With the summer holiday in recent memory and a long weekend approaching it’s an opportune time of the year to make the point: it’s hard to ignore a problem you know about.
If you’re wondering what that might have to do with holidays, it’s a friendly reminder that you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to. Our ever-connected world makes asking these questions all too easy.
So, if you don’t want the next hour, morning or entire long weekend tarnished, if not taken over by an unwelcome email, there is but one solution: don’t check your email.
Not even just for 5 minutes in the morning, during a lull in proceedings, or even —rookie mistake — looking for something else.
To be clear: you can be a long way from the dedicated office hours and Zoom-ready garb you might mistakenly believe is the ‘real’ problem. No, you could be in full holiday vibe, lei’d up and mid-margarita at the pool bar, the problem is that you looked.
And now you know. And you can’t unring the bell.
There are exceptions, obviously, and if you’re on call you’re on call. Most of us are not but will behave like we are nevertheless and so our peace of mind becomes a roll of the dice, a lottery.
Is the day yours, or not? Is this a family moment, a long overdue catchup or some welcome couple-time?
What are you asking me for? Check your inbox. And open the door to the possibility that it’s none of those things, at least not unsullied. All because you couldn’t help yourself.
You had to look.
Some of you will claim that things aren’t so black and white: those who may not be on call but still imagine the world can’t do without you for a few hours or days, and it sure as hell won’t matter what I say.
For you, the only proof is in the pudding. The one way to learn the world won’t burn down in your absence is to give it the opportunity. And likely more than once.
You need no such proof to know that your work, or whatever other commitments— will take every second you are willing to give them. Answering emails, phone calls, even your social media use are all hours of your day in somebody else’s diary.
Only you can decide if you’re going to keep giving them. You can need time, not have time and wait until you have time, or you can take it. And protect it.
Sure, there might be an emergency. But you know most— if not all— ‘emergencies’ either could have waited or more likely have solved themselves by the time you got to them in an otherwise timely manner.
Which means you’ve wholly manufactured a problem because you looked.
Which is interesting and, in a sick sort of way, funny. Because if you’re not fit, there is a collection of problems becoming very real only because you won’t.
Look, that is. More interesting still is that the reason you did look when you didn’t need to, and the reason you didn’t look when you did, are one and the same:
Your phone.
A tool that uses you. And via the twin evils of distraction and distance makes you available to everyone else, and a stranger to yourself.
No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.
SENECA
Your phone, its associated social media, and endless entertainment now keep you in a near-permanent state of detachment from your physical state. A badge, a ding, or a ring keeping your mind forever on the hook. Each offers a variable squirt of the feel-goods that keep you forever ducking back inside your cell to check if something requires your attention.
Something does, of course. And always will. Every year the brightest minds are harvested from the best universities and colleges across the globe and tasked with one mission: to take and hold your attention. It’s fair to say they are only getting better at it.
Meanwhile, how are you doing? Has your screen time decreased since 2010?Unlikely. So your most valuable resource— time—falls victim to your second most valuable —your attention.
This short-term reward—for long-term discomfort— used to capture you is, of course, the opposite of what is required for any worthwhile pursuit, and so this distraction leads to us living our lives upside down: superficial in the most critical and rewarding domains like fitness, learning, or creativity, and going deep only on the superficial— the cat memes or the aptly named doomscroll.
Our feet in crystal clear waters, our heads in the silt.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, your body does not mirror this hijack of the mind, and it is forever giving you a literal heads-up—and out of your phone— that this is not a very good idea.
And certainly not in so far as it comes at the expense of your being fit.
[A quick reminder that when I use the word ‘fit’ I mean both: the condition of being physically fit and healthy. And the quality of being suitable to fulfil a particular role or task—that task, for the general fitness population, being life.]
So we can dispense with the inanity anybody might want to be ‘unsuitable’ and move straight to the fact that if you are not fit, then distraction does come at the expense of your being so. Not only because by merely halving your daily screen time you could likely prepare for the Olympics much less achieve a basic level of fitness, but the more uncomfortable notion that: were it not for distraction you would be fit already.
A quiet nudge to stretch your legs. Tight shoulders. The faint ache that comes from sitting too long. In the absence of distraction, you would, sooner or later, heed the signals. They are subtle to begin with, but, they’ll only get louder. Occasional discomfort becomes chronic stiffness, the light fatigue turns into exhaustion and burnout, and the slow creep of inactivity reveals itself in mirror and scale.
Until, eventually, you are forced to listen. Mohammed always comes to the mountain and fitness will take its rightful place on your to-do list, the only question is: what condition do you want to be in when it does? And what do you want to get back from it? The medical crisis-as-catalyst path to exercise is as unfortunate as it is predictable.
And unnecessary. Only because it’s a problem too easily pushed to someday. The tut-tutting of your GP will bring it front and centre of your mind at your annual checkup, at least until you’ve left the room. You’ll be back in phone land before you’ve left the building and it won’t hit the radar again —hopefully— until next year’s physical when a very long list of associated problems will be 12 months more severe.
The time and effort to address them correspondingly increased. And the benefits on offer, are reduced.
The solution is to go back to where we started: make being unfit a problem you can’t ignore. A problem you know. Always. Such that you shift from ignoring fitness to feeling compelled to address it.
Here you could use your phone to help the situation by putting in weekly reminders, or a home screen with a suitably moving image— like your ECG— but the more salient point is simply to notice how hard real life is without it: the constant strain, drain and effort of being unfit that could be better channelled into doing something about it, once and for all.
Once. And forever.
Only then does the problem begin anew. The cruellest of ironies is that when you reach this tipping point you run headlong into precisely the same problem.
And that’s what we’ll look at next time: keeping it real.
P.S. No, we won’t. It’ll be the week after next. Next week is the double DEC/JAN edition of the BESTOFS, and it is stacked. If so inclined, you’ll have about 30 hours of reading, I reckon, so consider this fair warning to clear your schedule, make a cup of tea and put your feet up.
And, in this specific instance: check your inbox.
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Enjoy your weekend.
- OLI