Overcoming the Pull of Social Media

So this is another thing that I point out in the book is that we're never bored anymore. So as we evolved, boredom is this evolutionary discomfort that basically told us whatever you're spending your time on right now, it's not an efficient use of your time. So go find something else. Now in the past, this would be like, let's say you're picking berries from a bush, you've picked the easiest to pick ones. Well if we didn't have the skew of boredom, we'd be like reaching into the very back for the berries that are hard to pick, but they become successively harder to pick because we've picked all these different ones, right? Boredom would kick on and be like, hey, your return on your time invested has worn thin, move on to another bush, right? But nowadays, with this influx of media we have, people spend 11 hours a day engaging with digital media. Is that real? Yeah, 11, and that's the average. So what? You want to hear an even crazier thing? Yeah. Okay, so I'm a professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and one of the classes I teach is an intro class, so it's got about 150 students, and it's a media class I teach in the journalism department. First day of class, I'll talk about just how things have changed with media. It's like we live 2.5 million years with no media in our lives, and now it's become our lives. And then I will ask, all right, I want everyone to pull out your phone right now. I want you to look at your screen time, tell me how much you have, who thinks they have the highest. And we'll start to go through people. I've had people, you know, 7 hours 45 minutes, 8 hours 50 minutes, 9 hours 16 minutes. It's like, that's your entire day all on that cell phone, right? So nowadays, when we have this discomfort of boredom kick in, we have a super easy escape from it, right? We're not forced to be like, okay, what am I doing with my time? Is there something better I could be doing? We just pull out our phone and you see this, right? Anytime people have one moment of solitude or inactivity, it's like, oh, might as well just check my phone. It's brutal when you see people on dates. They're not even talking to each other. They just looking at each other's phones. Yeah. Wow. People at dinner. Yeah. It's like you're in front of an actual person. Yeah. And you prefer to communicate in digital with someone who's not even there. Totally. What's interesting about boredom is when oftentimes when boredom would kick on, we would go inward, sort of mind wander. And mind wandering, it gives you your brain some time to like reset and revive. Whereas anytime you're focused on the outside world, your brain is actively processing information. So this is kind of like in the book, I compare it to lifting away when you're having a conversation, looking at your phone, watching a screen, whatever you're doing. If you're focusing on the outside world, your brain is working and it's lifting. When you go inward, your brain goes into this default mode network, which is like a rest period. So now, because every time we're bored, we just pull out that screen and focus more, our brains are just constantly being worked and overworked and overworked. This is associated with just burnout, anxiety, et cetera. Yeah. There's some real benefits to boredom in terms of creativity as well. Oh, totally. Boredom is really good for coming up with new ideas. Yeah, and there's actually research behind this. They've done studies where they'll have people watch something really boring, like a video of people folding laundry, just like they bore the shit out of these participants. And then they have them come up with, take these different creativity tests that scientists use, and the people who were bored come up with more better solutions and responses than the people who had been stimulated the whole time. And you think about this, I mean, just in terms of anecdotes from creators, it's like you need time to just sit and be with yourself and have these weird ideas bubble to the surface. If you never have that, you're not letting the weird stuff come out. Do you experience this when you're trying to think of stuff in your own work? Yeah, you have to have discomfort. The worst thing that could ever happen to me if I'm writing is to just open the browser. Let me just Google this real quick and see. It's like I'll play little games with myself. Like I'll be in the middle of writing. I'm like, what does that mean, really? And then I'll Google it and like, shut the fuck up and get back to work. Because I'm just being distracted. I'm just distracting myself. And sometimes I'll allow myself a couple of minutes of distraction before I get mad. But really, I shouldn't allow myself any. I should just keep working. And sometimes people say, I can't write. I just stare at the screen and nothing comes out. I'm like, yeah, that's what's supposed to happen. That's how it works, man. You're supposed to fucking stare at the screen. And then you just write some nonsense and eventually something good will come out of that. But if you just bail because you don't like the staring at the screen part and nothing's coming out, guess what? You're never going to write anything. Congratulations. So then you'll be at the whim of whatever random spontaneous creativity just pops into your head throughout the day. And sometimes you'll get some and sometimes you won't. But Pressfield talks about that in the War of Art. Have you read that book? I haven't read that book. It's really a very small book, but it's really good. It's great for writers. And he basically says he talks about the muse as if the muse is a real thing. And he's like, treat it like it's a real thing. Treat it like you're a professional and you're there to summon the muse. And if you just show up every day and do that work, it will come. It will come to you and it will bestow upon you these creative ideas. But if you don't do that, if you don't sit down and be uncomfortable rather, it won't happen. And in this day and age, like you said, we're so accustomed to having any boredom alleviated by our phone. Yeah. So in the book too, I talk about you hear all this stuff that's like break up with your phone, less time on your phone. Here are a thousand different ways to use your phone less. Yes, that is important. But the problem is, is a lot of times when people go, okay, I'm going to use my phone less. So they put their phone in, you know, safe or whatever weird habit they've developed. But then they go watch Netflix. It's like your brain doesn't know the damn difference between the screen on your phone and the screen on your TV. The point is that you need to remove yourself from this outside media that's totally just weaved its way into your life. Like. Stimulating you with nothing. Yeah. Yeah. And then when you're going from phone to Netflix, it's like going, I'm quitting smoking, but I'm going to go buy some Redman and just pack that in real hard. You know? Yeah. Same thing. We're all aware that there's this immense gravity that comes from the digital world. It's immense. It's just constantly pulling you in with new content and new distractions. And this is one of them, this fucking thing that you and I are on. That's it's ironic. This is one of the... I know. We're talking shit about what we actually are doing right now. But they pull you. They pull you. And we all know that it's probably not the best way to live, but it's so hard to break the addiction. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing, right? It's amazing that I can pull up the podcast and listen to almost whoever I want, their thoughts and get these new ideas. But at the same time, it's like, if that's all you're spending your time doing, there's some downsides. We need to offset it. I don't necessarily think the answer is to go live in the woods in Alaska for the rest of your life. Although that'd be pretty cool if you did. More power to you. But figuring out how do we balance this all and have these moments where we have solitude, go more inward and aren't as stimulated. So one thing that after I'm standing out there in solitude, when I get home, I start researching what are the benefits of solitude? Because we know that the data shows that being lonely isn't good for us, but there's the difference between loneliness and solitude. Solitude is electing to be by yourself and using that time for introspection. And the scientists that I talked to, they said, yeah, you really need this because a lot of times people are more conductor circuits and they don't do well when they're alone at all. This is part of the reason we have such a loneliness problem. If you can build this capacity, be alone, they call it, that can serve you well in the long time. And it also breeds deeper thinking and creativity. There's a reason that thousands of years of religious tradition, they have people who go and spend this time alone out of nature. Jesus was in the desert for 40 days. The Buddha exited the palace gates and spent a bunch of time alone and in solitude. Can Abraham Lincoln use solitude and for all his, a lot of his writing and stuff like that?