Raptitude.com

I forget who pointed this out, but Netflix has a subtle feature where it periodically tries to inspire you to get off the couch and live the life you really want.

Whenever an episode of the show you’re watching ends, and the next is queueing up, there’s a moment in which the screen goes black, allowing you to glimpse your own reflection. When you see your own tired, expectant face, about to invest another 47 minutes of your precious life rewatching The Mentalist, you have a fleeting chance to save yourself.

Whether you’re a binge-watcher or a doomscroller or some other type of time-bider, the following is probably true for most people reading this:

You spend your life doing things. Some of the things you do make themselves happen, and some don’t.

Sweeping the floor, even if you don’t love doing it, will eventually make itself happen, because you’ll get annoyed by walking through filth every day.

Same with things like getting groceries, sleeping, taking out the garbage, and getting dressed. Whether or not you’re excited to do these things, not doing them quickly becomes intolerable, so they get done.

Certain activities also make themselves happen out of habit more than necessity, such as flipping on the TV, slipping out your phone, or checking email. The mind and body are primed to do these things without conscious effort.

We can call all of these self-triggering actions default activities. You’ll do them unless you try not to, because they’re the actions the current conditions of your life drive you to do. You’re not going to let the years slip by without ever getting around to buying groceries or tying your shoes.

Bananas used to be a lot more difficult to eat than they are now. The seeds were huge and plentiful, and ran throughout the flesh of the fruit, which itself was starchier, stringier, and less sweet.

Other foods were similarly obtuse. Watermelons, for example — instead of having contiguous pink flesh throughout, the good part was hiding in small, seed-riddled segments divided by thick white rind. Pre-modern corn was much smaller, and the kernels had tough outer shells. Meat would be tough and sinewy, and you might have to enter mortal combat in order to get it.

Basically, everything used to be like a pomegranate, at least figuratively: full of rinds and membranes and hard bits, requiring some work to get at the good stuff. Not by coincidence, chronic overeating was rare.

I was thinking about this as I drove home from the gym the other day, just before lunchtime. There’s a McDonalds on my route, and it’s basically the inverse of a pomegranate — getting to the goods has been made as easy as possible. There’s a wide, funnel-like approach coming from the street, inviting even the largest vehicle to enter easily. Arrows direct you into either of two parallel drive-thru lanes, so the line is usually only a car or two long. At this point all you have to do is say “Bring me a cheeseburger!” and they say “Yes, at once!” Then you advance down the one-way funnel and someone literally puts the burger into your hand. You touch your card to some electronic thing and unseen computers settle the monetary side of the transaction.

Your mind is always pointed at something, and it matters what it is.

If you spent most of your day preoccupied with thoughts about a past failed relationship, for example, that makes for a different kind of day than one in which you’re preoccupied with solving a computer programming problem. Your mood, your actions, and the tone and feel of your life depend hugely on what’s on your mind.

As you know if you read this blog, the mind can focus on things other than thoughts; you can attend to present-moment sense phenomena. Even a few seconds of this at a time can break the momentum of thinking.

For the most part, though, if you’re a human being living in the modern world, chances are your attentional bandwidth is going to be dominated by thinking. There’s just too much in the environment drawing us into abstract world of thought. Every glimpse of entertainment, advertisement, news, gossip, or content is a seed that can set off an open-ended, self-sustaining weather system of thinking and feeling.

Seneca pointed out that people tend to be reflexively stingy with their money, but almost comically wasteful with their time.

There are at least two ways to take this. One is that Seneca thought he used his time better than you and I do, and maybe he did. Another interpretation is that everyday life, for most people, is an untapped gold mine. Certain undone tasks represent huge gains, waiting just a short time away, behind one session of elbow grease. Even ten or fifteen minutes of directed effort, judiciously applied, can improve your life far more than the wages you earn for the same period.

This principle is most obvious when you use that time to fix a broken thing. The broken things in our lives are constantly charging interest. They feel bad to use, or even to witness, and they never run out of bad feeling to impart. Trying to use a pen that barely writes or a vacuum cleaner with poor suction is awful, even if it’s a small-scale awfulness.

Brokenness takes many forms. There are the obvious, literal forms of brokenness: the leaky faucet, the wonky table, the wobbly bike, the drawer that grinds, the door that sticks. There are also the more figurative, more spiritual forms of brokenness: the unanswered letter, the crooked painting, the book with no spot for it on the shelf, the filthy screen protector on your phone that’s peeling off on one corner, the bulletin board covered in outdated reminders.

