picnic table, a firepit, and two patio chairs facing the woods. A small staircase leads to the front door, where inside you’ll find books, appliances, two kitchen counters, an AM radio, a lockbox for your phone, a small fridge, a wood table and a chair, a small bathroom, a lamp, a deck of cards, a queen bed, and a pack of s’mores with sticks for roasting marshmallows.
In the weeks leading up to my stay, I recall having anxiety about how I wanted to partition my time.
If I spent too much time outside enjoying s’mores, the scents of the oaks and the sycamores, and the warmth of the crackling fire, I wouldn’t be able to make as much headway reading the book I brought (Eragon), or any of the other books made available inside.
If I read too much, then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy being physically present at the cabin and instead, I would be mentally abducted elsewhere.
What if I forget to set enough time aside to journal? Checking in with myself was one of the main reasons for booking the cabin after all.
What if I don’t cook dinner for myself quick enough and I’m unable to properly enjoy the reds, oranges and purples of dusk before it’s pitch-black outside?
On and on, and on and on. So silly.
Here was my inner city slicker demon tempting me to adhere to the rules of time, shelling out the perfect blocks for each activity in order to extract maximum value from the experience, allowing me to leave with peace of mind knowing I got my money’s worth. Efficiency overriding enjoyment.
From a bird’s eye view, I think I knew that none of these ways to spend the evening were wrong. It’s only that partaking in one activity requires confronting the opportunity cost of another activity that might be more useful, enjoyable, or memorable. Here, too, I fell victim to an excess of noise and attention deprivation with a surplus of alternatives. I brought my efficiency, structure, and systematization to the very place that implored me to leave it behind.
I arrived around 5pm that evening, and had to check out around 11am the next morning. Step one for my evening, which I agreed with myself ahead of time would be a non-negotiable, was tossing my phone into the lockbox with no mercy. This would be the foundation that the rest of the evening would hinge upon.
From this point forward, there were no more internal battles over what would be more worth doing. All the pressure I felt about how best to use my time dissipated. With a large percentage of potential distraction out of sight, the mental itinerary dissolved into mush, where a natural spontaneity emerged and guided the rest of the stay by instinct.
Hour One (5pm): The first thirty minutes were spent unpacking and setting up shop. I laid my guitar up against the wall, sat my red duffel bag down, and scanned the welcome manual lying on the table inside. It mentioned the amenities that were at my disposal, included noise level reminders, and encouraged the visitor reading to center themselves and enjoy the time they had. Here, for now, was home. Once I finished reading, I scooped my guitar and walked outside to sit on a patio chair and strum around, visiting musical neighborhood after musical neighborhood, no plan in mind.
Hour Two (6pm): Light slowly began to leave. I brought my guitar inside, cooked a bowl of pasta pomodoro, and returned outside with my dinner and a book to sit and enjoy the cool air.
Hour Three (7pm): Warm colors danced through the trees as the sun pecked at the horizon. I didn’t move an inch.
Hour Four (8pm): As light crept away, the moon rose and swam in the sky alongside a symphony of blinking stars. Dark, still and silent grew the night.
The firepit called out to me, and I answered with an offering of firewood and lighter fluid. As the flames ate at the wood, red and orange hues bounced off of the torsos of the oak trees, standing tall over my nook. Chocolate and roasted marshmallows were sandwiched between graham crackers, and this is what dreams were made of.
After making a companion of the campfire, I was ready to journal by firelight.
At this point in my life, I was in a heavy transition period. Burned out as a barista working in the heat of the pandemic, I had applied to many roles over 2020 and early 2021, having not heard back from most of them.
“I had a Bumble date planned,” I previously wrote in my journal on September 7, 2020, “with a cute girl who had Iceland photos in her bio, and I ended up taking a rain check, and provided explanation why. On paper, she is exactly the kind of girl I’d like to go on a date with. But I woke up that morning, knowing that something was fundamentally off. Maybe I’m insecure that I’m not “settled down” with a high-paying job yet, or feeling sorry for myself because the job market is awful and we’re in a pandemic. Whatever the case, what I know is that this isn’t the best time for Michael Miller to date and love somebody. And hopefully the circumstances that allow for my readiness come sooner than later, and with the utmost of clarity.”
