Light and Momentary

Ideas from Digital Minimalism

Hi, you guys, I have been meaning to tell you about finishing Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism over spring break. I was expecting it to cover well-trodden ground: phones are bad for concentration, smartphones are unhelpful at least as often as they are helpful, your attention is a valuable resource. We know all this, right? (Maybe you all will disagree on assertion #2. I am not convinced that smartphones are a net gain for the world.) It turned out to be a book that was more thought-provoking than guilt-inducing, so maybe you will want to read it too.

He seems to have mellowed somewhat on social media since he published Deep Work. He recommends a 30-day digital detox, in which you avoid all the sites that steer you toward immoderation, but he isn't asking readers to live austere lives in sparely appointed houses with only tin-can-and-string phones connecting them to the outside world. He suggests that if you want to have Facebook or Twitter or Instagram in your life after your detox, you should eliminate use on mobile devices; the mobile versions of these tools are specifically designed to elicit more compulsive use. He says that you can probably get what you're looking for on Facebook (i.e., actual updates from the people you actually care about) in 20 or 30 minutes per week; he acknowledges that this will vary.

If you are an average social media user, eliminating it entirely for a month will free up a lot of hours in your day. Newport invites readers to be purposeful about what they're going to do with that time. Perhaps the single most memorable piece of the book is his recommendation to engage in active leisure. Some of what he means by active leisure is familiar -- walk outside, play board games if that's your thing. Here's the thing I'm still thinking about: he challenges readers to improve or repair something once a week as a leisure activity. Use YouTube judiciously, to learn how to tile your backsplash or replace your light fixture or fix that hole in the drywall. And then -- get in there with your own hands and make your environment a little more homey.

(My backsplash remains untiled. But I'm THINKING TILE THOUGHTS, friends.)

The other idea that made me say "...whoa, that's really smart" was his suggestion that do-not-disturb mode should be the default. It's not hard to configure a phone so that calls and/or texts from your loved ones can get through while everybody else waits for you to finish what you're doing. "Treat texts like email," he says, which I think is excellent advice. As I was reading the book I was imagining a table:

Level	Required Response Time	Adverse Outcome If Disregarded
1	<1 minute	Harm to someone I love
2	<10 minutes	Irreparable property damage
3	<1 hour	Avoidable distress and worry
4	<4 hours	Annoyance
5	<12 hours	None

Contemporary phone culture makes it easy to treat every buzz of the phone like it's a Level 1-1 emergency: if I don't check this immediately, harm might come to someone I love. In reality, most of my texts from non-family members -- and many of the texts from family members -- can wait with no ill effects. Most of my texts probably fall in 4-4 or 4-5 territory: it would be good to respond before I eat my next meal, but I certainly don't need to respond before I finish my next sentence. It's not like I'm a realtor, whose income depends on prompt responses to inquiries from strangers, or a physician on call.

I am curious about your reactions. Are you intrigued by the active leisure idea? It might just be a natural fit for me as a person who finds joy in creating to-do lists. I'm also curious about where other people's texts tend to fall on my made-up urgency scale.

Gracefully

It's easy for me to see the loveliness of God's design at the beginning of the lifespan. Those patches of hair at a newborn's temples, the ones that fade away mysteriously within a couple of weeks? I love those. The variations in baby coiffures, the way that some of them are born with full heads of hair and some stay bald for a good long while? I love those. Three of my kids lost all the hair on the tops of their heads at 26 days old -- like, whoosh, scissors-free tonsure on day 27. Weird, right? But after the first one it also felt to me like an identity badge: here I am, bald and vulnerable and entirely yours.

I have a harder time seeing the loveliness of God's design further on. It's the same idea, right? Some of us saw our first gray hair at 25; some of us are catching up more slowly. Some of us (okay, this one is me) have, like, the Eyebrows of Dorian Gray. I don't have much gray hair on my scalp, but my eyebrows bespeak the hard-living years of my youth. Or something like that. I believe that gray hair can be a crown of glory but maybe, just possibly, my coronation could take place a little further in the future.

