What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking and Sacred Space

http://99u.com/articles/6947/what-happened-to-downtime-the-extinction-of-deep-thinking-sacred-space

by equilibrium • 13 years ago

76 25 13 years ago

99u.com

cjg• 13 years ago

The URL without the #comments is better:

http://99u.com/articles/6947/what-happened-to-downtime-the-e...

raverbashing• 13 years ago

Yes

the pitch for iUnplug is ironic.

No, you don't unplug by installing another app, you unplug by keeping away from the darn thing

regal• 13 years ago

It seems to me that the real problem is the habit of always "doing" something we're in, making any wasted time when we could be doing something but aren't feel bad and anxiety producing.

When I'm on a long train ride in a third world country for a half a day or more with no Internet access and no ability to do work (or surf the web, for that matter), this feeling of urgency disappears and I feel at peace. When I try to meditate early in the morning for 20 minutes back at home though, it takes a lot longer than it should to clear my mind of urgent desires to "check" on things and make sure nothing's blowing up at the office and get cracking on the day's agenda.

pyre2• 13 years ago

  | a long train ride

It depends on the train ride. If it was going through a tunnel (for half of a day), I might get restless, but if it was going through the country-side, then you can just gaze at the world whizzing by.

buildwonder• 13 years ago

Just got back from Quadra Island (British Columbia) after four days of no cell service and patchy wifi at best -- got a significant amount of thinking done... made me realize I really only get 2 to 3 hours of actual work done in the average day due to email, chat, and in-person interruptions... thinking working at the coffee shop next door to the office could result in significantly higher productivity... worth an experimental attempt anyway, right?

pyre2• 13 years ago

It depends. I've found that coffee shops aren't a panacea. If your mind is elsewhere, or you're on-edge, changing settings usually doesn't do much to help you focus. If the coffee shop is crowded/busy, then you will probably find it difficult to focus. It's also better to stay away from the flow of people between the counter and the door (if the coffee shop is large enough, or structured in a way that permits it).

leviathan• 13 years ago

> If the coffee shop is crowded/busy, then you will probably find it difficult to focus.

That really depends. I have been working from home for 5 years now. And the fact that I'm in a room with no view from the window and no human interaction drives me crazy, so the solution that works for me is to usually go to a coffee shop and work from there. I actually found that I need all the noise and crowd in order to focus, I can get a lot more done in that 1 hour at the coffee shop than the whole day working at home.

VLM3• 13 years ago

I found working weird hours increased my productivity, because when a 500 person mini-skyscraper only has three or so people in it at 5am on a weekend, no one is sending email, no one is chatting, literally no one is here to interrupt me. This might even help at the coffee shop next door, I imagine 8:30 am at the coffee shop might be even worse than sitting in the office... but I bet 4am is a productive time.

I can physically be at work on a friday afternoon, but I guarantee I'll accomplish nothing other than being interrupted. It got to the point that I wouldn't even try to do stuff on Fridays... I'd just plan to sit there, maybe surf the net all day, until I get interrupted (which usually didn't take long). Its too risky to try to do stuff knowing you're heavily impaired by interruption, so trying to do nothing at all on Friday actually measurably improved my overall long term productivity, which I thought was interesting.

WA• 13 years ago

I'm sometimes suprised how good just a 30 minute bike ride feels compared to 30 minutes of mindless web surfing. So I'm all for downtime.

However, articles like that are always a bit shallow. It sounds like the solution is to switch off your phoneand WiFi and everything will be alright. If I sit down and do nothing, my mind produces nothing oftentimes. I start to fantasize about having sex, whether I should buy a new gaming computer, what people would say about clothes I bought a few days ago, whether I need to go buy some groceries and if so, what I'd need and so on. There is not always automatically some deep thinking involved.

On the contrary, I even feel like if my mind needs deep thinking (i. e. think about strategic decisions of my SaaS business), I have no desire to be at my computer. I have the desire to sit on the couch and look out of the window and let my mind do the deep thinking.