In 2020, my journal grew full of entries like these, colored by angst, sadness, doubt, and frustration at my situation and the circumstances that led to it. I want to give the Michael that wrote that a big bear hug now. Of my early 20’s, this period of life was certainly among the most necessary to experience a quiet, contemplative night in the woods.
Hour Five (9pm): At the picnic table beside the fire, journaling was in full swing. I had written journal prompts for myself ahead of time, questions that I knew would open doors in my brain I had left closed due to the lack of time and effort I devoted to properly answering them. Those prompts included questions like:
“What draws me to my artistic heroes?”
“What feels most authentic to me?”
“What has been formative to my being at this point?”
“Where are you at with romance right now?”
“Where are you at with faith right now?”
“What do you want to do more of this year?”
“What kinds of risks do you want to take that you would regret not taking?”
In retrospect, these questions carry a certain desperation to better know myself, and to let these answers dictate how I would spend the rest of my year crafting a solution to leave my current situation behind.
Here are a few short, unedited excerpts of my answers that night to the respective prompts stated above:
“Purposeful expression with conviction, and finding the universal within the specific. Beauty formed in sentences, in poetry and prose, in chord shapes, in song structure, in photographs, in conversations, and ideas, that speaks for itself. All of my heroes channel a part of me and almost seem to unlock it.”
“Awareness and acknowledgement of what makes someone themselves. The good, the bad, and the ambiguous. Living in full stride and conviction to the path one is being led on, and doing it with an openness to whatever lies ahead.”
“Travel has awoken traits in me that I love, like open-mindedness, good conversation, cultural diversity and international music. It makes it easier to appreciate anything and see beauty in things that I don’t quite understand fully yet.”
“I’m very open to dating, but I also really enjoy the freedom I have right now.”
“My quest for the truth isn’t riddled by fear of consequence or poverty for asking hard questions anymore. My understanding of faith and reality remains a kaleidoscope of insight and wonder. I like saying ‘I don’t know’ a lot.”
“1) Analyzing why I do things, 2) Creating things that will last, 3) Focusing, 4) Investing in relationships, 5) Embracing and confronting ambiguity”
“1) Disconnecting from my dependence on dopamine (candy, soda, technology, etc.), 2) Quarterly retreats to places like this, 3) Writing a book of essays”
American inventor Charles Kettering once said, “A question well-stated is half-solved.”
Though I couldn’t know it at the time, this hour spent journaling set in motion a breakthrough in the years to follow. It seems the answers to these questions were found in the choice to ask them at all.
Hour Six (10pm): The embers slowly died out and it was tough to make out what I was writing. By this point, I had skated through each question and felt happy to have made the time. I showered, tapped on the bedside lamp, and read Eragon for about thirty minutes. In the lockbox across the room was a phone that hadn’t been checked in over five hours. I hadn’t much thought about it.
Hours Seven through Sixteen (11pm-8am): A slumber best described as transcendent, as if 19 years had passed me by in hibernation.
Hour Seventeen (9am): A breakfast bar kicked the day off and I set out to a walking trail down the road. It rained overnight and a cloudy sky lingered over the wet ground. I visited with a family on the trail for a moment, heard about their experience so far, and made back to the cabin before my shoes turned too muddy.
Hour Eighteen (10am): It had been a time. I’d done everything I wanted to, and found far less pressure to have a perfect experience once I let myself be present there. It only felt right to pen a quick journal entry about my time before leaving.
“I’m realizing just how much I depend on my tech. But I came to this Getaway to uncover that dependence, to feel it and ache, feel the pain of disconnection from people, the news, and the range of conveniences like voice memos or reminders that help to keep my head on.
