Why I gave up social media and what I'm doing instead

Summers I get up early, walk the dog if he's game, and then go water the garden. It's a ritual that I observe perhaps not religiously, but I have spent an awful lot of early mornings doing it. This fine sunny Summer morning was no different. I was doomscrolling social media while filling up buckets of water to pour on the tomatoes when my wife came out- which surprised me- to tell me the burning I'll smell when I come back inside is the pan I left on. Totally distracted, after making my breakfast with it, I just let it go.

We all see signs of how distracted society is around us. Since I commute to a job to another town one day a week, and am not within walking distance of essential services, driving is the example I see most often and glaringly. Now, when I approach a four-way stop and no one is taking a turn, I know why: at least one driver was filling that yawning chasm of nothing to do for 10 seconds with their phone. It happens every day at every intersection. It happens at street lights. it happens in exit and entrance ramps on highways. It happens in parking lots and driveways. No one is really paying all that much attention, anymore.

One of the most brilliant inventions, I've always thought, was the driving simulator. It's apparently a relic of the past, from what my kids say. It let you preview the feeling of driving before even getting behind an actual steering wheel. Your job was simple: stop at stop signs, keep the car on the road, don't hit a pedestrian or other car. And it was a challenge. Its most important role was to ingrain behavior. I think our phones and social media have broken this pattern for so much of our behavior. It's making everyday experiences awkward, difficult, even dangerous.

There was nothing in particular I was distracted by this morning. That's the scary part. i was not thinking "gotta get back to doomscrolling." I just don't have the concentration I used to have. And as someone who works in the IT field, that is very concerning. I speculate that it's what Alzheimer's or dementia might feel like. If I can't maintain focus long enough to turn a burner off, what will I be forgetting to do next?

There is an area of study which seeks to improve how you engage with reality, here and now: that is mindfulness. Mindfulness is all about foregoing all else in favor of the one thing you are focused on. It could be reading a book, sewing a button- or cooking an egg on the stove. The key is daily practice.

I notice not many people are talking about mindfulness on social media. Is it even possible in a world on fast-forward, seeking to grab your eyeballs in a couple of seconds, literally as you can't wait to swipe away and on to the next couple of seconds of entertainment?

I've read the highly recommended How to Break up With Your Phone by Catherine Price. I've taken the intial step of removing all social media from my phone. But I am still at the beginning of the process. Next comes the hard part of rebuilding my attention span. The laundry list, according to the article "How to Reclaim Your Attention Span" over at Experience Life, is daily meditation, body scan exercises, breathing exercises, and the bane of all IT workers- monotasking. The column also encourages "deep work-" like reading a book- and discourages "shallow work-" like mindlessly scrolling social media.

So join me, won't you, as I try to rebuild my life, one book, one pan, one day at a time.

Just one more thing

Abbey said I looked like a Wookiee.

"What do you mean?" I asked, knowing fully well what she meant. I must have looked a little hurt, too, judging from her facial expression.

"Your hair," she replied. I know you like your hair long. What you don't realize is you look better when it's short. When it's long," she sighed, almost imperceptibly, as if her internal dialogue leaked for a moment, "you look like a chubby Shaggy."

Ouch. That hurt, even though I knew it. I had said it to myself, though couched in more gentle, rationalizing tones. I have reached uncomfortable conclusions. My hairline is apparently losing a war with my forehead, because it is in serious retreat. I play down the extent in order to protect my fragile sense of self. More and more I find myself Googling things like "fashion tips men receding hairline" and "awesome look large male forehead."

Acquiescing this fight to shorter hair styles was more about self-preservation than just a haircut. My ego has been tied to my hair since my twenties. My hair has always been straight and thin- so, in decades past when it was not as laughable for men to do so than it is now, I got perms. I colored to add fake highlights. I used Aqua Net. Whatever it took to give it a bit more lift.

As fads came and went and I was determined to rock a natural look, I would try simply not washing it. I had friends with dark, black hair for whom this look would melt the underwear off of people, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. It looked so damn good on them. On me, I just looked unwashed. So I embraced mousse, wax, spit, sand, anything that added some depth but in a way that looked completely nonchanlant and devil-may-care. usually my devil-may-care look deflated around 3:30 in the afternoon.

Then, the dreaded widow's temple; and after, the ever-so-slight balding patch in the back. Crap. I was really hoping to avoid male pattern baldness.

So I fought back in the only way I knew how: pretend it wasn't happening. But my wife has finally drawn the line in the sand. Ignoring is no longer the cool posture it once was. Now it makes me look unkempt and, I suspect, somewhat creepy.

Funny the myriad ways we reject change, from small daily rebellions in the bathroom to not-so-smart sweeping decisions like sticking with careers we not only hate, but which clearly hate us back.

Take, for instance, what I like to call the "just one more thing" phenomenon. The one last unchecked thing on your list that stops you from making important changes in your life. I do some work (ok, let's call it "career development") from home on my laptop most mornings- I am a big-time early riser. When it's time to confront my new plan- spending some of that early morning time in a gym a couple of days a week- the last thing on my mental list always becomes very, very important. "But I need to get this graphic cropped just right!" I'll be thinking to myself. "One more revision, and I'll reach a great stopping point!"

