A healthier self

A couple of months ago, I started having chronic headaches. At first, it wasn’t a big problem. When it happened, I just stopped working, took a pill, or went for a run. Then I would return to work refreshed, and that was it.

But the pain’s intensity and frequency started to increase progressively, and I began to take it more seriously. It’s not normal to have headaches at least once a day, right?

I talked with my therapist and my doctor. I described the pain I was feeling, my daily routine, fears, desires, goals, and ways of thinking. Both agreed that it’s a symptom related to burnout, a sadly common word nowadays.

The worst time was a week before a planned vacation with my girlfriend. We traveled to Brazil for some time off, and the days before were filled with dozens of maintenance tasks (both work and personal related) that I needed to complete before the trip. Many of these tasks depended on other people or processes, making them more difficult to accomplish. It was crazy.

When we arrived at the hotel, I made a personal promise to myself: let’s use our time off to be really off. I deleted X app, turned off most notifications on my phone, shut down the computer, and didn’t touch it for 9 days. The only interaction I had with the digital world was using my phone to take photos and my Kindle to read only one book: How to do nothing by Jenny Odell.

Those nine days in a different location, doing different things from the ones I usually do in my daily routine, and without distractions, gave me a lot of resources to think about myself, the relationship I have with my work, and other questions that I need to at least pay attention to.

They are summarized in the following sections.

Multitasking

I’m deeply interested in today’s Argentine economy and politics. This is kind of a new phenomenon to me, since I didn’t pay too much attention to politics in the past (only in my adolescence, when I was an idealistic child with some theoretical background but zero practical expertise, wanting to change the world based on books).

Reasons:

• We’re in the middle of a big crisis. More than 200% per year inflation is not something we are proud of. A 60% poverty rate is even worse. One out of two children cannot cover their basic needs.
• There was a shift in political power. We moved from a way of thinking that put the government as the most important economic actor to a libertarian mindset that basically hates the government. It’s a 180-degree change, and we’re feeling the gap between them every day.
• I’m trying to build a better economic and political outlook for myself. I have a lot of doubts, and I think this moment is really good to put my ideas or preconceptions under the pressure of different perspectives to grow as a better thinker.
• I’m an economic actor who offers services and has needs and desires, and all the economic decisions directly impact me.

But… what does it have to do with my headaches? Well, it has to do with a bad habit that I silently developed because of this interest. Every time I have a free moment, I grab my iPad and listen to some YouTube video of Ernesto Tenembaum interchanging ideas with a libertarian guy or Carlos Zuchovicki talking about trends in the national stock market.

The good part is that I’m always up to date. I’m a little bit obsessed with trying to hear more than one voice on a specific topic, and because of that, I think I can have a clearer picture of it. The bad part is that sometimes I cannot control the compulsion of knowing what’s going on. Technology has made it really, really easy to stay informed, so every dead moment is a potential moment to listen to or read something. Cooking? With a video playing. Running? With a podcast playing. Taking a break? Reading the news…

Over-information + multitasking is a bad combo. In The Burnout Society, a book that I recently read but it seems like I forgot (🫠), Byung-Chul Han warns about multitasking:

Multitasking is commonplace among wild animals. It is an attentive technique indispensable for survival in the wilderness. An animal busy with eating must also attend to other tasks. For example, it must hold rivals away from its prey. It must constantly be on the lookout, lest it be eaten while eating. At the same time, it must guard its young and keep an eye on its sexual partner. In the wild, the animal is forced to divide its attention between various activities. That is why animals are incapable of contemplative immersion—either they are eating or they are copulating. The animal cannot immerse itself contemplatively in what it is facing because it must also process background events.

Sometimes, I feel like I’m an animal in a jungle. There’s too much going on, and it feels like it’s directly affecting us. Wait! They tell me we’re living in a civilization! That we’re better than animals because we build things to satisfy our needs and grow in complexity. But many of these things (push notifications, infinite scrolling, persuasive designs, etc.) are taking us back to the beginning: being an animal with the fear of being eaten. In the words of Cocos Capital’s CEO (an Argentinian stock broker):

Each morning a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Each morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.

Lion or gazelle, when the sun comes up, you better start running.

I like running, but to be healthy, not to avoid the possibility of being eaten.