“All this to say, it feels a bit primal, and very right, to have clear headspace to think about and process my own thoughts and life.”
Act III.
Perhaps this is an appropriate time to introduce my soft theory that the rapid pace of modern living paired with widespread attention deprivation is why millions pass their precious free time playing games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing, games that Henry David Thoreau was ostensibly playing before any of us.
As the Instagram user @palmiron3rddegree beautifully articulates in the comments section of a reel basking in the wistful nostalgia of Minecraft: “I feel like Minecraft sparks this feeling in us because of how free it is. Lonely, vacant, sometimes dull, but free. It feels like you’re crawling around in your own mind, a lonely hospice for creativity that will never see the light of day anywhere else.”
I have to wonder if the comfort of these games is a reflection of our deep, centuries-old desire for simplicity, freedom, self-sustenance and a home built upon direct outputs for our direct inputs; i.e. our fishing, gathering, communing, and constructing efforts. After all, early humans progressed in hunter-gatherer tribes generally consisting of no more than 100 people and heavily relied upon each other in close proximity.
Perhaps, this is the early human inside of us yearning for another chance to live wildly, if only through a Nintendo Switch or PC. Again: soft theory.
~
On Walden, writer E.B. White stated, “Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives—the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.”
Nearly 180 years later, this conflict is more present than ever.
As a very online 20-something, I speak for many of us when I say that life has never felt more loud. The average day in my current job consists of sending 100+ emails, attending 3-5+ meetings, and receiving 100+ pings a day.
And always nearby, if not in my pocket, my sleek black slab of doom bears the weight of all my favorite arms of the digital oligarchy, spewing out all my favorite content churned just for me and all the while touting their ability to stoke true human connection and enhance the quality of my life.
If I’d like to learn more about the Peruvian coffee market or absorb a music theory analysis of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, I’m only a YouTube video away. If I’d like to be filled in with the latest on the political news in Myanmar or catch up on the offseason activity of the Dallas Mavericks, a podcast will do the trick. If I’d like very much to meet someone new and find true love, dating apps promise I’m just one degree of separation away.
In one single moment, I can receive a funny penguin video from one of my best friends, input a calendar item for an upcoming coffee date, publish a life update to 1,500 Facebook friends, and read a push notification reporting a school shooting a few hundred miles away.
This abundance of chaos and possibility is all too familiar to us, and there is no new, clever sentence that can perfectly capture the dilemma of seeking connection and entertainment online at the expense of our mind’s dwindling capacity to digest so much stimuli at once.
And of course, as tech consumers, we are prone to those forces outside of our control, actively working against us. Ad tracking. Suggested content. Gamification. Rampant accumulation of personal data. The almighty algorithm.
During my tenure as a barista, I met a senior marketing executive visiting from Los Angeles. By the end of our encounter, my curiosity may have started to bug him, but one question surfaced in particular given his background.
“Are advertisers truly able to listen to us?”
“That they are,” he nodded and smirked. “Wouldn’t work so well without it.”
Ever preying on all of us: the Cookies Monster. And unfortunately, as smartphone users, we don’t have much of a choice.
Many of us know deeply that our digital rituals are not natural nor sustainable, and we’re absolutely positive humans weren’t designed for this. Though the norm, must our online living forever function this way? Is there something special to be found in living as a digital recluse, taking baby steps to bridge the divide between our online selves and offline selves?
There must be.
The seeds of my digital reckoning were planted in 2019 when I read Digital Minimalism by author and computer science professor Cal Newport.
Newport defines digital minimalism as “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”
Newport claims that those who embrace the philosophy are those who remain emotionally stable, who can carry on a conversation without the impulse to check a device, who are able to deeply immerse themselves in a workout or a good book, and who bring themselves fully to work and leisure that is meaningful to them.
