Two random events set me off.
First, I read an article about efforts to lure people back to movie theaters, since Americans now prefer to camp at home in front of monster TVs rather than get in the car, drive to a theater, and pay $35 for two tickets and $20 for snacks while constantly scanning the room thinking, “If something goes down in here, how close am I to the exit?” That last part is likely a purely US thing, but you get my drift.
The solution? Gimmicks.
“Increasingly grotesque popcorn buckets are apparently part of the strategies to get butts into the seats of theaters,” Cory Ohlendorf wrote in his Daily Valet newsletter. “The new ‘Gladiator II’ will come with one shaped like the Colosseum that allows you to scan a QR code and watch a buttery-scented battle take place inside.”
But that’s not all! Distributor A24’s new horror film Heretic, starring Hugh Grant, “will feature something nobody has ever asked for: the piped-in smell of blueberry pie filling the theater during a blueberry-pie-related moment onscreen.”
Mmmkay.
Second, one of the daily barrage of emails from my youngest son’s school touted a “Funny Sock Parade,” which landed on the heels of last week’s trunk or treat, a talk by a children’s book author, and my eldest son’s school holding its Halloween parade just a week after its “Raccoon Rally” charity fun run. I’d have to check with my mum, but I seem to recall school in the old days (er, the 1980s) was pretty exclusively about … going to school.
In seemingly every element of life, we’re assaulted by constant stimulation. It’s no longer enough to quietly read a book or go to the movies, or for kids to simply go to school and learn. There are constant distractions for all of us. We can’t go for a walk without listening to a podcast or eat lunch without Netflix on the iPhone. We can’t watch something on TV without simultaneously scrolling Instagram.
When I wake, I immediately check my email despite vowing not to—and there are dozens of missives, all seeking to steal my attention for something it most definitely isn’t worth being stolen for. Even airlines—the one place the internet failed to invade for so long—have now fully surrendered, with often patchy satellite WiFi being replaced by high-speed services via Elon Musk’s Starlink.
Maybe I’m just guilty about my lack of willpower, helpless to resist the sustained offensive of thousands of software engineers, neuroscientists, and tech overlords stealing my attention to re-sell it as a product. Or perhaps I’m fretting about the trajectory of a society that increasingly demands we keep our kids permanently entertained and children who have, unsurprisingly, come to expect non-stop attention.
But what I do know is we need to collectively figure out how to reclaim our time. Life isn’t meant to be a forced march of daily events, scheduled with military precision, until you drop dead. That’s not to say some structure and discipline isn’t important—I’ve noted that before, and fully admit both are critical to actually freeing up time.
What’s important is waiting a beat when you find breathing room. Our natural inclination now seems to be to fill every void; to keep ourselves perpetually busy, perhaps to avoid the discomfort of being left alone with our own thoughts. We all know the joy that accompanies the last-minute cancellation of a work meeting or social plans: all of the sudden, you have nothing to do. Instead of immediately filling that time, savor it. Bathe in the decadence of being lazy. Because you’re not actually being lazy, you’re ensuring you’re at your best at other times.
Tim Ferriss created a stir in 2007 when he published his book, The Four-Hour Work Week, suggesting that was possible if you eliminated unnecessary work and outsourced tasks.1 More realistic is a four-hour work day, given what science tells us about the limits of our ability to sustain deep focus. And we’ve known that since the early 1950s, when a study conducted at the Illinois Institute of Technology surveyed scientists’ “work habits and schedules, then graphed the number of hours spent in the office against the number of articles they produced.”
“You might expect that the result would be a straight line showing that the more hours scientists worked, the more articles they published. But it wasn’t,” reported The Week. “Scientists who spent 25 hours in the workplace were no more productive than those who spent five. Scientists working 35 hours a week were half as productive as their 20-hours-a-week colleagues. The 60-plus-hour-a-week researchers were the least productive of all.”
All of which makes total sense as I try to structure my slightly reduced working week into bursts of sustained activity. It’s really hard to leave “empty” hours empty—we seem pathologically wired to equate being busy with working, and to equate working with being productive. But not rushing to fill the empty minutes is already giving me a renewed sense of purpose during those periods where I knuckle down. One thing’s for sure: I’m not using the downtime to inhale a bucket of dodgy popcorn in fake blueberry funk. I mean, c’mon.
A note about whatever this is …
After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.
Love Tim Ferriss, but it was a click-bait title removed from reality. Still, the principles are worthwhile.