“Our technology has exceeded our humanity.” – Albert Einstein
Want some simple advice that is guaranteed to make your life better, but almost nobody will actually do?
Make your life more boring.
I know that’s a hard sell, but like I said — results are guaranteed — so I’ll do my best to sell you on it anyway 🙂
Starting with an over-the-top story about how moronic I was in my mid-20’s:
In 2015, a business partner and I spent the year travelling across ~20-something countries and eating at high-end restaurants every night.
I don’t mean steakhouses where the bill might be $150 bucks, but Michelin Star tasting menus where the bill might be $500-1000 and the meal takes three hours to finish.
That might sound glamorous, but it quickly turned into a gigantic waste of time and money.
After a month, these meals seemed (and I know how stupid this sounds)…
Normal.
Boring, even.
Been there, done that, what’s for dessert…
Oh, a mayan skull hand-carved into four layers of luxury ice cream, gently dusted with pop-rocks that sizzle in your mouth as the ice cream melts?
How mundane.
Actually that one was still pretty amazing (pic at the bottom), but it would have been far more amazing if it had been a rare occasion rather than just another Tuesday.
By the end of the year, these world-class meals bled together into one long line of plates that were too small and cheques that were too big, and we were so over-stimulated that we went numb to the best food humanity has to offer.
Several years later, I spent two weeks meditating in the jungle while eating nothing but white fish, plantain, boiled potato, and rice.
No salt, no oil, no sugar, no seasoning of any kind.
On the final day, I added a tiny pinch of salt and my head nearly exploded.
My stimulation threshold was so low that plain jungle food became an earth-shaking culinary experience.
When I say “make life more boring,” this is what I’m really talking about:
Not eating fish and plantain all day, but simply stimulating yourself less, so that you can actually feel your life again.
And not just with food (notice how healthy food tastes better as you become healthier)…
…But more urgently, with technology.
Most of us are so over-stimulated by the dopamine firehose of social media that we’ve gone numb:
Like a junkie who needs another hit just to feel normal, we rely on the flashing lights of our screens to escape how strung-out we feel.
But the only way to truly feel normal again is to stop stringing yourself out on screens:
Fill the empty spaces of your day with silence instead of social media.
Spend your breaks stretching or going for walks instead of plugging back into the matrix.
Avoid (or at least limit) the sharp spikes of dopamine that come from heavy-duty video games and those x-rated videos you pretend not to watch.
Ask yourself more often whether this doom-scroll is actually satisfying you, or making your life better in any real way.
And please, for everyone’s sake, go to the bathroom without your damn phone.
If you’d like to enjoy a show or a movie in the evening, go for it:
But make it a relaxing reward at the end of a day well lived, rather than just another dose.
Bottom line:
Technology is great for many things, but mental health is not one of them.
So take your mind back by making your life more boring.
Before long, nothing will feel boring because everything in your life will feel better, and you’ll wonder where on earth your mind has been all this time.
Results guaranteed 🙂
– T
P.S. This really happened:
