Sunday, January 20, 2013

This product is habit forming

Everything we have ever experienced has happened inside our heads. Every time we "feel" something in our hands, it's really just electrical impulses being sent from our hands to our heads, and decoded there. And et cetera with many other systems in our body. But, this is a bit too clinical for the point I want to make. Consider this:

You go into a restaurant and order a burger. You probably think something like "This is disappointing. I don't like lettuce. That waitress is hot. I should have gone to..." and so on.

We take literally almost everything around us for granted, habitually. When is the last time you really looked at your own room, for instance? We always walk into our room, accept that it's our room, and go about our business. When last did you take a moment to appreciate that cleaning you did last week? Or look at how messy your desk is? Or enjoy how the walls softly reflect the light from your lamp? If you're like most people, you almost never do these things.

This is called "habituation". We get used to things, and then ignore them and carry on to other things, which we then get used to. This is an absurd and beautiful world we live in, and most people spend their time not paying attention to large parts of it.

Our brains evolved to deal very well with changes. We are creative and flexible. We observe changes, analyze them, and draw conclusions about the world. But, once we see something say, 50 times, it becomes part of the "background" of our lives. Buildings, trees, roads, billboards, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, the sky, music, many of us will disregard these things until they somehow change.

We think of everyone we pass on the way to, say, the cereal aisle, as just "extras". They are background noise, we walk past them, looking straight ahead, careful not to look them in the eye or make any gesture deemed inappropriate or offensive. Perhaps we nod our head, perfunctorily, upwards if it's someone we are comfortable with, downwards if it is someone we don't. The most loquacious of us will proffer a "Hey." or a "How's it going"?

We are, in effect, isolating ourselves from other human beings because they aren't "new" or "change-y" enough for us.

We can choose not too, though. It's a choice of paying attention to not only the "little things", but everything around us. Everything is, of course, an exaggeration, but we can drastically shift our focus. It is proposed that we can focus on 126 bits of information per second, and something like having a conversation takes about 1/3rd of these.

How much of your headspace are you wasting? How much attention are you paying to what kind of cereal you're looking for, and how much are you spending on interacting with the world, the actual world, around you? Are you really enjoying things, or are you just thinking about enjoying them?

There is this wonderful synergy that comes from being totally in sync with the world, or as I like to think of it, having your shit together. When you spend less time thinking and more time completely engrossed and enraptured in what you're doing, and the things you're seeing, and the people around you, and how absolutely beautiful Jupiter when it's right next to the moon, it is so much easier to feel the reality of things: we are all just little pieces of the world. Or, you could be daydreaming about that cute guy who sits in front of you in class, walking ahead with your head buried in Facebook, oblivious to the people and things and all of the beauty of the world around you. It seems like an easy choice to me. Perhaps not so easy to accomplish, but something to strive for.

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