I wonder if this "issue" is really a non-issue, because most of the time, our minds are simply bored to death and being disconnected makes not much of a difference. And in times when deep thinking is required, our mind finds a way to make it happen.

enraged_camel• 13 years ago

When I used to go cross-country backpacking last year, I often went out of reception range for cell signals. Most of the time I was hiking in the wilderness, away from most civilization. Sometimes on day trips, sometimes on weekend trips.

It was stunningly effective at allowing me to do deep thinking. To make it less abstract, for me this meant gaining a new perspective in my life (usually in the form of realizing I'm not the center of the world) and new insights into problems. What is surprising was that this was not stressful at all. On the contrary I always came back to the city fully recharged.

Did I think about other stuff such as having sex or buying a new computer? Of course. But it's like meditation: you have to notice when your mind wanders and bring it back.

DigitalJack• 13 years ago

Excercise blanks my mind very well. I find motorcycle riding does as well, but traffic sucks where I live.

cageface• 13 years ago

This is exactly why I consider modern mobile technology to be a very mixed blessing. Having all that information available everywhere I go can sometimes be very useful. But I'm also always tempted to pull out the phone and start browsing trivia whenever I have a few spare minutes alone or even when there's a lull in a conversation with friends.

I've noticed my attention span is considerably shorter now than it was ten years ago and I think this is at least part of the reason why.

Hortinstein• 13 years ago

I am a distance runner and for years after I graduated running was my time to work through daily issues and contemplate project ideas and solutions to the harder problems that take some time to think through.

It was amazing how an half hour to an hour of just thinking to myself let me step back from the keyboard and let me architect solutions and ideas. Same thing applied to my relationships (work, personal and romantic).

Unfortunately I discovered audiobooks and podcasts, but I have been fighting to get back the motivation to just disconnect and think while exercising. I just got back from an 7 or 8 mile run totally disconnected and it felt great!

VLM3• 13 years ago

"Unfortunately I discovered audiobooks and podcasts,"

As an experiment, mess around with the subject. I'm about 10-15 years further along the path than you by description. I found that liberal arts / history / pretty much any lecture series from "the teaching company" really cleared my brain and gave me things to think about.

On the other hand trying to listen to "tech" stuff just turned into an extension of work, drained more than recharged. Nothing wrong with that stuff while puttering around or doing yardwork, but it didn't recharge me like doing something "new".

So do some A/B testing like this:

Podcasts : "Software Engineering Radio" "The Linux Link Tech Show"

Podcasts : "The History of Rome by Mike Duncan" "In our time with Melvyn Bragg" "Dan Carlin's Hard Core History"

Now see which "group" of media clears and refreshes your mind better. Takes you off task, lets the unconscious cook for awhile. New ideas sprout to the surface. Comparisons and Contrasts and historical analogies...

david9272• 13 years ago

It's making us less smart.

I have a theory that intelligence is not so much about the knowledge of facts but about the relations between those facts (more about the edges than the nodes). Making distinctions and the opposite, creating abstractions, are where intelligence arises, and that happens when you're unplugged. It's an unconscious process, so it happens when you sleep, when you shower, when you stare out into space.

Where are the great novelists and great artists of today? I think we're not smart enough, not insightful enough, to write like that anymore. Tolstoy died a hundred years ago. Where is his replacement, when we have so many more people and the percentage with access to writing tools and publishing means is unprecedented in history?

I think they're out there; I think they're watching TV.

outworlder• 13 years ago

> I have a theory that intelligence is not so much about the knowledge of facts but about the relations between those facts (more about the edges than the nodes)

Indeed, I have reached a similar conclusion. For me, the brain is a huge pattern-matching machine, therefore it needs to have patterns to be able to match anything, that's where the knowledge comes in. In addition, the more "patterns" it has, the faster it works. And it can come up with new patterns (and infer their relationships) on its own.

I have noticed that many people that are perceived as "slow" or "dumb" are just unfamiliar with concepts, no matter how trivial they seem. So their brains have to work overtime to try to understand something that is "intuitive" for others - probably something everyone struggled with at some point of their lives, perhaps as children.

I wish I could have data to back this up, but I only have anecdotal evidence.

dcminter2• 13 years ago

They're all reading novels, listening to the wireless, watching TV, on facebook, ...