The stopping point gets reached- the gym doesn't. And now that I see the pattern, I realize all my life the conscious plan of reaching my full (or at least fuller) potential has been undermined by this one tiny little snag, the nagging thing at the end of that ever-present mental list of rationalizations.

It's interesting how I discovered the presence of this bug in my programming. I had two objectives to accomplish during today's lunch break: get a haircut, and grab my favorite cup of coffee, sold at a place that happens to be right down the block from this new salon I'm checking out.  I get the haircut, no problem. Then I leave and realize I "have" to do this one last thing, get a cup of delicious coffee, before heading back to the office.

It was inexplicably difficult to walk that two extra blocks to go get one of my favorite treats ever.
Once the cup was secured, suddenly the trip back seemed like a complete delight. My step was easy, the office approached with startling quickness. Why was this suddenly so easy?

I think because I have had this mental block for a long, long time, and I just discovered it totally by accident. It was a weird realization, a kind of "Manchurian Candidate" moment. Here was incontrovertible evidence that the beasties that control me- opioid receptors, bacteria, whatever- were large and completely in charge.

I encourage you to root out your own mental lists of excuses and procrastination routines, tear them up and throw them away! Some of us need to learn what it means, for the first time, to be completely in charge of your lives. It's not an easy path, but getting started is half the battle.

Shut up and listen!

I don't know if I've always ignored the signals my body sends to my mind. But I do know I have been for some time. Some signals are impossible to ignore, like the times I've needed immediate attention for serious medical problems. But most signals are more like status reports, something that merely registers in your consciousness- you can let your autonomic system handle it (like letting voice mail get it). You can even ignore slightly more urgent messages, especially if your conscious mind is on a mission. Feelings of satiety fall into that latter category. Many times I've ignored how my digestive system feels just so I can get one or two more bites of a second or third freshly baked biscuit with honey and butter, or in order to savor a few more forkfuls of perfectly cooked pasta and tomato sauce. I've even tried to override those signals with more input. For a long time I considered soda more than just a refreshing beverage; I also held a belief that it was somehow "medicinal." A liter of cola was a great cure of indigestion, something I've experienced repeatedly in the past twenty years of my life. I now think the grand total of medicinal value soda has is to drown out the messages from my body so I don't have to listen and feel guilty.

I've been conducting a curious experiment the past day or so. I've been listening to those messages, making note of them. I'm not letting them dictate how I eat- yet- because I don't want to scare myself into not listening. It takes a little practice to listen, especially if you're used to ignoring yourself. But it's like riding a bicycle- do I need to repeat the old adage? you never really forget. Practice makes perfect. et cetera.

So, now that I am actually listening to my bodily voice mail, what am I discovering? For one, it doesn't take much to fill me up. In fact, the default sensations i've been experiencing for several years now, I'm coming to believe, is coping with being overly full. Even by the simple act of listening to my body's feelings, I have reduced what I am eating. I set out not explicitly desiring to do so, and I think that is really key. I will fail if I turn this into a battle of endurance, determined to eat less and beat my cravings into submission. In the past, doing this has always resulted in an immediate system-wide rebellion and the next thing I know, I'm halfway through an extra-large slice of new york style cheese pizza with a 36 ounce Coke. No, this is not about suppression. this is about acknowledgement.

I started my day as usual yesterday, having what Abbey and I jokingly call my "breakfast and second breakfast-" breakfast first thing upon rising, ostensibly to prevent a gastric rebellion in the face of encroaching espresso. Then when everyone is up, I make a second breakfast to have with everyone else. In preparation of the day I'm about to spend in an office in front of a computer, I always take a savory snack for the morning and a sweet one for the afternoon (I think this is related to blood sugar). I've also been known to bring along a soda from the convenience store because I'm afraid my tank of water will be too boring. I didn't get the soda, because by the end of second breakfast my stomach was crying uncle. It was more murmur than thunder, but the signal was received. Then I had my snack as usual- sadly, nothing out of the ordinary- an olive loaf and american cheese sandwich on wheat. By the end of that, I sat and waited for the report, and it was not good. I felt sluggish and a tad dazed. Concentration became more difficult. I had a hair cut during my lunch hour. Afterwards, still dragging from the sandwich, instead of shoving something down my gullet I opted to cut up some raw vegetables and dress them with olive oil and vinegar, and packed those for my snack instead of the sweet snack. That's right, I skipped lunch. Me! I skipped lunch! For the first time in, er, well, have I ever skipped lunch?

On the way back to my office, I felt memories flooding into me. They hit me with some force. I realized that basically every day when returning from lunch I can barely move one leg in front of the other. And I had been ignoring it day in, day out. Today I felt different. Really, how I felt was... normal. More normal than usual.

The mind is such a powerful instrument. When ignored, you let your subconscious desires and base animal instincts dictate your behavior. At least that's how it now seems to me. All it takes is the simple act of listening to your body to turn this powerful consciousness toward productive, reasonable tasks. I would say this last day has blown my mind, but I guess it's really quite the opposite.