These days it’s hard to find time for ourselves. The Open Debate in the back in this month’s FastCompany struck a chord with me. Shannon, a high school senior, says the following:
Many teenagers instant-message instead of having actual relationships. Everyone rushes through the streets jabbering on their cell phones, iPods stuck in their ears. No one has time to be close to, well, anyone.
I, along with John Seely Brown (former Chief Scientist at Xerox Corp.) disagree to some extent. As he mentions, instant messaging and the internet allow us to establish extremely dense networks. To many, this brings us closer to more people with more ease. Take me for example: I work under two seperate individuals that I have never met in person, I communicate with friends studying in Spain, and I am in constant contact with my friends at school (despite living 20m away). I think Shannon is trying to date herself without having the required years to effectively do it…
But, what exactly is an “actual relationship?” Are we to suggest my relationships with Noah, Jeremy, and Jim are fake? Certainly not. A relationship doesn’t always require physical interaction. Sure, it’s become clear that there is an important difference between working with people in an office and working remotely from home. The point being, we’d all prefer Shannon’s “actual relationships”; but we can’t discount the value of any other relationship.
I agree though, people do run around with cell phones attached to their ears. As mentioned earlier, we rush from A to B to C back to A. Certainly it begins to wear on us. We’re constantly connected and constantly ‘doing’. Put simply, our hectic lifestyles require some sort of solitude.
I realized as I started my biphasic sleep cycle that I lost some important ‘down time’. Instead of lying in bed and thinking to myself for who-knows-how-long I had to start forcing myself to stop and fall asleep quickly. This way I woke up at the correct time and didn’t throw my schedule off. Frankly, that sucks. I need some of that time to reflect and escape the nonsense around me.
I can walk to class and turn on my iPod, I can sit at work and listen to it too. This doesn’t mean I’m trying to shut people out and dissolve my “actual relationships”, I’m just seeking solitude. Taking some time to stop and think (or stop thinking) seems necessary. I forgot where I read this but it’s recently been shown that after taking in a lot of information the brain tries to rewind and re-process it. If we never have that downtime our brains don’t seem to develop as well as they could. That thumb-twiddling time is important!
I don’t know what I’m going to do about getting to sleep, though. Perhaps I’ll set aside 20 or 30 minutes to just lie there before I expect to fall asleep. I’m not sure yet. I just know that I need some of that time back… I need solitude.
[tags]solitude, personal, schedule, relationships, sleep[/tags]
An interesting post. It triggered a couple of observations I’d like to share.
1. Courtesy and etiquette aren’t mentioned, but I think are more at the root of Shannon’s post. For example, when talking to someone whose cell phone rings, the instinct is to stop talking to me, answer the cell phone, and complete that conversation. I liken this behavior pattern to one where two people are talking and a third walks up, stands in front of me, turns their back on me, and proceeds to have a conversation with the person I was just speaking to. I think most of us would call that “rude” or worse.
All cell phones of any value have two very useful features which I use to help me be courteuous – vibrate mode and voice mail. When in a conversation with someone, and my phone vibrates, I do nothing to acknowlege it other than hit the button that makes it stop. I continue the conversation. I like to think the gesture to turn off the vibrate, acknowleges the value of the person I’m speaking to. And the physcial gesture visably enforces this. I also do not answer my desk phone when someone is talking to me. It too has voice mail. (I have noticed that this often makes the person I’m talking to uncomfortable, and when I see this, I tell them “I’ve got voice mail, and this conversation is more important”. It would be nice if desk phones had a button to stop the ringing like cell phones have :-)
2. Solitude and silence are closely related. Sleep and its essential value in maintaining sanity are well documented. I think “sleep” is the ultimate solitude. In addition to the solitude of sleep, planned solitude every day is important for much the same reason. I have at least 3 periods of planned solitude each day. Two of them are riding my motorcycle too and from work (no one is talking to me, and there is no radio on my bike). The third is a planned hour at work early in the morning (I go in an hour earlier than most for this reason) where I take time to reflect on yesterday, and plan for today. This third time of solitude is not the same as “not thinking”, but is “single threaded” time without any external multi-tasking communications going on. I find it healthly, empowering, can clarifying also.
3. Lying in bed before sleeping or, for 20 mins before getting up, can provide much the same opportunity to “sort things out” from the apparent chaos and random sense of it all that accompanies living life with many rapid changes in your attention.
4. Music can be helpful in getting your thoughts to slow down, establishing a “beat” for your thoughts to flow with, (but that depends on what you select for music :-). For some, music is just enough “distraction” that the effort to keep it in the background creates the necessary focus to concentrate your thinking. For others, its the excuse not to think, deeply analyze what is going on, look for patterns, ask “why” enough times about events, etc. In other words, its the tool of choice to detach the higher brain functions from the surroundings.
4. Folks often confuse activity with effectiveness. In fact, its a bit of an American prejudice to equate rushing around with effectiveness. I believe it is important to be proactively be “inactive” in order to improve effectiveness. In physics, energy can be organized (effective), in which case it does work (something useful), or disorganized, in which case it becomes heat (waste). The same of amount of energy is used in either case.
Much of what goes on today in work environments strikes me as more of the latter than the former, and Email, crackberry, cell phones and endless meetings seem to contribute to too much heat and not enough useful work.
5. There are people who are afraid of the sound of their own thinking. They are afraid of absolute quiet, places where no one else is around (for miles), and can sit alone in an open space for an hour and day dream. I am not one of them, so I don’t understand what it is that makes them aprehensive. But I do wonder if they are the majority.