The great novelists and great artists of today are lost in the noise. When history has thrown away the chaff they'll be visible - and people will be complaining about the low quality of their own contemporaries.

david9272• 13 years ago

> When history has thrown away the chaff they'll be visible

Tolstoy was famous in his day. As was Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Picasso, etc. Sure there were a few, like Van Gogh, who died before becoming recognized, but they were fractional exceptions.

Show me one great artist living today -- anyone who can compete with a Tolstoy or even a Hemingway. Below Cormac McCarthy and Jonathan Franzen are mentioned, but I don't think anyone in their right mind would put them remotely at that level. You're waiting for history and there's no sign that you'll do anything but keep waiting.

scotch_drinker• 13 years ago

The great novelists and artists of today exist, the audience is just overwhelmed by noise and that makes it difficult to find them. But there are people writing great novels and people doing great art. It just requires more work to find them now. Cormac McCarthy comes to mind.

ryanklee• 13 years ago

> It just requires more work to find them now.

The amount of work it requires is trivial.

Cormac McCarthy was interviewed by Oprah, for god's sake.

Jonathan Franzen appeared on the cover of TIME magazine.

If someone wants to read any great novel, all they need to do is spend the fractional amount of time searching their memory for a lauded novelist and a corresponding work.

If someone wants more particularly to read a great novel by an author they aren't yet familiar with, all they need to do is five minutes of triage on the internet.

If you've got the notion floating around in your head that reading a great novel is a great thing, then locating one serves no difficulty, because you're very probably aware of the well-publicized awards - Pulitzer, National Book Award, Booker, etc.

Further, that person's very likely familiar at least partially with the canon that's been repeatedly shoved down every high-school to college educated Westerner's throat for the last fifty years.

There are lists upon lists upon lists of great novels out there both contemporary, classic, genre-based, contrarian and obscure. Just pick your flavor.

The organizational and review systems out there are better than ever.

Is there more out there? Absolutely. But it sure as hell doesn't qualify as noise. And it sure doesn't qualify as a valid excuse for not spending time with a great book.

shaydoc• 13 years ago

To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual –Oscar Wilde 1891.

“Without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things…What will happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable without working long hours?”

-Bertrand Russell

“We keep a large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labour by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.”

-Bertrand Russell

“There will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion…At least 1 per cent will probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some public importance…men and women, having the opportunity of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for all…Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others.”

-Bertrand Russell proposing a 4 hour work day

begriffs• 13 years ago

Looks like more cities could use a "thinkerspace" like what just opened in Madison, Wisconsin.

http://blog.begriffs.com/2013/06/madison-thinkerspace-now-op...

outside1234• 13 years ago

This is why I mountain bike.

VLM3• 13 years ago

Not bad for propaganda. The method displayed in the article is the assumption that "of course" we'll spend and consume endlessly all the junk they're pushing, by definition and without any self control. So occasionally, while still being mindless eaters most of the time, we could as an ascetic experiment disconnect, oh but only temporarily, maybe as a BSDM thing to feel the pain and the joy of reconnecting.

My solution is better and cheaper. Tried facebook for six months OMG what a time sink and minimal/zero return, deleted account. I don't need a "sabbath manifesto" or a momentary mental escape, I have a permanent escape to a FB free world. The real world really is pretty nice, come and join me out here!

"TV time became a controlled endeavor because, otherwise, it would consume every waking moment."

Um, no, it wouldn't, not for mentally healthy people. Clearly I don't have an addictive personality. As a financially well off adult I most certainly could spend endless hours a day watching TV if I wanted. I don't need permission from my mom, and I can easily afford it. I don't because its highly addictive, yet fairly boring, and doesn't have much of a return on investment other than the addiction itself. The analogy with facebook and other social media as discussed in the article is obvious... People with a severe addiction problem don't need to read a "sabbath manifesto" as the article suggests, or occasionally meditate. That just leads to a microscopically better read, somewhat better rested, hard core addict. They need treatment, medication. Its like telling a heavy heroin addict in a very condescending tone that all they really need to do is read one bible verse a day and it'll fix itself, and once in a while they should wait 15 minutes before getting high, just to appreciate better the feeling of being high or the trip of experiencing something unusual for them aka real life.

What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking and Sacred Space

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