#MundaneLife
My ugly sweater cookie decoration submission. Nailed it.
What Has My Attention
Last week I turned 34 and decided to give myself a birthday present that was a long time coming — I quit Twitter. Like, quit quit. Capital Q quit. There are lots of reasons why this felt equal parts necessary, scary, and inevitable but one of the biggest reasons is this newsletter.
There are ideas I want to explore and things I want to do with this project that are going to require some deep thought, continuous effort, and a willingness to sit with discomfort. Twitter was always the first place I went to share any thought somewhat related to the topics I write about here. Every once in awhile a tweet would gain enough traction that it would feel like it made sense to explore it further in an issue here or with a standalone article. More frequently, though, the line of thinking more or less ended with the publication of the tweet that encapsulated it.
With that option now removed from my toolbox, I’m excited to see what I can turn this outlet into. I still have that same urge to share ideas and communicate with like-minded people but now I have to do it in a couple hundred words instead of 280 characters.
One week into this newly quiet online life, I have a lot of thoughts. I think I’ll sit on them for a bit longer, though, because I know the first week is always the honeymoon period for a change like this. It starts to get a real in the second and third weeks. That being said, I'm honestly excited to see what emerges from the time, space, and calm that a Twitter-less existence allows.
For Your Attentional Consideration
The aforementioned article where I go into the nitty gritty of why I decided to leave Twitter, what I’m afraid of, and what I’m hoping to gain from this change, is here. I sat on this one for awhile because a.) I know how annoying it is to read about other people quitting social media, and b.) it scared me. But it’s out there now and I’m curious if any of my readers here have done something similar?
Max and I have been on a bit of a hiatus from Fields of Work for the past few months. Being a northern hemisphere farmer means Max doesn’t do much farming in the winter months so we always take a bit of a break then. But like the groundhog, we have emerged from our burrow and are starting what we’re considering season 3 of Fields of Work! The first episode is out now. We deliberately made it an episode where you can start listening without having ever listened to any of the other ones. It’s a reset of sorts and if you’ve ever been curious about this little project of ours, it’s a good place to start. You should be able to find it in your podcast player of choice (I recommend Overcast on iOS).
Moving on to things that don’t involve me, you may sense a bit of a theme across most of these links. Please excuse my momentary fixation on the topic. There’s been a lot of deep thinking on this topic on my part over the past few weeks and this is like turning the last few pages of a very long book.
From Radical Acceptance, by Dr. Tara Brach
“Whenever we wholeheartedly attend to the person we’re with, to the tree in our front yard or to a squirrel perched on a branch, this living energy becomes an intimate part of who we are. Spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti wrote that ‘to pay attention means we care, which means we really love.’ Attention is the most basic form of love. By paying attention we let ourselves be touched by life, and our hearts naturally become more open and engaged.”
“A Personal Digital Reset” by Anil Dash
“Only intentional information: The ideal is that the only things I see or experience when looking at my phone or computers are things I actively chose to see there, not just whatever others have chosen to shovel at me without regard to whether it causes stress or distraction.
App defaults are designed for the companies that make them, not for users: This is one of the most key things to understand about the tech we use today — by default, it only serves the needs of the companies that make the tech, and they generally act like their app or service is the only one we use, and the most important one we use.
You aren’t gonna need it: There’s a ton of FOMO about uninstalling, disabling, or removing things on our devices, because we worry a lot about “what if I need it?” In coding, we commonly use the abbreviation “YAGNI” to dissuade ourselves from taking on unnecessary technical debt, and the same can apply to being users of technology. If you really need something, you can always reinstall it or turn it back on.”
“Minds turned to ash” by Josh Cohen
“Burnout increases as work insinuates itself more and more into every corner of life – if a spare hour can be snatched to read a novel, walk the dog or eat with one’s family, it quickly becomes contaminated by stray thoughts of looming deadlines. Even during sleep, flickering images of spreadsheets and snatches of management speak invade the mind, while slumbering fingers hover over the duvet, tapping away at a phantom keyboard.
Some companies have sought to alleviate the strain by offering sessions in mindfulness. But the problem with scheduling meditation as part of that working day is that it becomes yet another task at which you can succeed or fail. Those who can’t clear out their mind need to try harder – and the very exercises intended to ease anxiety can end up exacerbating it. Schemes cooked up by management theorists since the 1970s to alleviate the tedium and tension of the office through what might be called the David Brent effect – the chummy, backslapping banter, the paintballing away-days, the breakout rooms in bouncy castles – have simply blurred the lines between work and leisure, and so ended up screwing the physical and mental confines of the workplace even tighter.
But it is not just our jobs that overwork our minds. Electronic communication and social media have come to dominate our daily lives, in a transformation that is unprecedented and whose consequences we can therefore only guess at. My consulting room hums daily with the tense expectation induced by unanswered texts and ignored status updates. Our relationships seem to require a perpetual drip-feed of electronic reassurances, and our very sense of self is defined increasingly by an unending wait for the verdicts of an innumerable and invisible crowd of virtual judges.”
“I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age” by Charlie Warzel
“Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend On It” by Cal Newport
“How Twitter Fuels Anxiety” by Laura Turner
I may no longer be on Twitter, but I still love getting email. Hit reply to this newsletter and you’ll be sitting in my inbox. I read and respond to everything I receive. Even better, maybe forward this along to someone else in your life who might like it?
Until next time,
Sam