There are three values Newport argues that technology can provide:
Core value: value that significantly impacts an aspect of your life you could not live without
ex: Using FaceTime to keep in touch with your spouse and children while living abroad
Minor value: value that offers moderately positive benefits for a brief period of time
ex: Laughing at a funny TikTok, or playing a game of 8-ball with a friend in iMessage
Invented value: value that solves a problem that did not exist prior to the tool’s invention
ex: Keeping up with a friend’s activities throughout the day through their Instagram stories, though we never had a glimpse into these constant updates prior to the integration of Instagram stories
With a force as dynamic and ever-changing as the apps we use to connect, so too must our relationships to these apps be just as dynamic and ever-changing. These values are crucial to examine across our tech use in order to assess how useful each second on our devices is to us.
Seven years ago, I used my time on these platforms as a crutch to cure boredom, seek entertainment, bolster my self-image, and pretend my way into self-confidence entering college. My tweets from 2015, my freshman year, are painfully cringe, so obviously desperate to prove how clever I was.
*me, as a chick-fil-a employee*
customer: hi, a sandwich & a large fry please
me: yes
*i pull out an 8-foot tall french fry*
me: my pleasure
November 4, 2015. 19 likes.
*accidentally applies shampoo to body*
*sigh*
*turns 90° to face camera with goofy grin*
call that a shamp-oops
*audience laughter*
October 30, 2015. 36 likes.
stoichiometry and chill
November 16, 2015. 6 likes.
These tweets make me feel indebted to Cal Newport and his research. I’m comforted by the likelihood that it curbed at least one teenager entering college, who read Digital Minimalism by some miracle, from posting a surplus of insufferable first draft tweets like I did.
I never want to return to 2015. Back then, my activity was based primarily on 1) any minor value found in giggling at hundreds of tweets a day along with the dopamine rush of a few interactions on my own contributions, and 2) invented value found in feeling funny, or clever, or important by friends and friends of friends.
The outcomes I seek the most from what I post online often have a great deal to say about how I want to feel.
Newport suggests asking yourself exactly what outcomes and benefits you’d like to reap from your time online—a question well-stated is half-solved. Most importantly, Newport urges holding yourself accountable to those outcomes, encouraging habits such as turning off notifications, boycotting the “like” button, engaging in mindful consumption, and reclaiming your leisure.
There may be no better way to define outcomes than writing a mission statement, however ineffective it might feel.
My digital mission statement is this: today and always, I aim to use my time online to learn, to connect with others, to be amused sufficiently, to discover new ideas, and to gain perspective. Specifically, to use my limited time online exclusively to enhance and inspire my time offline.
One of my favorite writers Jedidiah Jenkins wrote a great think piece about taking every decision in adulthood and facing it with the question, “To what end?”
“Do you want to leave home and travel the world for your life? To what end?” he writes. “To exchange deep community for sensation and thrill and an endless stream of acquaintances and skin-level conversations? Maybe you do! But asking that question sets you into the truth of the question.”
“To what end?” is a question that continually serves my interests and my time. We can all follow thousands of content monoliths that provide us with enough in a day to last us for a year, but to what end? Will it move us to learn more, or connect, or gain perspective? To have a giggle at the least? Or will it incite rage or FOMO, negatively impact our emotional states, produce feelings of inadequacy or insecurity, or not serve any purpose at all?
I’d like to crown the pursuit of core value as the end. Particularly, I think about the core value found in phone calls and FaceTime, quality journalism, the unfollow button, the mute button, voice messages, video essays, educational content, and Screen Time—functionality that saves us time, stimulates our brains, broadens our worldviews, and genuinely connects us to others.
It is naive to think we can perfectly optimize our lives overnight, and especially to think we can keep it up all of the time. That is the stuff of a perfect world. But if the volume of our consumption is astronomically greater than the volume of our thoughts, expression, and mental clarity, as it tends to be, then we should be made uncomfortable by that. At the heart of that discomfort, we should be moved to recalibrate.