One of my friends messaged me tonight, feeling that she ought to accept the gray gracefully but also not feeling at all graceful about it. And you know, there's something to be said for pushing back against the cultural message that gray hair means it's time for a woman to be put out to pasture, but also we need to tackle that message on fronts that transcend the tonsorial. Like, perhaps the beast of burden imagery is a bigger problem than the chemicals or the vanity or the support of the beauty industry. Perhaps the core issue is a culture that equates aging men with bottles of wine (they improve with age), and aging women with cartons of milk. (After their sell-by dates they get lumpy and sour.)

"I support you in dyeing or graying!" is what I told my friend, and I guess I wanted to tell you that too. We live in a time and place where we're mostly expected to modify our bodies to meet a cultural standard: trim our split ends, depilate our pits, don our anti-gravity undergarments when we go out in public. (Some people just call them bras but it's more fun if you can shout TO INFINITY AND BEYOND when you get dressed in the morning.) There's no intrinsic virtue in conforming to or rejecting any of those standards; the same is true for dyeing and graying.

But here is the thing I wish for you, my friends: I wish that you would take a deep breath and think back to when you held a sleeping baby dear to you and admired the whorl of hair at the crown of her head. Remember the rush of affection you felt as you looked at your own particular baby's very particular hair? I think that God our Father looks at us with the same affection as we trudge through our 30s and 40s and 50s-- viewing the sprinkling of gray at your temples, and the silver strands highlighting my pal Veronica's dark curls -- and also my Dorian Gray Eyebrows -- with tender love and with his everlasting appreciation of variety.

Gladlys Climb High (Again)

You guys, I have a fun new hobby. I've been not-blogging about it for a while, because (a) I continue to be vague about my location and the number of Midwestern climbing gyms is not enormous, and also (b) it feels like a departure from my usual frugal habits. But I love it and I did something hard tonight, and I am going to tell you more about it.

Have you ever been rock-climbing? We had been to the gym here in Gladlyville occasionally -- I took a belay class when Petely was 2 or so. (He will be 14 next month, if you can believe it.) Last year he asked if he could have his birthday party there, and that's when the boys' interest took off. On the day of his party I hadn't climbed in more than 10 years. My first attempts were not pretty. If you've never climbed you might assume that it's all about strength, but it's more complicated than that. It requires some flexibility, and a fair amount of balance, and some technical skills. ("Trust the heel hook!" Pete exhorted me tonight, as I stretched out five feet above the floor and parallel to it. I...am still working on a trustworthy heel hook.) It also involves more creativity and problem-solving skill than I first realized. It's as much a brain sport as an arm sport.

It reminds me a little bit of knitting (here all the Serious Climbers snort derisively, but hear me out) in the way that you can vary the difficulty of the undertaking to suit your current state of mind. If I want to tackle a super-gnarly* Shetland lace stole with cobweb yarn and wrong-side patterning, I can do that. Or I can just crank on a plain-vanilla sock while I mostly think about something else. At the rock-climbing gym, when I am fresh I can work out the next pieces of the routes that make me say "Hmmm" or perhaps "You have got to be kidding me." When my arms are tired I go and repeat some easy routes to build endurance.

*Does anyone say gnarly these days? Or does it serve only as a signifier of middle age?

I love the thinky part of it. Running doesn't require a ton of brainpower, unless you count the creative efforts to dissuade oneself from taking a walk break. But climbing something new and hard requires my brain to fire on all cylinders. Can I trust that hold? Will I have enough leverage if I move my foot to that chip? I want to tackle that tough move with my right hand, but will I fall off the wall if I try to switch hands? It might be better to try the tough move left-handed than to have to climb back up here again.

Routes are rated by difficulty. Beginners start with 5.6 routes; I've been hanging out in 5.8/5.9 territory for a while now -- reasonably confident about finishing those routes, daunted by anything harder. But! Tonight! I sailed up the first section of a 5.10a, the part I had managed before. I got the following move. I thought to myself, "I will probably fall off now that I am in the hard part, but at least I got a little further tonight." But! Then! I did not fall off! After the hard part I matched on the highest hold I could see and looked around, confused, for the next hold. There was no next hold! I did it! It's a milestone! 5.10a, baby! I think this paragraph needs more exclamation points!!