Sometimes doing a small thing can be extremely satisfying, out of all proportion to how easy it is: placing a jigsaw puzzle piece into the right slot, wiping your phone screen spotless, returning a tool to its designated hook, or making a nice diagonal cut across a lovingly-made sandwich.

This simple kind of satisfaction seems to come haphazardly. Much of the time, you’re barreling through the day, and the tiny actions that make up life mostly seem to be in the way: pushing through a turnstile hoping it doesn’t catch awkwardly, stuffing your phone charger’s prongs into the outlet, trying to get a stack of printer paper to finally settle into the plastic tray.

No matter what your day looks like, life is ultimately made up of a zillion tiny actions: small movements of the hand, foot, eyes, or mind. Whether these actions feel like round pegs slotting into perfect holes, or bushes that scrape you as you push past them, depends less on what the actions are than on how you perform them. If the mind is looking past the current action, to when you’re through the turnstile, or when the printer light is green again, then the action is basically a little pain in the ass. If the mind habitually regards small, necessary actions that way, then life is mostly made of tiny pains in the ass.

Those little actions feel better and more rewarding when the mind stays with the action itself, rather than fixate on what’s just beyond it. If you’re scrambling around in the junk drawer to find the scissors, life feels mildly annoying until you find them, because you just want to get the scissors in your hand and go off to the next thing. If instead you open the drawer, and treat the hunt for scissors as a tiny mission that currently sits at the center of your life, it feels just fine to look for the scissors, and pretty great when you find them. It takes only a very slight effort to do it this way instead – aim your attention at the act itself, instead of beyond — but there’s much less friction and annoyance involved, and something quite satisfying (rather than merely relieving) about completing it.

Say you’re walking through Death Valley, trying to find your way back to the highway. Luckily you’ve got a good paper map.

As you walk, you scan the territory around you for landmarks. You see some large-scale details: hills, rock formations, and gullies. Also some minute ones: pebbles, gangly plants, trails through the dust where snakes have been.

These smaller details would never appear on a map, because they’re not conducive to navigation, yet they are certainly part of the territory, as are lizards, birds, forgotten stone arrowheads, the bleached bones of cattle, and the fossils of Mesozoic squid.

At least right now, you too are a part of the territory, along with your clothing and boots, canteen, Tilley hat, and California highways department map of Death Valley.

When you look at a map, it appears at a glance that the territory is inside the map. This map contains the whole of Death Valley National Park — every stretch of its highways, every point of interest, both gas stations, and a handful of residential hamlets. You hold the whole expanse in your hands. You’re in there somewhere, presumably south of the line that says Highway 190.  

The other day I replaced an old, cracked mirror in my bathroom. When I took the existing one down, suddenly the room seemed to lose half its size. Turns out it’s just a claustrophobic little room with a toilet, sink, and tub.

The sense that there’s open space in front of me while I brush my teeth is an illusion, but that illusion is much more familiar to me than the reality. In other words, my mirror-skewed impression of the room – the way it seems – feels more real and is more relevant to my life than the room’s actual properties.

The new mirror opened it up spatially again, and removed a bit of dinge and disorder from the view. This even made me seem better — I feel like a slightly more dignified person looking into an immaculate mirror than a damaged one.

The way things seem matters a lot, perhaps more than the way they actually are. You get a hint of this whenever you dress up in good clothes. Even if nobody else is around, you probably feel more capable and more formidable. Sharp attire can change, at least for the moment, who you seem to be, even though the being beneath the clothes shouldn’t be changed by draping new things on it.

Humans aren’t good at predicting the future, but sometimes you can see a trend that promises something great — like “a genie is granting your wish” great. I think this might be happening right now with one of my genie wishes, maybe yours too.

For me it has to do with the piles of unread books I own. There’s almost nothing I want to do more than plow through stacks of 600-page history and philosophy books, but my efforts are mostly thwarted by the cognitive difficulty I have with processing line upon line of printed text. While I’m reading, my attention veers off at least once or twice per sentence (unless I read aloud, which is slower, hard on the throat, and not always appropriate).

It’s not a small impediment to learning. Not to sound dramatic, but those books represent something I want badly that feels locked away from me, like I’m stuck in the middle act of some frog prince fable. Imagine you loved swimming more than anything, but water happens to cause you horrendous itching.

Audiobooks allow me to spend more time reading (e.g. in the car, at the gym) but lapses of attention still occur frequently. I rewind a lot, but I still miss the context needed to understand the next point. Missed context accumulates until the content is mostly lost on me, then interest crashes completely and I stop.

This happens because books, in any form, are essentially long strings of interdependent sentences, which must be read and understood in order. They operate something like old strings of Christmas lights – miss an important “bulb” and the rest might not work for you at all.