By Cayla Berkejikian | June 4, 2021
Recently, I ruminated with a friend about the tireless monotony that had overtaken our lives since we graduated college. Our grievances might sound familiar to you: perpetual overstimulation and anxiety, a feeling of being trapped on a hamster wheel of hyperstimulation and menial to-do’s.
The irony is that, despite our tireless efforts, we had become less productive than ever. We were afraid to rest and waste time, yet we surrendered hours a day to our phones, absorbing quick-form content and managing loose ties with friends.
And worst of all, it all felt utterly meaningless. My friend let out an exasperated sigh and said something that broke my heart.
“There has to be more than this.”
At one time, I would have assured her that there was. I would have insisted that a new mindset or fresh routine could make things better.
But now, I didn’t know how to respond. Hers is a common sentiment shared by many people trapped in the nine-to-five grind. We get up, go to work, eat, sleep, repeat, and live for those few moments during the evening or weekend when we might experience something meaningful.
What distinguishes those rare moments that we wait all week for? The answer eluded me. Meaningful moments had become so sparse, so few and far between, that I was ready to give up. Maybe I could go backpacking through Europe or something.
Instead, one fateful Saturday night, I stumbled into Manhattan’s Chelsea market looking like the living dead. The week had wafted past me again, and I was beyond discouraged. Eventually, I found myself in a tiny bookstore. I perused the shelves, glassy-eyed and disenchanted, until a book caught my eye: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. I skimmed the first page and felt like I’d just been handed a glass of cold water after eight days in the desert.
The introduction of the book addressed my problem with eerie specificity. The author, Jenny Odell, suggested that many of us live in a state of anxiety because:
“We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.”
This seemed to be an answer to my question, a potential definition of meaning to hold onto.
I had become disenchanted with the concept of meaning. The harder I worked to forge connections, the more I sought opportunities to make memories and invest myself in satisfying work, the more hollow it all seemed.
I no longer trusted I could engineer a meaningful life through sheer force of will. Until now, I hadn’t considered that perhaps my life was too engineered. There was no more room for the unexpected, for discomfort, for newness.
Desperate for salvation and convinced I’d just found my bible, I purchased the book and hurried home. This was a fresh wave of inspiration, and it came along at a perfect time.
Lately, my life had become modernized to an uncanny degree. Many of us are aware that we live in an attention economy, where human attention is a scarce commodity and information is managed to reflect that. Because our attention is in high demand, it is constantly pulled in every which way. As a result, we are overstimulated, irritable, and overprotective of our attention.
This scarcity mindset leads us to view our own attention as a resource and are wary to spend it on anything deemed “unproductive.” In other words, existing in and of itself is a waste of time. We no longer observe just for the sake of observing, because we expect a return on the investment of our attention. That’s why it feels nearly impossible to sit in silence and take in our regular, unextraordinary surroundings, and why practices like meditation, for many of us, seem unrealistic.
In the attention economy, identity and societal value is tied to output. To survive this reality and optimize our limited resources, we live with our heads down and our lives tightly engineered. We digitally compartmentalize and manage all areas of life to optimize efficiency at the cost of nuance, newness, and unpredictability.
This looks slightly different for all of us, but here is how it manifested for me. On a typical day, I’d listen to a podcast while I made breakfast, stuff my ears with headphones during my daily commute (or any time I left the house), check social media throughout the day at work, watch HBO on my lunch break, and unwind before falling asleep by scrolling online.
If I saw something beautiful in the real world, I’d whip out my phone to take a picture. If I had a thought, I’d post about it to make it tangible. If I craved connection, I’d open an app to feel like I was surrounded by others. I never had to take my nose out of my phone, hear the monotonous and meaningless sounds of the city I lived in, or talk to anyone I didn’t want to speak with.
To manage friendships, I kept a list in my phone of people to stay in contact with. Periodically, I’d comb through the list and reach out to make plans with each person like checking off a to-do list. Tragically, I had no motivation or energy to follow through on those plans. Even friendship felt like a chore.
I had become irritable and highly intolerant of minor disturbances or anything that could get in the way of my comfort. And I was deeply unhappy.
Whenever I did stumble upon moments of unpredictability or nuance, I had nothing left to give. It felt like all the juice was squeezed out of my brain. How could I ever be present in the world if I kept squeezing myself dry of attention?
To buy my way out of inconvenience, discomfort, and challenges, I was experiencing a skeletal version of what day-to-day life should be.
Maybe my attempts to make my life more bearable were the very reasons it had become unbearable.
Odell advocates for reconnecting with the physical world, and essentially “being useless,” as a form of rebellion against the attention economy. Inspired by her idea, I constructed a potential solution to my problem:
I would embark on a mini-quest to regain ownership over my lived experience, my sense of time and place, and a sense of meaning in my day-to-day-life. And ideally, I would find some stable form of happiness.
I conjured up a set of rules to live by for one week.
You may have heard of dopamine fasting, the practice of temporarily abstaining from addictive experiences to reset the brain’s reward system. At its most extreme, dopamine fasting involves abstaining from any source of pleasure, even socializing.
Instead, I would engage in a selective dopamine fast. Essentially, I would be on digital detox. My rules were as follows:
- No headphones when I walk in the street, or in stores, or at work.
- No social media (this included any app I’d scroll on to pass time).
- Commit an hour before falling asleep to something non-digital.
- Eat without watching television or listening to a podcast.
- Watch no more than one episode of Game of Thrones each day (I’d been on a bender).
The rules were simple and manageable, but I was surprisingly nervous. I couldn’t muster enough willpower for a 24 hour juice cleanse, much less a week-long cleanse from social media. And more than anything, I was afraid of boredom, though I couldn’t pinpoint why. So I told myself to lean into it. What was the worst that could happen?
For one week, I set aside my reservations and dove in.
On the first night of the detox, I laid down in bed without my phone and looked around my room. A small, shapely patch of moonlight washed my bed sheets silver. I reached out to touch the cloth. I was amazed to think that the light on my fingers was bouncing off a giant rock in the sky and came from the same sun that, in that moment, greeted a family on the other side of the world as they ate breakfast. I was utterly mesmerized by this one small patch of light, yet it did absolutely nothing of importance aside from lighting my sheets. So I laid there, happy to do nothing with it.
My first walk without headphones happened to be on a beautiful day. I left my noise-cancelling airpods in a drawer and felt antsy as I prepared to leave. How long could I stay outside in the world without them? It felt as if I was preparing to jump into cold water. The irrational intensity of that feeling startled me.
However, when I stepped outside, all anxiety dissolved. The world suddenly had context. Birds chirped, car engines hummed, feet shuffled on concrete. Every smell led to its source. Each was specific, as were the people on the sidewalk. I received new information everywhere I went – bits of conversation, people singing to themselves, others talking on phones.
Usually, everything I saw in the world would connect back to a thought I was already having. I would navigate the streets lost in a song I’d listened to a hundred times, thinking about my own life and repeating tired narratives in my head.
I used to project my own thoughts, emotions, and life story onto everything I saw. Now, that process was reversed. Everything I saw led to unpredictable thoughts and feelings. It was such a relief not to be the main character. I felt a sense of anonymity as I absorbed the world, almost omnipresent.
Later in the week, I walked through Central Park. As I waited to cross the bike path, I heard a hoof scrape the ground to my left – a horse tied to a carriage. The light turned green and the crowd dispersed, but I stayed behind. I took in the animal’s stature. His muscles twitched as he huffed. He swung his heavy head and I felt the heat radiate from his body. Even his smell was powerful. It made me feel small.
A few blocks later, I meandered past a baseball field and metal clanking caught my attention – a ball striking a bat. I paused to watch the game. The players’ joy was contagious – young men and women in their twenties, kicking up dust in the sun. I remember thinking it felt bizarre to see something so meditative and suburban in the heart of New York.
Once again, I found myself completely content to passively observe something that had no tangible potential and no relevance to my life. That feeling had started to become familiar, and I craved more of it.
Despite these moments of elation, I was intermittently at war with my dopamine addiction.
The most difficult were the in-between moments and transitions.
In periods of undefined silence, those that led to nothing and served no purpose, I’d look at my phone and be faced with emptiness. I had deleted the source of my notifications. The stillness was eerie and uncomfortable.
I felt an overwhelming urge to re-download Instagram or Snapchat, just to have an inflow of information or communication from the outside world. I was startled by how strong and urgent this impulse was. I felt like I was being held underwater, desperately thrashing to break the surface for air.
Over the course of the week, that impulse weakened. And it had been replaced by a serenity I hadn’t felt in a long time.
I was tempted to call this new feeling happiness.
Happiness is not a universal emotion, it’s a subjective idea that we each define for ourselves. We receive hedonic happiness through experiences of pleasure and enjoyment. But we can also achieve eudaimonic happiness through purposeful and meaningful experiences. Researchers have called attention to the serious consequences on mental health when one pays too much attention to hedonic happiness.
Often, we identify happiness hedonically, when we “feel good.” And I did “feel good” when I reconnected with the physical world. But that wasn’t the only thing determining my happiness.
Breaking out of my habits required conscious, deliberate effort. Odell identifies several capitalist priorities that fuel the attention economy, and before I started my detox, I was at the mercy of them all.
- Efficiency, or the pursuit of a “frictionless” experience.
- Productivity, in which we need to constantly create value in our lives.
- Progress, which is how we justify valuing economic growth and advancing technology over all else.
According to social psychologist Steven Hitlin, our personal identity is made up of values that we hold dearly. In rejecting these priorities, I adopted a new value system as part of my identity for a period of time. I was no longer concerned with avoiding messiness or friction in my day-to-day-life. I had surrendered my need to forge any sort of value or progress with my actions. I placed more value on the tangible and the ordinary, and less value on myself. This made me feel more powerful, more productive, and more grounded.
Now, I saw myself as undefinable, free, untethered, and in a sense, anonymous. This was a massive relief.
