400 Days of Surrender — Day 30: News and noise

400 Days of Surrender — Day 30: News and noise

New to this series? You can find Day 1 and why I’m writing this here.

Last week, I went offline for four days and this week, I’m immersed in a full-time course plus have client calls in the evening and writing these posts leaving me with little free time.

Therefore, I have not been checking the news occasionally as I would normally do. The result is that I’m not missing anything and that additional noise of daily happenings has been cut out of my information diet and I feel more focused, less distracted, happier and calmer.

It reminds me of when I was partaking in a silent meditation retreat in 2018. At Vipassana you don’t speak, read and also try not to think for 10 days. You are together with a 100 other humans but you try to stay within yourself even avoiding eye contact. Plus you end up meditating for up to 10 hours a day starting at 4.30AM.

It’s a tough experience but as I got to the end of it, I was in complete serenity and bliss not even wanting my phone back nor talk to anybody. It taught me two things: We are addicted to stimuli like news or notifications and we think we could not live without them. That is, until they are removed from us, and you realise that you really don’t need them and that life is in many ways better without them.

News, notifications, social media etc. they are all drugs.

Legal ones but they are just as addictive as illegal ones. And because everyone is an addict of them we think that is normal. But life with less digital noise is better, is more humane.

The other thing Vipassana taught me, though we might think we are missing out (FOMO), 10 days later, not much has changed in the world and it felt that the tens of hours I usually would have spent on the phone or computer were just a waste. We underestimate how much we can go offline without really missing much and at the same time gaining so much by spending the time, energy and attention in more positive ways.

Needless to say, I am not succeeding in daily life to keep my phone off but I do try to not jump on it with every notification and instead look at it when I choose to: I have no visual or auditory notifications, my phone only lights up when I unlock it and I don’t have any banners popping up with new messages. Only if I enter an app, I see what’s there. I still pick up my phone a lot more than I’d like to but less than I would otherwise.

You can go even further, make the screen black and white and thereby not have the red badges showing how many new messages. Red is an alert colour and draws specific attention of the brain (think drug again). Another way is to remove the badges altogether, move apps away from the home screen or delete them from your phone.

Back to news: News are a business and they want your attention because that’s how they make money but there is no reason you need to check them every minute/hour/day/week or whatever your frequency is. Instead, focus on what you are working on, what you want to move forward and the return on that will be much bigger than checking news which is a huge distraction — and yes, we suck at multitasking.

When you get off whatever you are doing, to get back into it can take up to 20 mins. So a short glimpse at WhatsApp can be very costly. We now live in the attention economy. Everyone is fighting for our eye balls as The Social Dilemma illustrates well. It’s up to us to recognise and fight it.

It seems all so great to have all this info at our fingertips but we are paying a huge price not just in terms of being influenced and marketed to but in terms of time and energy. Think about how you could spend those 6–10 hours you spend on the phone otherwise. Maybe read a book and actually learn something because reading news is like a soap opera, often little to learn and tomorrow there’s another episode. News really are just entertainment wrapped up as “series.”

I recently read that 33% of high school grads never read another book and that 80% of US families did not buy or read a book last year. Maybe that’s part of the problem we are facing in the world today.

A good book has probably the best ROI (return on invetsment) in terms of money and time that exists because someone spent sometimes a lifetime understanding a subject and then invests a year to write about it and you can get all that wisdom for $10 and 10 hours of your time — instead of watching the news, Netflix or social media. ✨

Continue to Day 32: Life can be so much more.

This is a repost of my Instagram series of 400 Days of Surrender that I started in September 2020. If you want to skip ahead, you can find all posts here. If you wonder who I am, check out my website. Always excited to hear from you. ❤️