Protecting our sanity in an insane world
Summary
Tech proliferates into our lives with the promise of improving communication and giving us access to information. But it’s also left us more disconnected and busier than ever. In this post, I reflect on my years growing up and whether a subtractive approach to using tech, may lead to a more enriching outcomes in life and at work.
When I was a kid, growing up in India, our family didn’t have a phone at home. People of my vintage will remember that getting a phone connection in those days was a matter of great pride. It also took a lot of time to get your government-provided phone line. I lived in a family, where my mother was often on the move, with her army job. When we didn’t have a phone, we’d rely on old-school affordances. She’d tell me when she’d be back and I’d patiently wait for the day and time. Or if we had to call her, we’d use a pay phone to reach an army switchboard operator who would connect us to a common phone at her hospital or officers’ mess, where she’d be waiting at a pre-agreed time.
Friendships and social connections were similar. We’d tell each other where and when we’d meet them. In India, this made for quirky but precise landmarks. The banyan tree at the edge of a pond. Or a specific metro exit, in my home city of Kolkata. Yes, there was some anxiety when you got to a place in time, and your friend hadn’t made it yet. And there was also the occasional disappointment of being stood up, but for the rest of the time, we could chill.
It was a slow life. We didn’t get anxious not hearing from each other every day, each minute. I remember the smoky hall of India Coffee House on College Street in Kolkata, where my friends and I had many unsettled debates - because there was no Google to rest the argument. We didn’t have the power of the internet in the palm of our hands. But to the uninitiated, it didn’t feel like we were missing anything.
Always connected, always anxious
Fast forward to today, and we’re always connected. We have access to the latest news, the minute-by-minute stock and commodity prices, the latest exchange rates and status updates from our social circle. My mom; the same person who’d speak to me once a week or a fortnight from our border with Pakistan; now gets anxious if she doesn’t speak to me every day. With all the tech at our disposal, it’s harder than ever to coordinate a lunch with friends. We need a Google Maps location, a calendar invite, a few dozen back-and-forths on IM and the customary phone calls to say that we’ve left or arrived. Discussions rarely reach their logical conclusion without stretching for our phones. Wikipedia to the rescue, eh?
Don’t get me wrong. I love all the tech surrounding us. Heck, I work in the tech industry, don’t I? But I’m also a product of a bygone era. Unlike, western millennials, Indian millennials like me didn’t grow up around computers. We couldn’t take all telecom for granted. So pardon me, when I romanticise those primitive times. Given my backstory, I can’t help but feel that we lost something as we brought more tech into our lives.
But… aren’t we a bit off-topic?
Why am I telling you all this? This is a site about modern ways of working, isn't it? What’s the problem with our modernity then? Well, a few things.
We live in a crazy world and it’s been, if anything, crazier in the last few years. Covid, the crypto boom and bust, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza, the semiconductor crisis, generative AI, politics in your country and the world… you don’t need me to enumerate all the categories of “crazy” in this post. Keeping up with the daily happenings of each of these developments doesn’t educate us. If anything it numbs us, as Johnny Harris explains when he says that the world’s stopped caring about Ukraine.
Our anxiety levels (not a clinical diagnosis) have risen with all the technology we have at our disposal. If we don’t receive an instant response to an instant message, we stew over it. That uncomplimentary comment on your Twitter or LinkedIn post enrages you. Don’t hear from your children, spouses, partners or parents for more than a day, and you fear the worst.
As Leo Babuata noted in his book, Focus, we have no time to create or connect with real people when we’re always connected, always interrupted, always distracted and always bombarded with information and requests. Our time is the biggest dividend our work lives afford us. It’s also the biggest gift we can afford to our friends and colleagues. And yet, time is our scarcest resource, thanks to our always-on modernity. We have no time for deep work and no time to make meaningful connections.
What doesn’t add up, deserves subtraction
And so, there’s a case to pause and take stock of the information and tech landscape of our lives. I’ll be honest. I don’t have a prescription for you. But I can tell you what I’m doing. Who knows - some of my coping mechanisms may work for you too.
I find daily news stressful and mind-numbing. There’s too much outrage about every inflection of events and little insight in return. Indeed, this is a bit like how a stock market operates. In the long run, the index of most healthy economies heads upwards, but if you zoom in on a specific stock on a specific day, it may make a seemingly large jump or see a big dip. These zoomed-in views don’t educate us. They only make us more anxious. I’ve given up on the zoomed-in view, in favour of the longer-term, zoomed-out view. So I look for filtering mechanisms - weekly newsletters, podcasts and books. They help me keep up with the trajectory of current affairs without the minutiae of daily or hourly occurrences.
I’ve given up on FOMO at work. I needn’t be on every chat group, every mailing list and every meeting that makes me feel important. Not “in the loop”? That’s ok with me! I don’t care if I miss out on the latest stuff. I’ve found that if it’s important, someone will tell me anyway. And if it’s related to my job, then the information will find me.
I’m employing personal forcing functions that help me disconnect from counterproductive tech influences. For example, all my app notifications are always off. On every device. I’ll check in when I like, thank you very much. I don’t want an app jumping up and down for my attention. Similarly, I use Freedom to cut out distractions. It allows me to look at email, chat and LinkedIn for only specific hours each day. During the weekend, it cuts me out for most of the time. These rules are automatic. I set them up once and they repeat each day. Removing these interruptions has helped me focus and feel less anxious about work or life.
I practise “festina lente”, or what Cal Newport calls “slow productivity”. It’s meant making peace with the realisation that I’d rather do a few things to the best of my ability than be half-assed at an enormous bunch of things. I don’t know how long my job will allow me to keep this up, but my approach to multi-scale productivity has, until this point, helped me achieve my most important work goals.
There’s a growing realisation that we’re in a loneliness epidemic of sorts. As a man, I experience a friendship recession even more. The percentage of men with six or more friends has halved in the last 30-odd years. That’s saying something, isn’t it? I realise that building meaningful relationships takes conscious effort. So, from all the time that I free up through the strategies I’ve outlined above, I’m trying to devote some time to cultivating stronger relationships. At work, this means being generous with my gifts of one-on-one time to my colleagues. Outside work, it means device-free lunches and dinners with family. It means trying to be the easiest person to catch up with when friends want to meet up. Tell me, and I’ll be there. This winter, it meant I could play with my relative’s child and dogs, without the stress of the next notification, or the feeling of “lost productivity” during those play hours. It means having the space to reflect and thank and acknowledge the people who somehow enrich your life.
So, the focus of this site is still modern, location and time-independent work. But work occupies a third of our lives if not more. Without designing a calmer life, I wonder if we can be more productive at work. Design, as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said back in the day, is more about subtraction, than addition. That sentiment of subtraction may help you appreciate why subtracting some tech influences from our life, can enrich our experiences at work as well. I’ll leave to chew on that thought.