Distracted from distraction

You’re just not going to see anything new in there. (Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20)

It’s amazing how your fingers can land you on an app on your phone without any conscious awareness of how you got there.

The patterns of swiping and tapping are so well established that it takes more work to avoid them than to perform them.

I’ve gotten into many of these kinds of grooves over the years. Checking and re-checking my messages and social profiles. Having a look at the analytics on a website for the tenth time in a day. Finding out my Skymiles balance. Obsessing over the number of miles run this week. Revising my budget. Looking up the share prices of a stock. Refresh, refresh, refresh.

Sometimes, when I check whatever it is I’m checking, the result is a frisson of pleasure. That’s what keeps us all coming back, right? Those irregular reinforcement schedules are neurochemically compelling. But more often, there is nothing new to report (maybe because I just checked thirty seconds ago), and I’m disappointed.

There are a lot of ways to deal with this problem. I can usually disrupt the habit by fasting from checking at all for a period of time, or checking at predetermined intervals. Getting obsessed with a different set of metrics can do the trick as well.

However, my favorite way to distract myself from my dopamine source du jour is to take action.

I don’t mean that I keep myself so busy that I’m never alone with my thoughts. It’s that, instead of checking stats on yesterday’s post, I write the next post. Instead of checking to see whether so-and-so has written me back, I reach out to another friend.

In this way, life stays interesting, and I am able to measure the time between my pings on a server in hours rather than minutes.

When I was an adolescent, life was so boring. I mean it. I remember long, gray wintry afternoons of nothing — nothing to look forward to, nothing going on, nothing on TV, no ability to communicate with friends except for the actual, hooked-to-the-wall telephone. I coped with it by playing music and reading and who knows what else. Doing homework. Going out into the woods and exploring. I would walk to the end of the driveway and check the actual mail.

I developed a tolerance for boredom and an ability to make do with whatever level of stimulation was available. On the other hand, I also developed a tendency to wait for my life to start, something that I continued into college and beyond.

That’s why taking action is so powerful for me. It reminds me that I am responsible for making my life what I want it to be. If I want more likes, I should share more things. If I want more messages, I should send more out.

Once I hit a certain threshold of activity, I don’t care as much about checking things on my phone or online. I am experiencing life instead of evaluating or quantifying it. I’m doing fresh work rather than hoping something interesting will happen with the work I’ve already done.

These days, I’m back to spending winters in Maine, but life is a richer. I converse with people from all over the world. Anything I want to learn about is available via the computer in my pocket. And since I’m now a grownup, I can buy the things I need to start new hobbies. I can even buy a plane ticket to escape the winter in Maine if I want to.

I don’t have to be trapped in a life of waiting for the next thing to happen. I don’t have to sit around hoping to be noticed and acknowledged. The numbers are only part of the story — I’m the rest of it. I may as well go out and write it.