Optimize for what you care about

Because, at the risk of sounding a little fruity, I believe that a life in which we habitually abandon the known Good Things in order to helplessly stab at “”managing”” a nebulous morass of chaoses that we can never control is not much of a life at all. – On Chasing the Right ”Zero”

There are always more than enough things to do in your day that you need to decide what you’re going to optimize for. I try to optimize for riding my bike, reading books, and spending time with my family, which means I have a dormant lawn due to lack of water. This lawn bothers my father-in-law who loves a golf green smooth lawn.

I had to have this discussion recently as he started to spend hours on my front lawn to make it grow better and faster so it would be green. I told him I wasn’t trying to do more cutting of the lawn with my time. In fact, I’d rather do less lawn cutting.

While I don’t want my house to look like a trash heap, I’m not interesting in spending more time on caring for parts of it that really don’t matter.

Smartwatches mostly do suck

I’ve sort of got to go with Kev on the dislike of smartwatches. I say sort of because my daily wear watch is a Garmin Enduro and technically it has some smart features like notifications that I keep always turned off. I mostly don’t get the Apple Watch or other watches like it, specifically how they marketed it along with ultrarunner Scott Jurek.

The Apple Watch would never last for a full event for 90% of ultrarunners. The Apple Watch battery life is measured in a day at most while my Enduro has 70% battery and can run at full GPS precision for almost 50 hours. Everytime I see someone laud the latest update with better battery I look at my few year old watch that has more battery life in it after not charging it for a week.

Then we get to Kev’s arguments about smartwatches.

You’re mid-conversation with someone, and they suddenly stop to check their wrist phone because it buzzed. So fucking rude.

When I’ve had friends over for dinner and hanging out if this is the way it goes I just don’t invite them over again. Notifications for something that might be important constantly taking away from the real experience of spending time with someone in front of you is a terrible way to build any type of relationship.

In some ways I see this constant interruption as an insult, people simply checking if something more interesting is happening somewhere else because hanging out isn’t immediately stimulating enough.

The Hyperactive Hive Mind

Both of the above articles are really symptoms of dealing with what Cal Newport calls the hyperactive hive mind¹. It’s super easy in the moment to let your long term goals, and face-to-face relationships, take a back seat to the constant incoming pings. This current cultural anomaly can go the way of smoking, which was once something “everyone” did, and if you didn’t smoke you still had to put up with second hand smoke in most of the places you existed. Until we didn’t have to deal with it anymore.

The constant tearing away of our attention could go the same way if we finally recognize how much it harms our experience of life. From thinking to relationships, we pay for the convenience of always being in touch by loosing touch with those closest to us and with our interior life of the mind.

Optimizing life for relationships and being comfortable with our thoughts would yield a much different world than we live in today.

1. A World Without Email Pg XVII ↩︎