This seems so obvious to me, and it might to you too. It’s merely difficult to adhere to in the daily hurricane of content and noise, engulfing so much of our attention that any alternative, as media and culture critic Neil Postman posits in his book Technopoly, is made not only irrelevant but invisible to us.
I do not have it completely down yet. But as someone who loves practicality, here are a few measures that have personally helped me lessen the noise when it grows to be too much:
Finding a run, car ride, or walk to perform in complete silence. Often, my head is a mailbox full of inquiries, politely waiting for a lull in activity to present themselves.
Abandoning my phone whenever possible. There are many ways this measure can look.
Leaving my phone behind in the car when dining somewhere, shopping for groceries, or going on a hike has been crucial as of late.
If I’m out spending time with friends, my phone effectively does not exist outside of my pocket.
When I’m off to bed, I’ll place my phone on the opposite side of the room (or another room entirely), only checking it the next morning after I’ve gone through my morning rituals.
Ultimately, the key to nurturing my own mental hygiene has been mindfully eliminating the clutches of my devices from my routines. Most crucially, to make my phone so dull and boring that the thought of picking it up feels like a chore and the impulse to doomscroll until I lose my sense of time dissipates completely.
Any app I can use on my laptop, during what I’ve come to think of as specially carved out “fun computer time,” is an app that can be deleted from my phone. No Instagram, no Reddit, and no TikTok until fun computer time. In exchange, I reclaim valuable time and bandwidth to ponder and process what matters to me.
Choosing to hold my attention for one thing only, resisting the urge to consume media while consuming media. If I’m watching a show or a movie, I’m only focused on watching it. If I’m lost in a book, I aim to stay lost in that book. If I’m listening to a new, highly anticipated album for the first time, there is no chance I’m juggling the consumption of a news article or a YouTube video alongside the first listen.
Side note: earlier, I was listening to Brian Eno’s fantastic ambient album Music For Airports while reading, breaking my own rule. Luckily, no self-imposed rule is hard and fast; especially given that Music For Airports is a comfort album that I’ve listened to about a million times now. The alchemies between certain combinations of media consumption are more compatible than others. Find what works best for you.
Being outside. An easy one! Specifically, jumping in cold water, going on walks, and being outdoors with friends are simple and effective reset buttons for me.
Full resets. At the time of writing this, I’m in my second week of taking a fast from all social media. It hasn’t come without its challenges—there is a sense of FOMO, of plucking myself from the monoculture, and of having no easy outlet for self-expression or surface-level connection with my network of friends and acquaintances through sharing posts or story replies. Certainly, there are a good few positive benefits I’ve already noticed, like the heightened mental clarity, reduction in anxiety, and higher-quality sleep I’ve been afforded through hopping off.
More poignantly, the benefit most revelatory has been noticing and quelling the instinct to take shallow actions to achieve shallow outcomes. For example: stopping at an overlook, encountering a funny billboard, or finishing a great book would usually result in an Instagram story from yours truly, so as to cast a wide net to a wide audience in hopes of having further discussion or interaction about any of the above. Without that audience at my disposal, I’m forced to confront who in my life would truly benefit from sending them something over iMessage rather than seeing a ready-made Instagram story. Going a step even further, I’m forced to confront what in me is motivating me to take these shallow actions in the first place, be it affirmation, solidarity, attention, or bolstered self-perception. Again, I must face the question: to what end?
Undoubtedly, these shallow, marginal benefits are worth sacrificing, if not for consciously nailing down our desired outcomes, then for simply feeling better.
Slowing down. I consider the quote from German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who said “Modern man thinks he loses something — time — when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”
Embracing boredom. How lucky are we that it isn’t necessary for survival to fill every second with entertainment or stimulation?
Pablo Neruda once wrote, “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.”
I’d like to look back on my life with the certainty that I carved out quiet spaces for better knowing myself. There is no chance I would regret it.
Traveling and new experiences. Novelty makes the heart sing. I’ve always felt this intuitively, especially as a natural variety seeker, but luckily this feeling is also scientifically backed.