In climbing as in much of the rest of my life, my anxious brain has presented a formidable barrier. It took me a long time to trust the rope. I still get scared on the wall. There's another 5.10a in my sights that requires me to undertake one big dynamic move: I have to jump from a precarious position up to a higher hold. I couldn't do it tonight. But maybe next time. And if not, I'm pretty sure I'll get it the time after that.

Deep thought in the rearview mirror

Tonight I was waiting for the Scout meeting to end and inching through a chapter of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. The author would not approve of what I just did there. That's an affiliate link to the Kindle version, which is (a) tempting you to click away instead of reading the words I am writing for your consideration and (b) suggesting that you purchase an e-book instead of a nice old-fashioned book-book and (c) monetizing your descent into a state of being "distracted by distraction from distraction." (That quote is from the Four Quartets, but it seems prescient, no?) Nicholas Carr says the links in online text turn reading into a constant exercise in decision-making. Do I click this one? how about this one? maybe this one? Carr says the reason we're all more impatient with long-form articles than we used to be is that reading has become more cognitively strenuous for us.

Yikes.

In some ways the book seems dated. It was published in 2011, which is practically, like, the Pleistocene Era in internet terms. He's still talking about the Blackberry, and I'm pretty sure one of those guys in a Lascaux cave painting used his Blackberry to email his wife: "Hunt successful! Butchering now. Liver y/n?" But in some ways it seems like a warning we have failed to heed. Today I was in a waiting room at the doctor's office next to a grown man, in his 50s, playing a pew-pew-pew video game on his phone with the sound on. It's no longer unusual for everyone at an intersection to wait while the person closest to the just-turned-green stoplight pulls his head out of his inbox and returns his attention to the task of driving his car. People have heard the message that combining phone use and driving is dangerous, and in surprisingly large numbers they have concluded that they do not care.

At the tail end of the Scout meeting I was talking to a pal from church who is trying to persuade a relative to attend our fall women's retreat. The biggest barrier? The retreats are no-phone zones. The relative manages a pharmacy, and she has to be available by phone at all times. "When we go on vacation," said my friend, "she's always on her phone. If something happens at the pharmacy she has to be able to address it right away." But...it's a chain pharmacy. There are two of them right here in Gladlyville. What are they going to do if she needs surgery? When did constant contact with an employee turn into a reasonable expectation?

The retreat program we were involved with as grad students asked retreatants to surrender their watches for the weekend. It's got to be a harder sell these days, asking college students to lay down their phones for 48 hours.

I am on day 29 of Cal Newport's 30-day social media fast. I haven't peeked at Facebook or Twitter or Ravelry, and it's mostly been a good thing. (Anyone who has been sending me Twitter DMs might have a different view of the situation, though.) I don't know that it has really made a difference in my capacity to sit down and FOCUS on DEEP THOUGHTS. I don't know what happens on day 31, either. But I am troubled by the erosion of my capacity to think hard about hard things, and I am going to see what I can do to shore it up again.

In like a chimera

You GUYS, I am back in the land of the-- not the living, exactly, but the land of the people who don't have to work every weekend and most evenings. PHEW. We revamped the way we handled grad admissions, which was already a huge time commitment, so that it took more than twice as long as it used to. It was unbelievable.

We finished that up on Friday, and I dug out from under the grading backlog yesterday, and today I was going to take a deep breath and rest but the Boy Scouts' big annual fundraiser intervened. The beginning of March has felt more than lion-esque. Has it felt more like an assault by a fire-breathing mutant lion, you say? About like that.

My brain has been unfurling itself after the long hunkering-down, and lots of post ideas are bubbling up inside my head today: Burned By Convection, about sad Swedish croissants and lingering distrust, How To Buy A Cow, for all your livestock needs, and maybe one in which I tell you about running afoul of a representative of the parish pro-life organization due to insufficient Republican-ness on my part. 

It is freezing today, but the daffodil foliage is peeking up through the snow and the days are inching toward a reasonable length. How's by you?