Digital Detox: Week 4

Reclaim Leisure

Step three of four in Cal Newport’s guidance from Digital Minimalism [1] is to “Reclaim Leisure.” The major lesson in this chapter is in differentiating between high-quality, enriching leisure activities and mindless consumption of social media. It’s tempting to do nothing after a stressful day, and I had them in spades this week. All I really wanted to do in the evenings (especially Friday) was shut down my brain and watch YouTube. There was some time spent watching TV and movies with Christian throughout the week, but I was also reminded by Cal that “doing nothing is overrated.” Decompression absolutely has its place – and on some days is absolutely necessary – but the key is to keep decompression time from devolving into low-quality, mindless down-time. I am here to say that that is a tall order for sure, especially when you’re exhausted.

Too much of a good thing?

The foundation of Newport’s “reclaim leisure” philosophy is that a well-lived life includes activities that have no purpose other than the satisfaction of doing them. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I have been trying to find more ways to incorporate playtime and/or active downtime into my life, but that that has been easier said than done. [2] Part of my difficulty with taking on leisure activities is that I rapidly get to the point where they no longer feel like leisure. Pre-pandemic, I had engagements almost every night of the week, including choir, group workouts, book club, and so on – to the point that I wasn’t deriving satisfaction from the things I loved.

Though it may seem counterintuitive, the last thing we need after a stressful week is passive time scrolling through social media. Being active with things we like to do is far more fulfilling, rewarding, and healing.
Image credit: [3]

But according to Newport, high-quality leisure should consist of 1) prioritizing demanding activity over passive consumption, 2) using skills to produce valuable things in the physical world, and 3) seeking activities that require real-world, structured, social interactions. And by all accounts, I was already doing those things in many of my “hobbies,” so I wondered where the disconnect was. I think that part of the problem was that I had too much scheduled, that I didn’t have any decompression time built in, and that I was still often focused on the outcome of an activity (and potential for external judgment), rather than just enjoying the process for its own sake.

In this chapter, Newport describes how when people attempt a digital declutter and don’t already have high-quality leisure activities in place to fill in the gaps where low-quality, mindless social media consumption took up the time, they are likely to experience anxiety, isolation, and a feeling akin to withdrawal from a drug. He’s not wrong, as social media sites and applications are designed with our brain chemistry in mind, making sure we get hits of dopamine with every like, comment, or retweet. Ironically, I feel like I was already overloaded on analog hobbies, but probably not in a healthy way, which made me feel exhausted and unsatisfied – and therefore I still looked to social media for connection and relaxation.

The Journey is All

After reading Catherine Price’s The Power of Fun, [4] and hearing her describe the benefits of using something like a Panda Planner [5] (which she didn’t mention by name), I pulled mine off the bookshelf, dusty from several years of neglect, and started using it again. I wrote in my New Year’s Day blog post this year that my completely unrealistic expectations of productivity at work and in my hobbies were likely what led me to abandon this planner back in 2017.[6] Therefore, this time around I’ve been focusing more on how I want to spend my time, rather than what I want to accomplish with it – for example, carving out quality time with Christian, playtime with Siegfried (and Pumpkin, if she’ll allow it), or quiet time with myself. Also, since I’ve been so bad at identifying “fun” activities that I want to do more often (Price says that’s OK – many people are out of practice and can’t make a list), I’ve been spending time every night listing instances of playfulness, connection, and flow (the three components of Price’s definition of fun) that I experienced that day.

Examples from March (some of which fall into multiple categories)…

Playfulness: Figuring out the “door riddle” from Labyrinth,[7] playing with Siegfried and his favorite ribbon toy, baking anatomically appropriate cookies for Christian as he recovered from an outpatient medical procedure
Connection: Making breakfast with Christian, getting dinner and drinks with friends, calling my parents and having some friendly banter with my dad
Flow: Researching a new topic on my blog and making connections between seemingly disparate topics, making a more challenging recipe than I’m used to for dinner, losing all sense of time while weeding the garden

Nobel-prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was notorious for his bongo-playing and his practical jokes. It’s clear that he understood the importance of playfulness, personal growth, and following your passions, with outcomes and external judgment taking a back seat.
Image credit: [8]

Newport makes a point that leisure activities should be as analog as possible. There are examples of creativity and creation in the virtual world, such as coding or blogging, but our brains learn and grow through physical touch and action, so as creative and rewarding as virtual activities are, they are still fundamentally different than physical activities. And I get that – this blog is mentally challenging: it involves research, writing, and a good deal of introspection – and I love those things about it. But while I can point to this site as a whole – the output of four years of my time and attention – it still isn’t something physical that I can touch. (I have actually considered getting a bound copy of my “I <3 Fukushima” series, [9] as it is a subject very close to my heart, a segment of this blog of which I am very proud, and about the length of a master’s thesis.)

And as you will see from Newport’s suggested practices below, leisure activities can have practical results. In a previous post I was getting hung up on the idea that I should find hobbies that don’t have measurable outputs, but I was hitting dead ends because they all do: time with friends strengthens friendships, time spent running is good for my health, and time spent planting my pollinator garden is good for the bees, birds, butterflies, and other creatures in our neighborhood.[10] I am coming to realize that it’s OK if there are practical results from your leisure activities – the point is that the primary purpose is your (selfish) enjoyment, not others’ benefits. (If you cringed at my use of the term “selfish,” I encourage you to check out my post on objectivist values from this time last year.[11])

Suggested Practices

Remembering that we’re talking about leisure here, and the point is spending time in an enjoyable way, I want to stress that I am very much still growing in this area. I cannot currently define what I consider “fun,” and I have difficulty doing pretty much anything without the risk of casting a value judgment upon myself, based on its outcome. All that said, admitting you have a problem is the first step, and I’m going to keep that in mind as I work through the suggested practices in this chapter…

I have explained to Christian that gardening is a process that never ends, and I’m sure he thinks I’m crazy. If a finished garden were the goal, our yard would be incredibly frustrating, if not demoralizing. Instead, I look forward to the time every week when I’ll have the sun on my back and my hands in the dirt.