Boredom, attention, hyperattention, action

Reviewing my highlights on Deep Work (by Cal Newport), I found a simple, short sentence that caught my attention:

I’m comfortable being bored, and this can be a surprisingly rewarding skill

I’m not. I hate being bored. Whenever I feel that way, my mind automatically starts thinking about things I can or should be doing. How about reading a book? Continuing that side project? Going for a walk? Messaging a friend? Messaging my GF? Watching a documentary?

In Brazil, I tried the opposite. We visited beautiful beaches in Buzios, and I focused on just sitting and contemplating our surroundings. Talk with my girlfriend, drink mate, and just watch the sea, the “morros,” and people enjoying that space and time. And it felt good. Refreshing. I felt like my mind was a box full of things, and that with this immersive process, I started to put some of them out of it, make some space, and order what was left inside. Like when you organize things in your home and you feel it’s way bigger than you perceived before.

With space, you can think in a better way. I started to make cool connections between supposedly unrelated topics; creative ideas came to my mind without effort. In fact, we can generalize my particular feeling into a more collective thing. In the words of Byung-Chul Han, in Profound Boredom (an essay inside The Burnout Society):

We owe the cultural achievements of humanity—which include philosophy—to deep, contemplative attention. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible.

There is no doubt that without Aristotle and Socrates spending their entire lives in deep contemplation and reflection, many things that exist today wouldn’t be here. After all, philosophy is the mother of all thoughts.

It’s worth paying attention to the rest of the paragraph:

Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process. […] A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.

The most important sentence is the last one, which showcases the consequences of this modern phenomenon: “A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.” This hurts, but it’s true. When I’m constantly in a rush, without time to think, reflect, or simply observe, my thoughts and decisions become repetitive and robotic. There’s nothing new in them. When I make time to observe and reflect (like in Brazil), I connect dots and produce new thoughts. I’m able to hear my own voice, breaking the compulsive cycle of “accelerating what is already available.”

Jenny Odell goes to the same direction when she quotes William Deresiewicz in How to do nothing:

William Deresiewicz warns of this in “Solitude and Leadership,” a speech to an audience of college students in 2010. By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, “[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else.”

It’s true that Odell and Newport don’t agree on the fundamental criticism of current times (Odell believes something is wrong with the economic system design, while Cal thinks the issues can be fixed within capitalism). However, they both seem to agree that sitting and observing is not an easy task, given a similar quote by her:

Nothing is harder to do than nothing.

…especially for me (an active person), but also for the rest of society. How is it possible to “simply” do nothing when streaming, social media, games, and the gig economy demand your attention 24/7? Doing nothing feels like a fight against all this. It requires effort and energy. But if mental health and having a meaningful life are priorities, it’s worth it.

Byung-Chul Han discusses this effort in The Pedagogy of Seeing (another essay inside the book), an essay in which he talks about vita contemplativa, in contrast (or complement?) to vita activa. He refers to some thoughts described by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols about learning to see:

One must learn “not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.” By the same token, “every characteristic absence of spirituality, every piece of common vulgarity, is due to an inability to resist a stimulus” - the inability to set a no in opposition.

And:

The vita contemplativa is not a matter of passive affirmation and being open to whatever happens. Instead, it offers resistance to crowding, intrusive stimuli. Instead of surrendering the gaze to external impulses, it steers them in sovereign fashion. As a mode of saying no, sovereign action proves more active than any and all hyperactivity, which represents a symptom of mental exhaustion.

If I succeed in making this happen to me, time will feel different. Time will be fragrant, as Byung-Chul Han describes when talking about Cézanne:

Paul Cézanne, a master of deep, contemplative attention, once remarked that he could see the fragrance of things. This visualization of fragrances requires profound attention. In the contemplative state, one steps outside oneself, so to speak, and immerses oneself in the surroundings.

Structured and unstructured thinking

Other things that came to mind on that trip were some interests that had been deprioritized over the years.

When I was a teen, I wanted to be a writer. A fiction writer. I loved literature (I still love it) and since I had a lot of free time after school, I spent hours reading books and writing crap. I was lucky to have parents who also enjoy reading, so I created a little library by merging titles from my father, my mother, and buying more myself (I remember my first informal salaries were spent on completing Julio Cortázar’s bibliography).

