In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman writes a passage that fits the same vibe as this piece:
>You can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.
> When you keep your options open, you’re living a sub-optimal life, betting that you’ll come across the assuredly best option that you’ll eventually commit to.
If you've ever gotten into the groove of this mental habit, this post is a nice reminder to be more mindful when you fall into the trance of imagining a better option, and instead commit to whatever it is you're doing in the present moment.
I think this answer depends on age. For me, it was up until right around 2014. That’s when, I think, social media and mobile phones unlocked a number of generally unproductive behavior both personally and in business.
I used Tinder the first (and only) time shortly after its 2012 release – recognizing how dangerous this technology was, I closed my facebook profile (which was then-required to access their meat-matching "dating" service).
For me, Tinder was "the beginning of the downfall" – algorithms picking sexual partners, with a known history of favoritisms for the founder($).
The "for you" pages that started leaking everywhere from facebook to linkedin to reddit since 2014 is the death of the internet. And this is why i only consume old forums like hackernews.
At work I curbed most of my internet wandering by turning off all the autocomplete and history of the browser. When I close the browser, everything is wiped. This way I have to explicitly type in the site url instead of an autocomplete in the url bar or history suggestion. I don't do anything personal on a work computer anyway so I don't need to log into anything.
On my phones it's even easier: no apps save for absolutely necessary. If I need an app while traveling or whatever, I install it only for the necessary duration then uninstall it when done.
I edit my /etc/hosts file and send domains that I've realized I'm addicted to (ahem, lichess) to 0.0.0.1
This gives enough friction to the point, when I muscle-memory type the URL in a browser, and get an unreachable error... after a while I learn to just... break the habit.
I've been noticing the same thing, though I'd frame it as analog getting more appealing largely because it's slower than digital. The demand for a slower pace is driven by two factors imo:
Need: People can’t move so fast all the time, so they will dedicate parts of their lives to slow down and process what’s actually happening in their outer and inner worlds. It will involve activities like creative hobbies, fitness, and meditation.
Nostalgia: When people aren’t sure if the future will be better than the present, the past seems even more appealing. We remember the best of the past. While we swipe glass all the time now, we used to push buttons, pound on keys, and shake hands. It was a more tactile era, and we miss it. Vinyl sales have gone up from 1 million in 2006 to 49 million in 2023 [1]. Streaming will still be the dominant source of delivering music, but vinyl represents something else. (I believe most of them end up being framed on people's walls, to be clear)
I suspect more people will be interested in writing by hand, for example, so I've been working with my partner to make a journal. Very analog, very slow!
In the spirit of yes, and: how about a subscription similar to a pay as you go phone plan? Pay for the month, and when you don't pay, then you don't get to keep going. After a couple of months, they unsubscribe you, get rid of your account, etc. More often than not, the first thing I do when I sign up for a service is cancel it (after confirming I can use it for the billing period).
> More often than not, the first thing I do when I sign up for a service is cancel it (after confirming I can use it for the billing period).
That's what I loved about Apple controlling their App Store subscriptions. All subscriptions keep working through the billing period and there isn't really anything an app can do about it. It also gave me an easy centralized place to view and cancel subscriptions.
Uruky [1] (a simpler and EU-based Kagi alternative) does this! You only pay once for a period of time (one, three, six, or twelve months), and there is no subscription! If, after that period, you want to keep using it, you have to pay again.
I used to use one-off "virtual" credit card numbers for this kind of thing. My bank (MBNA, at the time) let me set a balance limit and / or expiration date. It was exceedingly handy, so the feature was axed when Chase acquired them.
Capital One has something like this but when I read the fine print I got the impression that it didn't work for this for subscription services. Something like how they automatically update businesses when you get a new card number due to fraud happens, defeating the purpose as long as it's marked as a subscription service somehow.
Many times, across companies, sometime between the day and half an hour before a meeting, I see a flurry of actions—including responses, decisions, deliverables/drafts, etc. In that sense, I think a meeting works because people don't want to show up empty handed, so it adds psychological urgency.
I think small teams can be an exception here, but across most teams (particularly quickly growing ones) and across functions, a weekly sync is irritating but obvious, proven, solution to getting things done.
This resonates with me! In a blog post, I wrote, "It has never been easier to avoid boredom. Distraction is all around you, offering to cover up the painful things you’re avoiding that boredom can sometimes be a gateway to.
Yet without boredom, there can be no inspiration. Boredom is the mud from which the flower of imagination blossoms. Your next creative idea is just one boring moment away." https://herbertlui.net/deliberate-boredom/
>You can’t become an ultrasuccessful lawyer or artist or politician without first “settling” on law, or art, or politics, and therefore deciding to forgo the potential rewards of other careers. If you flit between them all, you’ll succeed in none of them. Likewise, there’s no possibility of a romantic relationship being truly fulfilling unless you’re willing, at least for a while, to settle for that specific relationship, with all its imperfections—which means spurning the seductive lure of an infinite number of superior imaginary alternatives.
I give this tendency a name, "Optionality cost" (https://herbertlui.net/optionality-cost/):
> When you keep your options open, you’re living a sub-optimal life, betting that you’ll come across the assuredly best option that you’ll eventually commit to.
If you've ever gotten into the groove of this mental habit, this post is a nice reminder to be more mindful when you fall into the trance of imagining a better option, and instead commit to whatever it is you're doing in the present moment.
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