1. Fix or build something every week

While reading this chapter, I remembered the exact moment my paradigm shifted to deprioritizing leisure activities with practical value: it was during my MBA boot camp class the summer before I started grad school, and I was reading about opportunity cost.[12] Although I enjoyed sewing, I learned that my time could be spent more efficiently and effectively if I paid a tailor to do my alterations and mending, while I performed actions (and earned money) related to my own specializations. It made me sad, but it made logical sense – after all, that tailor needed my business too. And thus, the min-maxing [13] of my life began. But I wouldn’t be much good to the business world if I’m stressed, burned out, and stagnating, so clearly 100% efficiency is not the answer, either.

We know that challenging our intellect by learning new things can be a great way to have fun, de-stress, and even become better problem solvers. Learning a new physical skill in this way should be something that’s enjoyable for you, not essential (otherwise, it’s not leisure). Newport suggests you start with simple tasks, such as learning how to change your own oil, to cook a new dish, to perform a new technique on an instrument you already play, or to plan a garden plot. As Catherine Price describes, we can achieve flow (losing sense of the passage of time) by executing something that is slightly more challenging than we’re used to – and that is also a component of fun. To keep stretching yourself, keep increasing the difficulty level as you go (within reason) with related challenges over a period of six weeks (or so) and reflect on how you feel and what you’ve accomplished at the end of it.

2. Schedule your low-quality leisure

As important as it is to make sure we’re scheduling time for high-quality leisure to make sure it happens, we should be scheduling time for our low-quality leisure to contain it and keep it from becoming a mindless reflex when we feel the first hint of boredom. Work out specific time periods during which you can be active on social media in any way you want and stay off altogether at other times. Complete abstention is hard (you don’t say…), but corralling your use into specific time periods helps make the restriction less objectionable for your brain. Don’t even worry about how long or often the time periods are, as the trick is to get used to drawing a line and respecting it. You can minimize your use over time – some people who have limited their usage have found that 20-40 minutes of use per week can be satisfying.

3. Join something

When I first started college, there were already many clubs to join, but we were told right off the bat “if you don’t see a club you like, start one.” Getting involved socially, whether in a sports league, a gaming club, or a book discussion group, is incredibly beneficial for us because humans are inherently social creatures. Neural imaging experiments have shown that our brains default to a focus on interpersonal interaction whenever we’re not actively engaged in another task. Participating in a group activity – especially when there are rules, insider lingo, rituals, or some kind of shared goal – builds bonds of community, helps us process emotions, and even lets us push the limits of what we can do in polite society (think heckling during a poker game or portraying an unruly character in a Dungeons & Dragons game).[1 4]

4. Follow leisure plans

I mentioned my Panda Planner earlier in this post, and it is a great example of structuring long-term goals and breaking them up into smaller, achievable bites. Of course you don’t have to use that specific brand of planner – or any planner – but Cal Newport has blog posts on weekly and daily planning on his website that can provide more detail if you’re interested in trying out this approach.[15] The idea is to create a seasonal leisure plan for yourself – because it is easier to make time for an activity when you’re working toward a goal, and it’s much more satisfying when you have an accomplishment you can point to at the end of it. (Take it from someone who has run six marathons – it’s true.) While it may seem strange or even counterintuitive to schedule leisure time, you may find that simply making some small amount of time for leisure leads to a positive reinforcement loop in which you’re eventually making more time for leisure activities.

I can’t imagine a more perfect high-quality leisure activity than running. It represents mental down-time, bonding with friends, physical improvement, and working toward a goal. Here, my friend Stacey and I are on the pre-dawn shuttle to the start line of the Zion Half Marathon… my last race… in February 2020.

In the past few weeks, I have noticed plenty of opportunities where technology makes things easier, usually from the standpoint of supporting leisure activities, such as learning a cooking technique on YouTube or coordinating schedules for getting together with friends. It’s important to remember that technology is not necessarily a bad thing – it’s a matter of using it as a tool, rather than being used by it, which is why passive interaction with screens should not be our primary source of leisure. According to Newport, “successful execution often depends on the strategic use of new technologies,” and determining the boundaries of that fuzzy line will likely be one of my biggest challenges after Lent.

If you’re playing along at home, how’s it going for you? What have you found challenging or surprising?
Thanks for reading!

Keep Reading –>

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimalism

[2] https://radicalmoderate.online/sharpening-the-saw-part-3/

[3] https://saamvisual.com/process/2020/7/21/calnewport-digitalminimalism

[4] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/57569793

[5] https://pandaplanner.com/

[6] https://radicalmoderate.online/to-what-end/

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dgmgub8mHw

[8] https://www.facebook.com/ETHMemes/posts/physics-is-like-sex/650038988355742/

[9] https://radicalmoderate.online/i-heart-fukushima-part-1/

[10] https://radicalmoderate.online/sharpening-the-saw-part-1/