Trying to sit still for 30 min without any stimulation at all (no talking, watching, reading) sounds like torture to me.
This is a bit like excercise. When you first start, 30 minutes of exercise can be torture as your is out of shape and not used to the effort. Keep doing it and it feels better and you feel better.
Work on becoming a source of thoughts rather than a consumer of thoughts.
> Work on becoming a source of thoughts rather than a consumer of thoughts.
This is the classic “sounds deep but actually means nothing” vague statement that’s only meant to massage one’s ego and try to reenforce an unsubstantiated idea in a faux-philosophical way.
You are always “sourcing” thoughts even when “consuming”.
Being able to sit still, quietly without having to stimulate oneself is, by all means, exactly that: avoid stimulating oneself. Looking around and trying to come up with small stimulations based on your surrounding is merely replacing one object (say, your phone) with another.
Generally, I prefer just sitting quietly and not worrying about the definition of stimulation or whether I'm doing it correctly.
That said, I agree with you.
I had to sit still a lot as a child, since I wasn't allowed to have friends or go anywhere. I read a lot, but a lot of the time I was to tired or bored to read, so I'd just defocus my eyes, and disappear into my imagination. It would look like I'm reading, so I wouldn't get punished. In hindsight I'm not sure it's terribly healthy, as I now find it impossible to put up with boring people (which is basically everybody who has time to sit around chatting, almost by definition).
I also find it problematical to deal with people who live 'normal/standard' lives who are not curious about the world and how everything works. Being put in a conversation talking about sports, gossip, celebrities is intolerable for me.
I've come to accept (and I think some people here may resonate with) that this is can be a blessing or good filtering mechanism.
You're being judgemental to call them boring. Plus widening your opinions to be a "definition" sounds like an unhealthy worldview. You likely appear boring to others.
Then again I have a saying I use when anyone says they are bored - I say they are boring!
This is a very clever come back, I wonder if it might qualify as the best thought terminating cliché I've seen this year!
I never say I'm bored. The universe is too interesting a place to be bored. I did mean it, that most people, individually, are what I find boring. I'd rather withdraw into my mind and work on something interesting, whether it's about figuring something out, or trying to design something. The painful part is pretending to care long enough to get away without somebody getting butthurt.
The "almost by definition" is that the people I find interesting are usually busy doing interesting things, so the boring ones are the only regular people at social gatherings. I do not go to those anymore.
That is certainly the best back-handed compliment I have received in the last hour. Thank you. Your writing molests me.
> is that the people I find interesting are usually busy doing interesting things, so the boring ones are the only regular people at social gatherings.
That comes across to me as a refreshingly honest self-centred view.
You recall me of a friend who does contemporary dance as part of a troupe. I find them interesting - however I also find sewage plants and stink beetles interesting.
What's I'm trying to say is that finding people interesting (or boring) probably says more about you than it does about them.
The smartest people I know seem to be interested in everything. I often find people interesting for reasons I would find difficult to admit to them. I'm not that smart.
I find myself boring - contemptuous through familiarity?
And yeah, I'm rather cynical about "norms" too.
Be careful that there are social penalties for behaving like that way. When people smell an air of arrogance, they implicitly punish you.
I recommend to trick yourself into believing that people around you are worth your time. Even if it's not really true. Even if it makes you die a little inside. Just try to make it work.
And when the opportunity comes to get rid of those people from your life, grab that chance with all your heart.
they can't punish me if I'm not there and don't depend on them.
Why not? Is this some form/culture of parenting I’m not familiar with?
This idea of not allowing a child to have friends or go anywhere just sounds like actual emotional abuse.
it was. my father assured everybody that he and I were best friends and I didn't need anybody else. I was allowed to go to school, that was it.
Time to find support that you trust and face whatever is going on under the hood.
For me, the three major turning points were quitting my job, later starting somatic therapy with the right therapist, and then finally getting diagnosed with ADHD. Good luck to you :) wish you the best
Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.