I also participated in a literature workshop in the city where I currently live. There, I learned a lot about modern literature and tried to improve my writing skills. I kind of failed at that (or didn’t persist enough), but as a success, I can say that we published an anthology of stories and poems among all the participants of the workshop, which was really nice.

Then time passed. I started university, and time became more scarce. I graduated as a Software Engineer and began working in the tech industry. Coding became my passion.

The two blogs (intersecciones and soyantipoeta) and the Medium account I maintained during this era and the transition to the new one (the engineer era, let’s say) are good examples to illustrate my worries:

• The first blog is called “Intersecciones”, which in English means “Intersections.” The blog’s subtitle reads: “Searching for elements that belong to two or more sets”, complemented by a Venn diagram. I chose this title because I was studying discrete mathematics in college at the time, which left me with little time to read literature or write posts. The idea was to merge two worlds I was enjoying: liberal arts, literature, and engineering, science, coding. As Steve Jobs repeatedly said in his Apple talks:

• The second blog’s web title is Poemas, ecuaciones, acordes, which means poems, equations, chords. More of the same.
• I wrote a post where I researched initiatives to write poems using programming languages instead of natural languages.
• In 2016, in the middle of my career, I watched two TED talks related to AI: How we teach computers to understand pictures and How computers are learning to be creative. In the first one, Fei Fei Li, a computer scientist, explained the process of training and testing a neural network to understand and categorize images. In the second one, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, another computer scientist at Google, reversed the problem: what happens if, instead of having the picture as an input and the categorization as an output on a neural net, we make the image the output. The result was something similar to what we call creativity in humans. At that point, neither ChatGPT nor Midjourney existed. The results just blew my mind. It was the perfect combination of art and technology! I wrote an article on Medium and spoke to the owner of the literature workshop I mentioned earlier to organize a talk at my high school. I wanted people to notice these awesome discoveries that were happening. And we did it. Here’s the only photo I have of that moment. I can say it was the first tech talk I gave:

What I’m trying to illustrate with these examples is that I always try to combine both worlds. The first is unstructured, flexible, crazy. The second is deterministic, detailed, and consistent, with a concrete roadmap. But I need both. Whenever I lean towards one, something feels off.

In one of the evenings we spent on the beach, I started to look at my hands. On the left hand, I had my Apple Watch: numbers, activity rings, progress, productivity, growth. On the right hand, I had some bracelets I bought from street sellers in Buzios: just some calm scraps of thread with some aesthetic meaning. No progress. No numbers. It seems like both are parts of myself, like the Yin and Yang, that can be thought of as complementary (rather than opposing) forces that interact to form a dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the assembled parts.

In response to multitasking and hyper-attention: slow down

What happened to my thinking process in Brazil (which can be summarized as: having more space and time tends to generate better and deeper ideas) is not a unique or original experience. Something similar happened to Lionel Dricot. In his article A society that lost focus, he presents the same idea through a teen experience:

In the early 90s, after tweaking my MS-DOS computer, I was able to play games. One of those games was called “Battle Chess”. A Chess game were pieces were really fighting against each other. It was fun. I was, and still am, a mediocre chess player. I was mate in less than 10 or 15 turns at the easiest level.

For the sake of the experiment, I turned the difficulty to the harder level and started playing. Something strange happened: I was still losing but it took a lot more turns. I was able to protect my game, even to manage a few draws.

Was it a bug in the game?

Even as a young teenager, I quickly understood the reason. With the setting set to “hard”, the game would try a lot harder to find a good move. On my 386 processor, without the mathematical coprocessor, this would take time. Several seconds or even one minute by turn. During that time, I was thinking, anticipating.

With the easiest setting, computer moves would happen immediately. I knew I had all the time I want but I was compelled to move fast. I could not take the time while the other side was immediately reacting to my moves.

And then he states:

⁠⁠The root problem is that, for the first time in human history, our brain is the bottleneck. For all history, transmitting information was slow. Brains were fasts.

