Modern humans have become mindless dopamine-chasing zombies, doom-scrolling from one tiny brain-dead piece of content to the next. Never happy where they are and always wanting something else. Outside in the real world, relationships, tranquility and the best years of people’s lives slip away in the wake of wasting time. According to Hugh Van Cuylenburg, founder of The Resilience Project, when we look up from our devices, the emotion we are most likely to experience is regret.
At the opposite end of the attention spectrum, I recently spent a full hour lying on a table in a pergola on a beach in Fiji. It was a completely analogue experience and I was content and entertained the entire time. When I stood up at the end, the best way to describe my state of mind is - happy. There was a small sniff of regret in the emotional mix too. At one point, I went to sleep and dribbled on the foot of the lovely young lady who was attending to me. I felt bad about that, but the rest was all positive.
Many Kiwi males shy away from the quiet time you experience doing peaceful activities like health massages. We worry we will get bored. We worry about spending too much time inside our heads, having to listen to that internal chattering voice hassling us about where we are in life. Relaxation only lasts a few seconds before our minds demand we check our phones, get something to eat or do anything other than the thing we are enjoying right now. Our modern existence encourages us to continually think about the next thing, no matter how good we currently have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a game of golf, a swim, a conversation with a person we love or a one-hour couples massage on a beach in Fiji; wherever we are, our thoughts are elsewhere.
As the neuroscientist Sam Harris put it in his book Waking Up, “Everything we want to accomplish — to paint the house, learn a new language, find a better job — is something that promises that, if done, it would allow us to finally relax and enjoy our lives in the present. Generally speaking, this is a false hope.”
Recently I’ve had success fighting the urge to move on, using low-level mindfulness training. Learning to “live in the moment” from time to time, allows you to enjoy non-digital activities. I was trying to avoid the cliche “live in the moment” here. When someone tells me to “live in the moment”, I want to do anything other than “live in the moment”, just to annoy them. It sounds particularly vacuous when the person telling you to “live in the moment” is referencing the happiness they just experienced on a fancy Fijian vacation.
