Quiet
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It makes phone calls and text messages. The battery lasts almost a month. My wife can call me in an emergency. I wired up a few work outage alerts with IFTTT. That's about it.
The best part about it is that it leaves me alone. When I turn my smartphone back on, it's incredible to see the barrage of worthless notifications that would have distracted me throughout the day. I no longer check my phone aimlessly because there's nothing to do.
I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/@LastZactionHero/quitting-the-smartphone-...
I've tried a million different apps (even got a Headspace subscription for a while), read Mindfulness in Plain English along with a tonne of other guides on it but it just never seems to click for me.
Just start doing it, perhaps every morning, dedicate 15 minutes of each day to the meditation.
By doing it alone from the start is difficult. That's where sangha - a group of persons who practice meditation - comes to play. Others will help you and it is also easier to get up and meditate if you know that others come as well.
Another tricky think is to get rid of your expectations. You may have many ideas what meditation should bring to you, just abandon them all and let meditation surprise yourself.
My teacher always likened meditation to the soil dissolved in the glass of water - put soil in the water and shake it. Now just put the glass on the table and let it sit there for a while. After some time all the soil sinks to the bottom and above that you have clear water.
Same goes with your mind and that's also an explanation, why it is necessary to be regular - your everyday activities just mix the soil with the water and you tend to loose the clarity.
Just repeat and repeat.
It is a wonderful activity.
But to add on to what you've said. Meditation is great can help you lose mundane, petty worries and live in the moment, as opposed to the could've beens.
> It can help you lose mundane, petty worries
So, you're saying you haven't been meditating enough?
That nostalgia didn't stop the clock from moving forward or life from getting ever more hectic and complicated. But there seems to be something deep inside our psyches that yearns for "the village": a place where the rules are known, the people can be trusted, and time can be spent rather than hoarded.
Thinking retrospectively, I think I more happy today than I was in the past. The Internet noise that we deplore has helped me immensely to discover what I like doing. Sure, it's stressful at times, but given a choice between then and now, I think my choice would always be the latter.
Stardew Valley became extraordinarily popular. It's just a game where you explicitly give up your corporate cubicle job to take over your grandfather's farm in a small village town. It's such a peaceful game but there's a strong yearning for what you mentioned in it.
The game was also a one person project over 4-5 years which is pretty inspiring, too.
My prediction would be gradually the hyper connectedness becomes the norm while the last generations who remember “quiet” die. Of course there would likely always be small fractions of the population who look to the past and practice mindfulness, almost like how people re-enact the civil war battles. But I would guess largely highly saturated connectedness becomes who we are, in spite of a vocal minority who long for a different way of living.
It feels different than most old ideas that I've seen die before. Yes, of course there's always an inevitable "good old times" moment, but this one... There's something lurking behind it. It's not just nostalgia, it has the roots of a fight seeded in it.
We'll see. Maybe I'm now just old enough that this time, it feels different. But it does not feel like what happened to VHS, or the CD, or land lines, or any number of things that we've declared outdated in the last few decades.
But I don't know if the freedom of being quiet is lost to the past. The digital detox is increasingly a thing now; the youthful are attuned to and aware of the manners in which they are marketed to. It's only natural that we begin to see countercurrents, and only natural that humans intentionally disconnect to be one with the world around them.
Yes, exactly. The internet has been a cure for this, and we're lucky to be around for it.
When books were invented, there was an outcry against the idea. "We'll never have to use our memories!" Yet books have generally been seen as a positive thing.
Why should the internet end up any different?
I'd recommend perusing The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, which suggests that exposure to rapid and substance-less feedback cycles can actually change brain chemistry in undesirable ways. The book is a bit sensationalist, but is nonetheless a good jumping-off point for exploring the perils of internet addiction.
The amount of noise today is unprecedented. I am reminded of the movie _Her_ in which one sees a world where technology can move into the background and augment human relationships. Granted, there are moments in that film when the tech hurts instead of hinders, but compare that to today's world where everything has the "in your face" mentality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_(Anderson_novel)
Just chilling.
About twelve years ago or so I was living in this condo that had really noisy neighbors. One screaming baby on the left, and an enthusiastic Pantera fan on the right. The folks on the right, when not listening to Pantera, were constantly yelling right near the wall... or so it felt.
This was the first time I really discovered the joy of earplugs. A year or so later I got my first pair of industrial ear protection. They cut out about 20 - 30db (or something like that), and it was just enough to allow myself to be alone in an otherwise busy space.
Years later I still value regular periods of silence. These days I still have a pair of industrial ear protection, but I mostly use decent earplugs [1].
Another aspect of seeking silence is to completely (or almost completely) eliminate notifications.
For those of us with ADHD, meditation is fantastic, but it does take time. The love for silence didn't happen right away. It took me quite a while to be able to shut my mind up.
In the early 00s I went through these psychoneurophysiology sessions to help learn to focus, in hopes of eliminating the negative aspects of ADHD. One part of the 'training' was to have sensors on my ears and one on my head. While I tried to focus, the machine would measure my brainwaves... anyway, once I hit 'the zone', the cute hot air balloon would float up and over the silo. Tapping into this 'zone' really helped me break away from the constant chatter of my surroundings and my brain.
Like some, I do love the romance that comes with a lo-fi world. Silence, space, and peace are special. In the same, I really appreciate some aspects of the technology we've been blessed with. it all comes down to finding your off switch so these things can become special again.
[1] the earplugs I'm using - https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00RM6Q9XW
My kingdom for an abstract.
I found it ironic that the corner of the last paragraph was obscured by an "Up Next" pop-open, ready to push me on to the next thing before I'd even had a moment to digest it.
I was just thinking recently about how great it was to be in high school. Few responsibilities, spent lots of time with friends, homework and work were easy. Of course, then I remember I couldnt live alone, had little money, homework and work seemed hard because I had nothing to compare it to, drama at school, etc. And try meeting up with flaky teenagers without a cell phone :P
Of course, if you find yourself feeling stressed out by the connectedness, by all means take a break. You don't need to check email or be on slack all day. But at the same time, don't get too stressed out thinking we've lost something without gaining anything. You have the option to turn your phone off, you haven't lost anything. But it is now easier than ever to keep in touch, geography is even less relevant.
Obligatory xkcd: "It is, unfortunately, one of the chief characteristics of modern business to always be in a hurry. In olden times it was different. - The Medical Record, 1884"
> Before we could Skype home and feel we’d done something meaningful.
Those golden days where talking to people was so meaningful, not like today where people talk over a distance!
“Why doth solid and serious learning decline, and few or none follow it now in the University?” he asked. “Answer: Because of Coffea Houses, where they spend all their time.”
There’s also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306016/, which doesn’t go further back then 1860. It doesn’t mention complaints about the printing press (too much too read; won’t learn from copying books) or from the ancient Greeks, so it corroborates the theory that this started with automation (although I can imagine seeing the first complaints when artificial lighting of almost any form was introduced. Maybe even, people did complain when the bow and arrow sped up hunting)