Laptop closed. Light off. Change clothes.
Transitioning out of work and into another set of back-to-back activities. 5-6 pm dinner, 6-7 pm workout, 7-8 pm reading, and the list continues. Before you know it, it’s time to get into bed and restart the day again, creating an endless loop.
It wasn’t until I revisited Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman that this started to shift.
Days slowed down. Time shifted. The loop-like feeling faded, and in its place remained the space of peace. There were the top 3 transitions made, translating the first part of the book, Choosing to Choose:
Social Media, the Online Attention Casino
“The attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling – instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful,”
Mindless scrolling? Do a social media detox. Uninstall the app. Delete your account. These are short-term solutions for long-term problems you’ll return to after a few months.
Through Burkeman’s chapters, he articulates changing how we see these apps. Not as apps on our phone, but instead like a casino where our lives become the product. I build on this a step further by viewing it as the products we share are not only salespeople, but slot machines of the endless content.
Did it stop me from using the app? Nope, but it created a viewpoint for how to imagine an active choice of where attention goes.
Shifting from time to attention, the modern-day currency
“Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention.”
The sum of everything to which you pay attention to is your life. Take a moment to digest that. It’s not the days we live or the age we’re at, but the cumulative attention we have on this earth.
Reading this through the first time, I couldn’t help but sit and think about it. I glanced over at my Fitbit watch and asked myself if it was worth having it on for the measurability and time availability. As of writing this post, it’s been off for a week & letting time go as a whole decreased the structure of things.
It’s a testament to this other quote:
“Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it.”
Attention is all we have & the very essence of man-made time can be the sucker of it.
Letting Efficiency Go
“Convenience culture seduces us into imagining that we might find room for everything important by eliminating only life’s tedious tasks. But it’s a lie. You have to choose a few things, sacrifice everything else, and deal with the inevitable sense of loss that results.”
I don’t know about you, but I love optimizing things and having systems for them. It got to the point where I got so focused on the systems, I forgot how to enjoy them. Let them do their magic and focus on other things, not to make it better, but to enjoy the fruits of all the labor of getting to this one spot.
We are as young as we’ll ever be. Rather than jumping into the next project immediately, there is now a pause to enjoy the fruits of labor before starting again on the next project.
The Journey Continues
These are only 3 lessons thus far from the first section, and there is much more to come in the weeks ahead. Let me know your thoughts on this format! It’s something new I considered for these weekly notes and would love to hear your thoughts.
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