The only thing I ever “feel” good about is purely a mental thing. Eg I hit a new PR (progress), didn’t skip a lift (perseverance), or whatever. The act of exercising itself is always painful and it’s why I always dread it.
I say this because my experience is very different from yours: I get a very perceptible "high" once I get into the rhythm of a good workout. Think mild euphoria, mood lift, and general feeling of "rightness" in my body once it's been well wrung.
This only happens if I'm in decent shape, though. If I've fallen out of shape it's a slog.
Edit: I can't remember the podcast, but I recall some discussion of emerging clinical evidence in exercise response variability along many dimensions that may help explain the disconnect.
There's no way I'm going to run for 2 years on the hope that one day it will stop hurting and get enjoyable.
There's also something to be said for seasons of maintaining a level of fitness rather than pushing for the next level!
https://stories.strava.com/articles/a-productive-weekly-trai...
this is almost certainly wrong - 100% balls to wall training will surely be suboptimal (on avg) to achieving most fitness goals - eg within a running training block there will generally be recovery and "general aerobic" runs which are easy in effort relative to the harder work in the block. These easy efforts are necessary to optimally achieve the desired physiological adaptations acquired through increased volume and "nailing" the hard workouts. The easier runs enable this by getting volume at lower risk of injury + conserving energy/will for the key workouts.
This also doesn't consider how important recovery is to optimal results (as in sleep, rest, self-care etc).
We are chaotic and beautiful bundles of dozens of trillions of cells that evolved over 4 billion years. We breath. We feel. We are alive. We aren't math problems that need to be "solved" or "optimized".
> Which, to me, makes sense because you’re supposed to always be pushing yourself. You’re not supposed to ever feel comfortable or feel better from it. You should always feel shitty because if it doesn’t hurt then you’re probably not making optimal development.
You are way too demanding of yourself my friend :(
Harder is not always better.
There's more to it like how to pick the weight, etc... but the perfect rep piece I really enjoyed.
Also late to the party, but creatine is the body and more importantly the brains friend too.
However, for each new scanning protocol, I like to have had it myself - so I know what the children go through. And, at times lying inside a MRI scanner, detached from the world, with only the noise of the scanner (very reduced with our new noise cancelling headphones), is almost meditative, and a welcome escape from the constant connection and pressures of being immediately available at work. Sounds like the writer achieves something similar in the coffee shop.
I get a break from constant availability from air travel, but that's slowly eroding as it becomes more connected.
Yes, my last transatlantic flight I caught up with a stack of email.
What works to get children to stay still though?
But for kids over 8, a nice long form video works well. That, and having enough time so that they don't feel like we're in a rush, but also not taking to long to load them onto the scanner...
For the younger ones, it's very much dependent on the child. So we take a bit of time to get to know them before we get them to attend. We have videos to prep them, and can follow a script when loading them (e.g. becoming an astronaut and blasting off into space...).
2-6 days of just riding your bike, eating, sleeping outside. Yeah it can be hard but nothing makes the MS Teams chime in the woods.
I would say it is very enjoyable 30 minutes every time I do it. I don't think anyone would describe that kind of experience as hard to do?
Some would, especially the younger generation. Their attention span - or probably their brain chemistry - is strongly affected by constant stimulation, to the point where disconnecting from it causes anxiety and restlessness.
Not just the younger generation either, millennials are probably the first generation to be affected.
I try and think about this often.
The overwhelming majority of humanity's problems, such as they might be described, stem from the biological drive to survive and procreate. The quip presupposes that man naturally has a room to sit quietly in; this is not the case. The procurement of a room to sit in requires a significant amount of effort. It can entail the securing of territory and building of the shelter oneself, or it can entail the education, advanced skill development, and daily labour required to pay to reap the results of other people having secured the territory and built the shelter. To say nothing of food, mating, and rearing of offspring.
