Doing nothing part 1

We've lost something in having our devices

Hi! I haven’t written in a month. I was traveling: Cincinnati (Econome conference where I did a presentation on the 5 stages of FIRE), Toronto (family), NY (friends), New Mexico (friends), Texas (friends, eclipse).

Cloudy totality in Concan TX.

During my trip, I got really sick. I thought I had the flu, but even three weeks later, I’m still dragging. Maybe I had COVID, and didn’t know it? I’m still recovering, sleeping 8-10 hours a day, not doing much. Whether flu or COVID, let me tell you, it sucks to be traveling while sick. Three months is too long to be away from home anytime. So grateful to be home.

Here we are now, entertain us

In addition to not writing this newsletter, I haven’t really done much of anything in the past three weeks. No energy, no motivation, just sitting around doing nothing. Well, not nothing. I’ve been watching TV shows, reading the internet, and seeing if Arsenal will finally win the league this year.¹ In other words, a lot of digital media. During this time, it hits me that I’m part of the last generation that existed before the Internet, before the ubiquity of on-demand entertainment at all times. We’ve lost the empty spaces in our psyche.

When I was a kid, I was allowed 30 minutes of TV a day. I usually spent it watching Three’s Company, which basically means I understand all sexual innuendo.

On one level, there’s nothing wrong with occupying yourself with mindless entertainment all day (especially when you’re sick and don’t want to do anything). As a kid, I had classmates who were raised by TV; their parents both worked so when they got home from school, they were “babysat” by TV, and I’m not sure I “turned out better” than they did. But on deeper level, spending time plugged into a system of mass hypnosis is a subtle, yet indelible loss of creative and intellectual agency. As Krishnamurti put it:

“You think you're thinking your own thoughts. You're not. You're thinking your culture's thoughts.”

When we spend most of our waking hours online, we’re simply thinking culture’s thoughts.²

You need the time and space to think for yourself. I think it takes doing nothing to do that.

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone, doing nothing.” — Blaise Pascal

As a kid, I used to be able to do nothing: lie on the grass and stare at clouds. In those long periods of spaciousness, I used to be able to imagine. Think my own thoughts. Now I have almost always have a device on me. Whenever I experience the low-level anxiety and generalized dissatisfaction of being human, what the Buddha called “dukkha”), I distract myself.

Devices are a low-vibration way to deal with dukha. And nowadays, we all do it.

As a pre-internet kid, I was able to push through dukkha, because there was no other choice. Nowadays I have an addictive device to distract myself from it.

Writer Zat Rana writes:

“We fear the silence of existence, we dread boredom and instead choose aimless distraction, and we can’t help but run from the problems of our emotions into the false comforts of the mind… We now live in a world where we’re connected to everything except ourselves.”

Two Amish boys

In 2003, when I was a Quaker boarding school teacher, I was invited by a student’s parents to visit them in Pennsylvania countryside for a weekend. We were walking along the creek and ran into their neighbors, two Amish boys around ages 9 and 11, and had about a 10 minute conversation. I remember the quality of their attention as they spoke with us. They looked us in the eye, considered what we had to say, and paused before they spoke back. To this day, I remember it.

I remarked about the conversation afterwards to my hosts, who explained, “These kids grow up without TV, radio, or internet. They are fully present.”

Digital media takes you out of the present. And out of your body. Presence. When I am on the computer, or in front of the TV, I become a brain on the stick, a thinking entity, but not an embodied one. I forget to breathe. I forget my aches and pains. In the modern world, we fear boredom and we have to fill it with work, consumption, or digitized entertainment. I know this fear well: When I tore my Achilles in 2021, I sat on my couch or laid in my bed for 22 hours a day. I sat on my coach or laid in my bed for 22 hours a day and I had to fill it with mostly watching devices.³ It was an extreme case of what we all feel in modern life: the inability to be at home with ourselves, to be content without distraction. But our underlying need to stay busy and to fill our silences and emptiness with activity and distraction is what drives capitalism and our environmental destruction. We can’t sit quietly in a room, doing nothing. And all of humanity’s problems stem from it.

In America, we overwork and overconsume. Overwork: I can tell you that no one should ever work have 40 hours a week, but your body already knows it. Overconsumption: we have twice as many things as we did 25 years ago. And it’s mostly all unnecessary. And destroying the planet.

I remember 25 years ago; I was in my mid-twenties. Not only did we have more time, there was a sense of being less busy. Not being connected all the time did that. We had fewer things. We had fewer experiences.⁴ But I believe that we, like those Pennsylvania Amish kids that I met back in 2003, had more attention.

Our current addiction to sensation is simply a poor solution to our sense of not-enoughness, this dukkha we all experience. And companies have found a way to profit from it. In Financial Freedom 1, I assert: an immense amount of money and human talent today goes to finding words and images that trigger that not-enoughness and sell us something to relieve it. And miracle of miracles, it works! But the catch: you will need more. As Buddhist author Kate Johnson puts it, self-hatred is a big business. And business is growing.

Our enormously productive economy… demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption… We need things, consumed, burned up, worn out, replaced, and discarded at an ever increasing rate. - Victor Lebow, Retailing Analyst, 1950

Self-limits

Again, as a kid, I was limited to 30 minutes a day of TV. Want another sexual innuendo clip?

How much time are you connected to the internet each day? For me, I feel like almost every waking hour. It sucks. Crucially, my 30 minutes of screen time as a kid was enforced upon me(thank you, parents). I hated it at the time but what adolescent likes limits? I wish there was a way to limit myself now. I sometimes go out without my phone when I take Wu Wei on his dog walks or when I go play soccer, but that’s only a couple of hours a day. We think that total access to the world’s information at all times is a good thing. But it’s not.⁵

We’ve lost something in having our devices: our quality of attention. Presence. Stop thinking culture’s thoughts and you may find something amazing. We don’t lack for anything, than attention to the things we have.

You don’t need to leave your room.

Remain sitting at your table and listen.

Don’t even listen, simply wait.

Don’t even wait.

Be quite still and solitary.

The world will freely offer itself to you.

To be unmasked, it has no choice.

It will roll in ecstasy at your feet. —Franz Kafka

1. Probably not. Again.

2. Average American spends 3 hours a day watching TV, almost 7 hours a day in front of a screen.

3. In theory, I could have used this time to meditate, but … ha.

4. Ask yourself how many times you’ve stepped on a plane this year, compared to back then. If you’re like most people, it’s a multiple. Huge implications for climate change.

5. Similarly, the U.S. caloric availability is almost 4,000 calories per person per day. You have to limit your food intake because society will not.