Another white guy in Silicon Valley tells you to meditate

another krappy newsletter #38

Sup homies?

Happy 4/20. Here is to hoping this post gets 69 likes so we can all say “nice” together.

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I went to a wedding this weekend in the San Diego area.

A real life wedding with real life people. None of that Zoom wedding bullshit.

I dusted off the ole dancing shoes and had the time of my life at an outdoor venue.

The whole event felt surreal. Including the DJs perfect timing of Wagon Wheel as well as his wherewithal to avoid playing the Darius Rucker version.

We are so close to being back to normal pre pandemic times you can feel it.

Well.

Unless you live in the California Bay Area…where we are still 100% committed to holing up in our 600 square foot apartments.

Recently the county passed ordinances to allow us to leave our homes as long as we are explicitly doing it to signal to others how morally righteous we are or shaming people for daring to walk outdoors without a mask.

Anyway.

I want to talk to you about the conclusions of my Digital Minimalism experiment and a second experiment I have been running for the last three weeks.

On to the newsletter!

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Another white guy in Silicon Valley tells you to meditate

Decoupling my life from my phone is impossible.

I realized this over the last couple months as I experimented with “digital minimalism”.

Let’s catch ourselves up on what I was working on.

Experimental Timeline

• On February 23rd, I started a digital minimalism experiment.

• A week later, I spoke about how difficult this problem was to solve.

• Today, I am marking an end to the experiment and start of a new one.

Digital Minimalism experimental result

Over the course of the last two months, I had positive and negative findings with digital minimalism:

Positive

• I shifted a lot more of my free time from mindless consumption of digital content (Twitter, Facebook) to creation of content (professional work and this newsletter since I had to produce my own content instead of curating other’s work I found on social media). Additionally, there is a noticeable difference in newsletter quality since starting this experiment which makes me feel like it was worth it.

• I began a good number of analog world habits. Most notably, I journal by hand every day which I thoroughly enjoy. There is something surprisingly fulfilling about physically creating things with your hands.

Negative

• I was not able to join any group in real life with other humans. I look forward to joining things like group gym classes, in person courses, or meet up groups for hobbies I am interested in as they re-open post pandemic.

• I realized there is a non-negotiable difference between my personal and professional digital life.

  • Personal: I can opt out of all the addictive apps. I removed social media apps off my phone and turned off all buzzes and notifications. This significantly reduced the amount of time I spent doing dumb shit on my phone.

  • Professional: I cannot “opt out” of all the addictive apps. Specifically, email, Slack, and other forms of office communication are requirements. It is engrained in Silicon Valley culture to always be plugged in. Last minute changes to a slide or an alignment phone call before a big meeting. Refuse to participate at your own risk.

This final finding frustrated me a bit as it still leaves me feeling like I am attached to my phone more than I want to be. So I decided to try another experiment specifically focused on limiting the use of my phone in these contexts.

Controlling impulses when you can’t control the trigger

When eliminating a bad habit, you should remove the trigger from your environment.

Want to stop eating junk food? Don’t buy junk food.

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But what is not talked about is the situations where you HAVE TO buy junk food.

I struggle to control my urges around checking email and Slack, but I HAVE TO check them with some regular cadence.

The go to advice for this type of habit is to “batch” them. Meaning I should set a calendar appointment with myself where I remind myself to check my email throughout the day.

Unfortunately, this does not work. I kept finding that once I initiate a small look at my email it kicks off some weird dopamine loop in my head that I struggle to stop once in motion.

I eventually stop paying attention to the calendar notification and before I know it I am compulsively checking my email all over again.

I instead need to focus on something more fundamental: controlling my desire to check email.

That brings us to meditation.

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I know. I didn’t want to write this article either.

I never understood meditation. It sounded like woo woo junk science and is adopted wholesale by the kind of people that make me ashamed of being white without having done some actual egregious thing. Like they juice their own juices, can their own jam, and meditate. When people like that are on board it is easy for me to say NOPE.

But this time around, meditation snuck past my inner critic and I am here writing this post because it has helped with this digital addiction problem.

Meditation helps you recognize your addictive loops

In researching how to get a better handle on my relationship with apps, I came upon the work of a doctor who focuses on treating addiction. He focuses on mindfulness as his main treatment strategy and this quote stuck with me:

Building awareness through mindfulness helps us “pop the hood” on what’s going on in our old brain. We can learn to recognize our habit loops while they’re happening, rather than “waking up” at the end of them.

This resonated as I had just spent two months trying to get a handle on my compulsive email habit. I was intimately familiar with the feeling of not knowing how many times I opened my email app that day. Only waking up from the loop once I closed the app.

So I figured “what do I have to lose?” If meditation doesn’t work, I basically spent a few days taking naps sitting upright. Not the worst outcome.

Starting meditation

I tried meditation before in the past, but did not get the habit to stick. So this time around, I tried to leverage my psychology.

Specifically, I focused on making the habit as simple as possible. So I decided that downloading an app and following along with a 10 minute per day program would be the easiest way to start and continue this habit.

I downloaded Sam Harris’s Waking up app. This is both easy and Sam as a teacher appeals to me because he is a neuroscientist who says smart stuff often. This matters to me for reasons I cannot fully articulate. But basically he penetrates my inner critic by citing neuroscience principles that make me think this all isn’t garbage science.

Three week results so far

I have meditated the last 19 days for at least 10 minutes a day. Unlike previous attempts to start meditating, I have now kept at this long enough to notice actual changes. The shifts are subtle, but I now often times catch myself in the middle of addictive habit loops.

As an example, I will routinely catch myself mindlessly reaching for my phone. As I notice it, I am able to ask “why are you doing this?” to which the answer is almost always some version of “I am trying to escape from some momentary discomfort.” The discomfort usually takes the form of being bored or not wanting to work on something because it is hard. But it always comes down to choosing the security and ease of my phone over the difficulty of something else.

This ability to notice has greatly aided me in reducing my compulsion to check my phone. Don’t get me wrong…I am still checking it a lot. But I am now aware of this unconscious pattern that was just always running in my background processor. Armed with that awareness, I come to understand I don’t have to respond the way I always responded. It is a bizarre feeling. Like you are a third party observer of yourself.

Next steps

I am in no way an expert after three weeks of meditating.

I am still finding myself absorbed in my phone. Incessantly checking email. Pulled into the siren song of some fire at work. But I just focus on catching myself doing it, getting curious about it, and beginning again.

Another interesting side effect has been the way in which “progress” shows up in new ways throughout many different parts of life. Such as:

• I find myself working for a straight hour on a task.

• I find myself listening deeply for the audience’s reaction to something I said.

• I find myself barely checking my phone when I go to sleep.

I am interested to see what else can develop as I continue.

I plan on continuing this in my morning routine and will definitely do another article on this as I get a few months deeper into this practice. By then, the Tibetan people will have elected me Dalai Lama and I can wax poetic koans on demand. It is going to be lit.

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Closing time

You don’t have to go home, but you can comment here:

As always, reply to this email and say what’s up. Promise to hit you back with an artisanal, hand-crafted response.

If you enjoy what you’re reading, I’d really appreciate you sharing it with your friends.

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own.