It is well understood by good parents that life should only ever get so exciting for
a baby: after friends have come around and brought presents and made animated faces,
after there has been some cake and some cuddles, after there have been a lot of bright lights
and perhaps some songs too, enough is enough. The baby will start to look stern and then
burst into tears and the wise parent knows that nothing is particularly wrong (though
the baby may by now be wailing): it is just time for a nap. The brain needs to process,
digest and divide up the welter of experiences that have been ingested, and so the curtains
are drawn, baby is laid down next to the soft toys and soon it is asleep and calm descends.
Everyone knows that life is going to be a lot more manageable again in an hour.
Sadly, we exercise no such caution with ourselves. We schedule a week in which we will see friends
every night, in which we’ll do 12 meetings (three of them requiring a lot of preparation),
where we’ll make a quick overnight dash to another country on the Wednesday, where
we’ll watch three films, read 14 newspapers, change six pairs of sheets, have five heavily
meals after 8pm and drink 30 coffees - and then we lament that our lives are not as calm
as they might be and that we are close to mental collapse.
We refuse to take seriously how much of our babyhood is left inside our adult selves - and
therefore, how much care we have to take to keep things simple and very very calm. What
registers as anxiety is typically no freakish phenomenon; it is the mind’s logical enraged
plea not to be continuously and exhaustingly overstimulated.
What are some of the things we may need to do to simplify our lives:
Fewer People; fewer commitments
It is theoretically a privilege to have a lot of people to see and things to do. It
is also - psychologically-speaking - exhausting and ultimately rather dangerous.
The manner of expression is a little dated and brutal, and one might want to quibble
over the exact timings, but this point from Nietzsche remains acute:
“Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have
two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman,
an official, or a scholar.”
We need to recognise that what is physically possible for us to achieve in a day is not,
for that matter, psychologically wise or plausible. It may well be feasible to nip over to a foreign
capital or two in a day and run a company alongside managing a household but nor should
we be surprised if such routines ultimately contribute to a breakdown.
Sleep
Plenty of it of course; at least seven hours. Or if we can’t manage it, we need at a minimum
fully to recognise how much we are deprived, so that we won’t aggravate our sorrows by
searching for abstruse explanations for them. We don’t necessarily have to get divorced,
retrain in a completely different profession or move country: we just need to get some
more rest.
Media
What we’re taking in when we check our phones is perhaps the single greatest contributor
to our mental ill-health. For most of history, it was inconceivable that there could ever
be such a thing as ‘too much news’. Information from political circles or foreign countries
was rare, prized and expensive (it was as unlikely that one could gorge oneself on it
as one could on chocolate bars). But since the middle of the twentieth century, news
has been commodified and, in the process, it has become a major - though still too little
known - risk to our mental survival.
Every minute of every day presents us with untold options for filling our minds with
the mania, exploits, disasters, furies, reversals, ambitions, triumphs, insanity and cataclysms
of strangers around our benighted planet. Always, news organisations speak of our need
to know - and to need to know right now. But what they have left out is our equally great,
and often even greater need not to know: because we cannot change anything, because the stories
are too violent, dispiriting and sad, because our minds are fragile, because we have responsibilities
closer to home, because we need to lead our own lives rather than be torn apart by stories
of the lives of others who are ultimately as remote from and irrelevant to us as the
inhabitants of the Egyptian court of King Sneferu in late 2,613 BC.
Thinking
Insomnia and anxiety are the mind’s revenge for all the thoughts we refuse to have consciously
in the day. In order to be able to find rest, we need to carve off chunks of time where
we have nothing to do other than lie in bed with a pad and paper in order to think. We
need to consider three topics in particular: - What is making me anxious?
- Who has caused me pain and how? - What is exciting me?
We need to sift through the chaotic contents of our minds. Every hour of living requires
at least ten minutes of sifting. Expectations
Of course, it might be pleasant to be extraordinary, famous and world-beating, but maybe it will
be an even greater achievement to stay sane and kind. We might opt not to conquer the
world in favour of living a longer, and more serene life. We are not backing away from
a challenge, we’re simply shifting our sense of what the real challenge might be - and
more importantly where the real rewards may lie. A quiet life isn’t necessarily one
of resignation or flight, it may constitute a supremely wise recognition that the truly
satisfying things are available away from the spotlight and the big cities, on modest
salaries and as far as possible from the manic, sleepless competition to ‘win’ the professional
status race. As we’re discovering, excitement is fun for a time; but it also kills. Simplicity
is true wisdom; we need more naps.
Do you need a detox from your devices? Our phone detox is designed to help give you a well-deserved break from your phone.