Beep! Ping! Boop! Zhing!

Daily Meditation #361–2/20/2023

I think for many of us, seeing this number might cause anxiety.

“If a tree falls in the woods and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

I read.
Quite a lot.

Everything from history to Harry Potter.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to biographies.
Geopolitics to psychology to economics to currency trading to Bohumil Hrabal.

Sometimes, I pick something up and it’s just dense. Like a university textbook on a subject out of my primary expertise.

When I try to read something like this, sometimes it’s really hard to stay focused.

Well, I have a little trick — I put my huge, over-the-ear, noise-cancelling headphones from the 00s on.
I open up a special playlist.
Then I pick some pink, white, or brown noise and put the same, single “song” to repeat endlessly…
And I read it.

And all at once, my attention goes from butter-in-the-fridge rigid, unable to be spread across the pages of scientific terminology to that smooth, soft, malleable form which easily soaks into the pores of the text.

But, here’s the thing:
While those massive, muff headphones are plugged into my phone, pouring the drone into my ears, my phone is wholly dead to the world.

Nothing is more important to me than those 10, 15, 30 minutes of “now” where I’m reading, entirely undistracted and disconnected.

I know many people sleep with their phones beside their beds, thinking “well what if there’s an emergency?”
“What if my dad has a heart attack?”
“What if there’s an accident?”

What if there is?

If an emergency happens on a silenced phone, is it really happening for you?

Just as if my father had a heart attack (he is nearly 80, after all) during my “do not disturb” reading or in the middle of the night — another “DND” moment — nothing will have changed whether I know about it instantly or in 30 minutes. Or the morning.

We went literally thousands of years without notifications poisoning us from our pockets — thousands of years of burst appendixes, car accidents, raiding armies — and no emergency didn’t happen just because we didn’t hear about it instantaneously.

Whatever will happen will happen, notifications or not.
Be willing to relish a few minutes of no nagging, sharpened hooks of attention tugging into the flesh of your attention span!

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”