Pascal was born well-to-do, so perhaps he was removed from the general human experience. He was provided with the room to sit quietly in by the efforts of others, and may never have had to work a day in his life, affording him the luxury to make that statement. He also did not marry or reproduce. If everyone had lived the life he lived, there would be no rooms to sit in and indeed no men to sit in them. Being charitable, I suppose it's true that if all mankind were to stop reproducing, there would shortly be no more problems for humanity on account of humanity no longer existing.
Pascal also stated...
> as we should always be, in the suffering of evils, in the deprivation of all the goods and pleasures of the senses, free from all the passions that work throughout the course of life, without ambition, without avarice, in the continual expectation of death
while going so far as rejecting medical care for an illness that eventually led to his death at a young 39. In other words, his attained enlightenment was suffering in the name of his religion to the point of dying. He certainly committed to his beliefs, but I don't find his form of enlightenment inspiring, and do not believe that humanity should strive to follow in his footsteps of fatal self-deprivation. The only way sitting quietly solves all of humanity's problems is if all of humanity commits to doing only that until they wither away and die without any pursuit of the things they need to survive. He framed it as giving up ambition and avarice, but even without ambition and avarice you will endure struggles merely to sustain yourself if you are not born into wealth. I, personally, am quite content dealing with those struggles and have no interest in solving them by dying prematurely as Pascal might prefer to do.
Yes, it's hyperbole, it literally will not get rid of all the problems but the ethos of the view is being conscious of your needs and your actions and you only truly get that by having the space to think. As opposed to just go go go and not taking a step back and implicitly treating your mind as a hostile place you need distraction from.
I'll throw in another quote that sits nicely with the Pascal quote, from Ursula Le Guin:
> Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive
just discrimination can only come from being comfortable to be with your thoughts, which can, but is not limited to, happen in a quiet room
The second quote does not comport with Pascal, because Pascal was not advocating for a path that led to internal happiness, but rather the abandonment of the desire for happiness altogether. He believed that suffering on Earth was the purpose of being Christian and would lead to salvation through God.
As a related aside, that's why I continue to find it odd that many people take their phones when they're using the bathroom. Just further limiting the few places (with the shower being #1) where circumstances does force your brain to review and assess like it clearly wants to do.
Also, a lot of folks think it's easy to do. Until you try it, that is.
I also remember reading somewhere around the lines of handling the chaos in your-self. Or controlling the chaos within yourself.
And always thought this exercise showed what that is about. (Sorry, forgot the expression. Been a while. It's definitely more nicely put than the above.)
I've done more than that. Summer time I often swim in open water up to 2 hour at once as one of the ways to stay fit. Obviously it becomes routine and not very entertaining. So I usually doing some high level software design work in my mind at this point, exploring some concepts, thinking business ideas etc. etc. So my body does monotonous work of not very high intensity and my brain is busy with everything else. Not board at all.
I once spent 1.5 hour standing in a church listening to a priest for more than an hour (funeral). Same thing I mentally solved the problem why some piece of my code did not work.
Without this ability I would go nuts. My brain always has to be busy with something. It is like a drug for me.
After some struggle you will enter into a weird state that I think should be similar to what they achieve through meditation.
Not my cup of tea. But I do get your point.
You end up hearing conversations more clearly, environmental noises you wouldn't normally hear and I find more clarity for the environmental area.
Those of us over 40 have already had plenty of this in our lives, it used to be such a common part of life! Waiting for appointments, waiting for the bus, etc. before smartphones. My first job had two hours between lunch and dinner service. I only had about 15 minutes of work during that time, so it was hour plus of almost entirely idle time every shift.
Nowadays when I'm feeding her or napping her I admittedly do have a phone behind her head, but I'll always cherish those two hours where it was just us two.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/07/people-pr...
The mind finds entirely new areas of stimulation when it’s not being distracted or purely having sensory experiences.