Dr. Paul Nussbaum, neuroscientist at University of Pittsburgh, posits that traveling stimulates growth of new connections in our brains. Specifically, he notes the link between a fresh experience and the generation of dendrites, branches that grow from neurons within the brain when it tries to make sense of new stimuli. Dendrites serve to transmit information between neighborhoods in the brain, meaning that more dendrites amount to stronger brain performance.
Nussbaum points out that when we are unable to travel, we can reap the benefits of breaking routine even at home. Waking up earlier, trying a new dish for breakfast, or learning a new instrument can stimulate dendritic growth. I can’t think of a mightier reset button.
Using tech to beat tech. Recently, I’ve been using an app called BePresent to stay cognizant of screen time. BePresent allows you to set a daily screen time goal and holds you accountable to it with notifications informing you that you’ve reached an hour (or two, or three, etc.) of screen time. Along with engaging in BePresent sessions where all of your non-essential apps are temporarily locked for deep focus and limited distraction, you can also join groups with friends that allow you to compete and keep one another accountable.
In a 30-minute feedback call, I recently spoke with Jack and Charles Winston, founders of the app, and heard about their mission firsthand. Not only are they a joy to speak with, but they are passionately committed to the fight, and I cannot recommend the app highly enough.
Finding, building and sustaining local communities. For the last 8 weekends, I have frequented the same coffee shop in east Austin to read, write, and make friends. While the natural light, cozy interior and staggering pour over are reason enough to visit, I come primarily because it feels like home.
Twenty minutes ago, I met an artist and DJ sitting beside me named Juan, who delved into conversation with me about freelancing, the city of Austin, country music, and the moral dilemma of bringing children into the world of the 2020s. I will likely see him again next weekend, and we’ll likely have another conversation. And as luck would have it, conversations are the building blocks of the best communities.
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“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 notes in the Economy chapter in Walden. In Thoreau’s eyes, a thing is only as valuable as the time, or life, spent earning it.
Depending on your annual salary, a $250,000 house could be worth anywhere from <1 year to 10+ years of your life. A penny of time for a tech executive, a gargantuan sum of life for anyone in the working class.
With this in mind, we’re left with a central question: what are we willing to spend significant, finite portions of our lives on?
Assuming we spent an average of five hours a day gazing at our phones over the next 50 years, would we be comfortable finding out we had spent 10.4 years of those 50 years engulfed in distraction? Considering time as the ultimate currency, what activities are worth 10.4 years of our lives?
If I could spin the wheel of the future and invest in the next frontier of tech, I would hope to see tech that fully embraces core value winning the race—tech that fosters connection, prioritizes learning, time and efficiency, and abandons the attention economy altogether with a new model for its sustenance. Wishfully, tech that won’t require quarterly retreats to detox oneself of the effects of its use.
Nevertheless, as humans we will continue to be allured by the same reward mechanisms that draw us in to our current tech use, and it would be naive to assume that the tech to come will not be focus-grouped, profit-seeking, and intentionally designed to capture eyes and hold attention like the tech that came before. If history is any indication, Silicon Valley will not grow less exploitative of human psychology. This is not cause for cynicism, but it is cause for cognizance.
Let us be especially cognizant of those 10.4 years of our own making ahead, mindful that we possess the will and autonomy within us to delegate that time responsibly.
Later in Walden, Thoreau writes, “If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success.”
This sentiment is the mountain top—the purpose of living presently, unburdened by unnecessary interruptions and newly invented digital responsibilities. This is the life we get, ours to greet with joy and kindle with color and fragrance of our own making.
Living deliberately will prevail as a practice, a framework, and a compass for navigating the years to come. As Irish poet Oscar Wilde once stated, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
Briefly after his time spent at Walden Pond, Thoreau casts parting wisdom in a letter to spiritual seeker Harrison Blake: “I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day … So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run.”
Probe the earth we must.