Raptitude.com

I remember a surreal moment about twenty years ago, which felt like the beginning of something bad, and it was.

I was at a bowling alley with some friends, and a few people in our group were talking about Facebook. I knew what it was but had no interest in it. Then one of them turned to me and said, “There’s lots of pictures of you on Facebook!”

This kind of stunned me and I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t joined this website but somehow I was one of its features.

A year later all of us were using it. It was exciting at first, because it seemed to give us more access to the people in our lives. We could post photos, make plans, and stay connected to a wider circle of people.

I should note for younger readers that the term “people” at that time only referred to real, physical beings: persons with bodies that walked and drove around and did things. Having friends largely meant physically traveling to the same apartment, bowling alley, restaurant, or movie theater, positioning our bodies amongst each other in this physical space, and interacting using our faces and voices and hearts. The part of your life that consisted of this type of physical activity was called social life.

Social media was meant to facilitate this thing called social life. Facebook’s original purpose was to keep you in touch with people who would otherwise fall out of your social circle, namely people you went to school with.

The human being is an enjoyment-seeking creature. There’s a reason people are always trying to restrain themselves from excessive eating, drinking, scrolling, and shopping. It’s perfectly normal to pursue these and other pleasures even to the point of serious problems and early death.

Even though we are born enjoyment-mongers, we tend to overlook the greatest and most reliable source of enjoyment, which is our ability to consciously enjoy the stuff that happens anyway. We barely even talk about it.

For example, you probably sit down in a chair or on a couch ten or fifteen times a day. You can easily enjoy each of these instances of sitting down, if you make a point of it. It can feel great to relax into any decent chair. But how many times do you sit down without relishing it even a bit?

The pleasure of relaxing into a chair isn’t as intense as the pleasure of chocolate-coated hazelnuts or rapid-fire video memes. But it’s still more than worthwhile, and it’s free. You don’t have to go out of your way to access this source of pleasure, and it doesn’t gradually kill you or make you depressed. (I suspect it does the opposite.)

There should be a German compound word for the emotion you feel when you encounter a famous thing and realize you’d never actually seen it until that moment. (Ikonerwachen?)

I had seen a thousand images of the Sydney Opera House before my gaze landed on it unexpectedly as I was crossing the harbour bridge in 2010. I knew its iconic look from movies, travel websites, clipart collections, and Where in the World is Carmen San Diego — but only at that moment did I realize I’d never seen it before.

This happened again with the planet Saturn. From Mauna Kea in Hawaii, I saw the ringed planet in perfect focus through a large reflecting telescope, and it was spectacular. Voyager 1 photographs and textbook diagrams did not prepare my heart to see a real, physical object, hanging there before my eyes in empty space.

My cat refuses all medicine because she doesn’t understand the benefits. Nothing can make her see that having bitter liquid squirted into her mouth will prevent her from getting intestinal worms.

So I have to force the matter by wrapping her in a towel like a burrito, so that she can’t fight back. I’m sure she sees it as pointless cruelty.

Because of her erroneous views and suspicious nature, I have to trick her to make this happen. To get a cat who rejects modern medicine into a towel-burrito, experts say to lay the towel flat on the floor for a day or two, occasionally leaving a treat in the middle. The cat will soon start loitering around the towel, eventually laying on it, waiting for it to produce its magic bounty. Then you spring the trap.

A longtime reader emails me every five years or so, to say that he still thinks of me every morning when he makes his bed. Back in 2009 I wrote a post about the psychological benefit of immediately making your bed when you wake up. (It’s an easy little mission that gets you shaping your day right away – a foolproof first move to carpe your diem.)

There’s a different reader I think of on a daily basis, one who invited me to visit him at his home in Norway. While I was there, he gave me an AeroPress coffeemaker and showed me his brewing method. After spilling hot coffee grounds all over his kitchen on my first attempt, I got the hang of it. I still think of him for a moment every single morning, when I stir the grounds with the bamboo stick he gave me.

When I’m at the car wash, I always think of my dad, because he once said, “Nothing gets clean without the foamy brush.” I always use the foamy brush and my car always comes out looking great. It’s a bit of my dad’s insight living on in me, among many other bits.

On the wall of my office I put up a Tolstoy quote in 32-point text:

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’

I find it much more instructive than the standard “big things happen gradually” clichés: Rome wasn’t built in a day, a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step, how do you eat an elephant (one bite at a time), and the rest.

Tolstoy’s twenty-five miles is like the serious version of those throwaway adages. It’s for the person who genuinely wants (or needs) to cover a thousand miles, rather than just have another way to say “Oh well” after a disappointment. When someone says, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” it implies that Rome will get built eventually by the way you’re going about things now, but there’s no reason to believe it works like that. Romes don’t get built very often.

Covering twenty-five miles is a serious day’s effort, even though it’s only a tiny fraction of a thousand. It takes a real push, but it is doable, and days like that will add up to vast distances quickly. Note that Tolstoy was talking about hardened French soldiers crossing the Russian steppes; we can scale that twenty-five-mile march down to “A real effort you could achieve daily, but which you’ll only bother with if you’re serious about getting somewhere.”

When I want a thrill, I walk to the corner store without my phone. Leaving the house like that, with only wallet and keys, feels physically strange and wrong, like I forgot to wear underwear.

Even though I didn’t have a mobile phone for the first half of my life, ten minutes without it somehow feels unsafe. If I need to call in an emergency or something – or, much more likely, if I want to ignore my surroundings and check email while I’m waiting in line – I will be utterly helpless.

This uneasy, lost-at-sea feeling isn’t caused by being without phone access for a few minutes. It’s just what it feels like to defy a powerful habit. After all, the more often I do the thing, the weaker that feeling gets.

The mind just doesn’t want you to deviate from habits, whether they’re good or bad ones. “You can’t do this to me!” it shouts, as you lock the door with your phone sitting on the kitchen table. “We had a deal!”

I’ve been reading Lord of the Rings for two months and I’m just at the end of the first part. It’s not because I’m not enjoying it. It’s one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I can remember.

From the beginning, I’ve read the whole thing aloud. I’ve found reading aloud helpful for staying engaged — limiting myself to mouth-speed rather than eye-speed means I won’t rush, miss important details, and then lose interest, which has always been a problem for me.

At first I was anxious to read a 1,500-page book this way, because it would take so long. But, as someone pointed out to me, if I’m enjoying it, why would I want to be done with it sooner?

So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.

This leisurely pace made Middle-Earth blossom before my eyes. When I paused after each comma, and let each sentence ring for a small moment after the period, the events of the story reached me with more weight and strength. That extra time gave space for Tolkien’s images and moods to propagate in my mind, which they did automatically.

The human being is the only animal that can say no to treats. That’s what makes us special.

A hungry dog, fish, sheep, centipede – none of them can have their favorite food in front of them and voluntarily refrain from gobbling it up, unless it’s dangerous to do so. A trained dog might hold back for a bit, but it’s really just angling for another reward (pleasing its master) and it knows it’s getting the treat anyway.

The human being can – but might not – simply refrain from gobbling the fudge-covered Oreo sitting in front of him, however it feels to do so.

He might do that because he prefers a competing reward, such as losing weight or not having to brush his teeth again tonight. But he also might do it solely to free himself from the Oreo’s dominance over him. If you can’t not gobble the Oreo, it owns you. It will turn you into its marionette, operating your arms and mouth, insinuating itself into your mind, and then your body.