Our brain is the bottleneck. Specially for us, workers in the knowledge sector. Func fact related to this: I have a cactus cerebro on my desk. It’s inside a 3D-printed flowerpot shaped like a person reading a book, which is a gift from one of my best friends. The head part is open to let the “cerebro” rest in peace. This always reminds me that it’s a living organism. Being able to focus on one thing at a time or setting aside time to think deeply without restrictions or distractions is like watering it regularly and giving it sunlight.

Another excellent description of the problem can be found in William Deresiewicz, previously mentioned by Jenny Odell in my How to Do Nothing quotes. In Solitude and Leadership, he’s sharp about multitasking and the way our society tries to think nowadays:

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

He also describes his own thinking process:

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

We always have a next thing waiting for us. Something in our backlog claiming for priority, affirming that you should stop doing what you’re doing and pay attention to it. Fragmented attention. Just finish this in progress thing asap, put it in the done column and move on.

If we compulsively follow this process, we eliminate all alternative paths that may appear when examining a thought from different perspectives. We end up with partial realities that likely reinforce our previous thinking, increasing the risk of making bad decisions. This applies not only to individuals but also to companies and governments. The consequences of this negligent process can impact an entire society.

With this, I’m not saying I’m against trial and error strategies (at least for companies). I know that it is impossible to know all the results an idea or implementation can lead to, and iterative processes and MVPs can help with real feedback. But I can say an MVP of a weak idea, without foundations, that came out of a 20-minute brainstorming session without much stress testing will, with higher confidence, result in a failure. We need time to think:

I used to have students who bragged to me about how fast they wrote their papers. I would tell them that the great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day—half the length of the selection I read you earlier from Heart of Darkness—for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month. So it is with any other form of thought. You do your best thinking by slowing down and concentrating.

Talking about real-world examples, this article is one of them. I was feeling guilty because it’s taking me months to write it. I was in Brazil in April. At the time I’m writing these lines, it’s the end of June. My inner voice:

Omg! You’re not being very productive, Juan! There is a goal of writing content that you need to achieve for 2024! Probably, to engage your audience, you can separate all these thoughts into smaller pieces, one topic at a time, to produce easier and shorter content to digest.

It’s an ongoing battle, but I’m trying to silence that voice. These topics are highly related, and this blog post won’t be Les Miserables. We’re good.

Reject modernity, embrace tradition

I’m currently reading Slow productivity, by Cal Newport.

One idea I’m finding interesting to explore more because of this book is a tendency to reject modernity and embrace tradition. It’s not a new concept for Cal. He doesn’t have social media, he’s a professor of computer science, but he uses pen and paper a lot and tends to view the next big thing (a common phrase in the tech world) with skepticism. In Slow Productivity, he explains this with a historical example: Carlo Petrini, an Italian activist and journalist, and his experiment called Slow Food, a movement created in response to the arrival of fast food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King in Italy.

Against those—or, rather, the vast majority—who confuse efficiency with frenzy, we propose the vaccine of an adequate portion of sensual gourmandise pleasures, to be taken with slow and prolonged enjoyment. Appropriately, we will start in the kitchen, with Slow Food. To escape the tediousness of “fast-food,” let us rediscover the rich varieties and aromas of local cuisines.

A reminder to take undisputed progress with quotation marks.

In my mind, the idea is not to reject progress, but to think about it before jumping on board. Understand what’s the balance. Understand what you’re leaving behind. Sometimes, efficiency and speed are traps. Sure, you can probably produce 10x more writing content with ChatGPT-4, but does it have the same quality, unique thought, or inner voice as a single text written by you? Yes, you can be 10x more productive in your side project by coding with AI assistance, but if you use it to implement the app’s core logic, how much time will you spend fixing AI-generated bugs?

Again, T.S. Eliot wrote about 150 pages of poetry in his entire career, and he’s one of the best writers the world has produced. It’s not all about producing more.

Final thoughts

I don’t want this to be a classic How to article that offers you a set of instructions to follow in order like a robot and solve the information overload or the multitasking problem. How to do nothing is, basically, a title that takes that trend with irony. This is just a description of my personal experience, with some observations that can be extrapolated or not. It’s a discovery work. A WIP (an acronym we like to use in the tech industry). When I’m writing about myself I write myself, like Escher’s drawing:

Since this a WIP (and I’m a WIP), there may will be future posts about the same topics.

Stay tuned.