Prior to the detox, I had been riding on the crest of an identity wave and avoided exploring the depths of who I am – something that is much more murky, ever-changing and difficult to define. I needed to do this in order to maintain a web of peripheral online connections. I communicated through the guise of an online brand, one that I had complete and utter control over.
However, complete control comes at a price.
Identity is an integral part of experiencing happiness. Jessica Leveto’s research on identity and happiness shows that when we successfully enact an identity in social interaction, we feel happy and are more likely to implement that identity in future interactions. This is how identity verification leads to identity formation.
When a majority of our social interactions are micromanaged and controlled online, we act as both participant and judge. This does not allow for unexpected and authentic feedback, and it negates our ability to change and grow meaningfully in response. In the end, it is dissatisfactory.
Before the detox, the immediate dopamine hit I’d get from a higher number of online interactions had surpassed most of the dopamine I received in my in-person interactions. They had become hollow and performative, because that was the skill I’d been practicing. No wonder I’d felt like a shell of myself. I wasn’t embracing my own authenticity. And therefore, the people around me couldn’t either.
In my case, when the tools to manage an online identity brand were removed, the result was a staggering integrity of self.
Reconnecting with the physical world reminded me that I was a free agent capable of learning, growing, and collaborating with others. This also affected my relationship with the physical world. I was surprised to find that my self-esteem improved when I was in a state of being malleable and open to everything around me. When I felt elated, anxious, depressed, and even when I felt nothing, I felt it fully. And feeling deeply made me feel beautiful.
I have come to recognize “meaning” as connections with others that change or verify the self. Now more than ever, I am convinced that meaning is entirely a product of the world around me. And that world cannot be controlled at will. It is chaotic, and from the right vantage point, that chaos is beautiful.
In neglecting the often harsh and unpredictable nature of the world, I’d limited my perception of reality to the contents of my own psyche.
This happens to us as we get older. By nature, the more we learn, the less we crave. We start to prioritize answers, simplicity, and efficiency over nuance and unpredictability.
Living in this state of escapism is a way to self-medicate when life becomes unbearable. But the paradox is that, in reality, the safe internal worlds we create are often more unbearable than the real one.
In her book, Odell points out that withholding attention from social media requires valuing people and the natural world as subjects with inherent value. I have found there is power in revering the tangible world in this way.
After all, everything that made me who I am today came from somewhere else, not from me.
I moved to New York at the age of eighteen, and I was paralyzed by loneliness and depression. I spent countless nights in stairwells or wandering the streets alone, overcome with anger that my pain had not subsided. Weeks felt like years, and eventually, years felt like a lifetime. When would it get better? Hadn’t I suffered enough?
Now, my experiences in the city at that raw age, and the people I eventually grew close to, mean more to me than anything else – even the sad parts, like the night I snuck into a dirty bar with a large group of people who didn’t care or notice when I left early with a stranger who also didn’t want to be there. We walked by the river until sunrise and talked about things we wished would happen to us. We aren’t friends now. Still, I look back fondly on that.
I tend to feel entitled to peace after I endure struggle or suffering. But I’ve realized that there is no exchange to be made, no debts to settle, and no fairness in being alive.
This was the trap I’d set for myself: an expectation that I should be happy (or “feel” happy most of the time) and that things should ultimately “work out.” It is an enticing thought, a world where we can exist in comfort and pleasure, safe in the stronghold of our own minds – minds that have been hardened and wizened to the world.
I have realized that, in essence, this is a false way to live. We need unpredictability and novelty. We need to be wrong, and we need to hurt.
Perhaps, then, meaning is the result of struggle. After all, life is a journey to be felt. Who are we to neglect pain and sorrow in pursuit of elation and joy?
I am glad I wandered into a bookstore and stumbled upon that book. I am glad that I felt so low because that lowness propelled me to make a change, and that change gave me a valuable revelation: happiness can result from peacefully responding to new and unpredictable circumstances.
Before this experiment, my definitions of happiness and meaning were much more restrictive. I was convinced that both could be achieved through sheer will and careful life planning. But the very effort I’d been putting into “trying” to be happy was the cause of my grief. I am tired of living with my head down, waiting for the pain to pay off.
You might recall how it felt to be a child and embark on new experiences with optimism and a lack of responsibility for what might happen. Every day, children have faith that the world will give them something. They don’t need to predict it or expend any effort to engineer a certain outcome. We can take a lesson from them.
Now that my mini-quest has come to an end, I have no desire to return to my old habits. As I surrender the all-or-nothing approach to digital engagement, I anticipate it will be a daily struggle to strike a balance that does not compromise my connection to the physical world. Ultimately, my new goal is to stop relying on digital tools to cope or avoid discomfort. I would rather experience my ups and downs, and experience them fully.
But here is one thing I am now certain of. All the meaning I need waits dutifully for me, in the world, its people, and its chaos. I will get the most out of it by being how I am: completely at its mercy, a vulnerable observer of my own chaotic, ever-changing experience.