Slivers of Time
On dopamine, distraction, reading, and finding more expansiveness in our everyday.
Hello friends,
I led a bike/art trip last weekend. Four full days of nothing but riding bikes, making art, eating food, sitting at camp, drinking coffee. In other words: a window of time full of good things.
These types of adventures reliably elicit a sense of expansiveness. There is so much that is possible in a day! In my opinion, the bicycle is particularly well-suited for cultivating a creative state. I always like to refer to it as the “idea machine,” the act of pedaling and inertia serving as a lubricant for a continuous flow of thoughts, one organically evolving into the next. With your hands on the handlebars, you can’t jot an idea down or look something up, you simply let the ideas continue to do their thing and see where they end up leading.
When you have a few days away—whether it’s from an extended weekend or a longer vacation—eventually you return home, spend a day at the computer and assorted other regular life tasks, look up late in the evening and think to yourself “where did that day go?” The pace of digitally-connected life often leaves me feeling like a ping pong ball that’s constantly gone back and forth all day long. It feels like my brain never has the time to land in one place.
Of course, much of this is my own doing. It’s too easy to check something, to cut a task midway and read a message or look at someone else’s photos that will inevitably elicit a negative feeling. The urge is often too strong to avoid. I’m distracted. I’m addicted to the refreshing the various feeds. I know it’s bad for me. I do it anyway.
I hate feeling like this. I am sure a lot of you do as well.
I just finished reading Dr. Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation. As she writes:
“We’ve transformed the world from a place of scarcity to a place of overwhelming abundance: Drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting . . . the increased numbers, variety, and potency of highly rewarding stimuli today is staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamine 24/7 for a wired generation.”
As I begin to work on an enormous book project, I’ve been even more cognizant of how this shows up—of how often I want to reach for something to distract myself, of how easy it is to reach for the phone. “In terms of addictive properties, it might as well be stuffed with meth,” wrote Anthony Lane in a New Yorker article this week, referring to our smartphones. The article is about Blinkist, an app that summarizes books1 for (as they put it), “curious people who love to learn, busy people who don’t have time to read, and even people who aren’t into reading.”
The thought is compelling I guess, particularly in a world where we feel like we need to a “keep up.” We feel so overloaded and crunched for time, why not just get short synopses? But… yuck? Just the idea makes me cringe, makes me wonder what we’re doing to our attention spans, to our ability to understand complexity and nuance.
I spend a lot of time with books and words. I read (almost) every night before bed. It doesn’t work for all books, many require more bandwidth than I have when I am feeling sleepy, but to me this often feels like some of the only sacred space that I have left: disconnected and uninterrupted. I enjoy reading not just because I learn something or because a book puts me into another world, but also because it opens up space and time. Even if it’s just for a few minutes, a few pages in a small sliver of time that feels abundant.
Yesterday I got in the car to drive to my weekly Friday morning cold water group dip. As I turned the car on, the radio came on too. Tuned—loudly—to the local NPR station, I wasn’t met with news, or a person talking, I was met with music: the intro to MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.” Let’s just say that when MC Hammer unexpectedly blasts on your radio at 6:40 in the morning you immediately feel a little lighter. Or maybe “bouncier” would be a better description.
Up until 2022 NPR actually used to post these music interludes, or “buttons” as they’re called, in the archive of a show’s broadcast. Now you just have to enjoy the tiny portion of the song in the moment and embrace a bit of mystery if you don’t know what the song is. It’s one of my favorite things about listening, as if that in-between space—instead of being crammed with more information, more content—is padded with joy and color. A little bit of unexpected.
These days, it mostly feels like we’re alll managing small cracks of time, little slivers in between the larger tasks and expectations and to-do lists. And what do we those with? We tend fill them of course.
Our time doesn’t feel expansive, because we’re constantly chopping it up into the tiniest of pieces, and using them to refresh a screen. There’s no breathing room, no moment to just exist. No moment for a random conversation, or watching a leaf flutter to the ground. No room for the unexpected. As Lembke puts it, “we’re constantly seeking to distract ourselves from the present moment, to be entertained.”
I too like to be entertained! And I’m not opposed to distraction. In fact, distractions are often what fuel new ideas, new creative avenues. But I think we know the difference in feeling inspired by a distraction, in feeling like we can cognitively deal with the task at hand, and entirely depleted by the digital one that seems to just suck the life from us and keep us from the things that we really want to be engaged with and focused on. Or as
put it, “the internet is not sparking joy.”Every time I return from a trip, I think about how to infuse a little of that feeling into the everyday. I guess what I really want is a way to break that dopamine addiction cycle. What would it take to make those slivers of time in the everyday feel more expansive? What if we didn’t opt for quick consumption, but infused it with something more joyful, colorful, wild?
Take inspiration from the visual world. The Japanese tradition of kintsugi, is a method of repairing ceramics so that the cracks are filled and glisten with gold. Consider how a dandelion forces itself up through concrete, or how wildflowers can take over a roadside ditch. There are so many ways to squeeze abundance and life into the most unexpected of places.
Many years ago, my friend Brendan wrote about his own goal of sleeping outside for a month every summer. Not one consecutive month, but 31 days accumulated over the course of a season. A night in a tent in the backyard is still a night outside. That’s filling that sliver with a bit more color, a bit more joy.
Finding ways to keep a sense of flow, a sense of wildness, and a sense of expansiveness in our everyday digital and connected lives requires a lot of us. But it requires one thing in particular. In the world of overwhelming abundance we must say: “I can’t keep up and I will stop trying.”
If we stop trying to take it all in, then maybe, just maybe, we can focus a little more on what we do want to take in.
We can find a few more of those cracks and slivers, turning them into a calmer place for our mind to land.
-Anna
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on reading and attention.1000 Words of Summer with
starts next Saturday, June 1st. I think I’m going to do it. Who else is in?Build an attention cottage! (via
)“The affordances of the digital screen are really exciting. They help us skim the extraordinary voluminous nature of information that’s out there. Skimming is a defense mechanism that’s very useful. We can handle so much information… But how we are reading it will change the nature of what we have absorbed.” Maryanne Wolf in conversation with Ezra Klein about “deep reading.” The podcast is from 2022 but I found it while working on today’s newsletter and figured it was fitting.
“What is flow state other than a complete disappearance of the overwhelming reality of the march of time?” - Chris Pine
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Because this article mentions Steven Pinker, I’d also point you in the direction of the If Books Could Kill episode about his work.
“The internet does not spark joy.” 😆 Love this.
I love this idea, and I recently (only one month so far) have put myself on an information fast for the last 4 days of my cycle. No books, no internet, no news, no podcasts. I chose my bleed days because I’m already highly anxious and tired those days and I chose 4 because in tarot numerology it represents stability. It probably won’t be a perfect fast, but at least once a month I’ll remember to not consume/fill up with information and just rest and digest. 🙏🏽
Yes, yes, yes. Since October 7, i stopped using Instagram, Facebook and I stopped reading newspapers and watching the news. I gained so much more time, and I stopped feeling helpless. I talk much more with family and friends instead of reacting on social media. My love tells me when there is news I need to know. I read some Substack but not notes or every week. Peace of Mind makes me more creative too, drawing, textile art, knitting.