When you spend most of your weekdays obligated to look at a screen, you have to find things to do when you aren’t working. Having finally kicked the Facebook habit, the Reddit habit, and the Twitter habit, my options felt suddenly limited. I didn’t know what else to look at.
For a while I scrolled LinkedIn. It was a bit interesting in an anthropological way to watch people perform their jobs on social media. But it got dull really fast.
I eventually landed on Wikipedia. This one stuck.
I often read articles about geology. I find rocks and land formations fascinating. Recently read articles include: The Mid-Atlantic Ridge, Relative dating, Planetary geology. (Though I admit Wikipedia-surfing does sometimes devolve into reading about serial killers, bank robberies, terrorist attacks, or missing persons cases.)
So what kind of reading is this? I guess it is more appropriately defined as “browsing,” which implies a skim of the surface. Shoved into sporadic moments, intended as a way of killing time; a way of occupying the transition period between larger items on a to-do list. It seems obvious to me that I don’t learn a lot from this kind of reading. I have less information about rocks than the variety of what I consume on Wikipedia would suggest.
I could probably design a geology curriculum for myself, made up entirely of free stuff on the internet. I’d compile videos from trusted sources, open access articles, images from online museum archives. I could find places to go where I could see real mountains and rocks.
But is this what I want? The purpose of this browsing is more rhythm-based than content-based. I reach a lull in my work day. I need to give my mind a break. While working remotely, I’ve found that I spend more of these natural breaks resting with my eyes closed. When I return to the office after Labor Day, I won’t be able to replicate this. There is nowhere I can go to rest in this way.
I wonder about filling what ought to be rest time with information, even information superficially skimmed. I used to see people at the office scroll their phones while eating lunch, presumably having just finished scrolling something on their computer. This must contribute to cognitive overload. At the least, it might explain why the work day can be so draining. You have to intentionally create rest if you want it. My rest is to take a walk at lunch, regardless of the weather. That’s the only way I can release my mind fully from information during the in-office work day. (And my body enforces a natural limiter: excess screen time gives me bad headaches. If I scrolled my phone at lunch, I’d have a migraine by 2:30.)
Obviously I don’t know for sure, but I think working in an office must have felt different before computers. There wasn’t an email account to monitor, so the stare-at-your-screen imperative couldn’t have existed. Of course, people now can do anything on their computers. I have the freedom to read about The Great Unconformity. But I don’t have the freedom to look away.
Constantly keeping up the appearance of working is exhausting for people, and is certainly a factor in the current demand for remote work. People don’t want to be observed in what looks like a state of not-working, even if they are, in fact, not working. But couldn’t we try to advocate for a flexibility of state in the office too? The pre-email times weren’t that long ago. It might be a good start for us to recognize that no one in the office is actually working 8 hours a day, even though we don’t talk about it. (And if there are people who work 8 hours a day, they need to stop!)
An extra thought, more content-based than rhythm-based:
I’m wondering about in my interest in geology. Where did that come from? In high school, I took geology because I didn’t want to take anatomy (you had to dissect a cat, and I just couldn’t do that). I had no prior interest in rocks. At the end of the year, our teacher gave us a choice: we could either take a regular 60-question multiple choice final exam, or create a video project that described what we had learned.
When I was in high school, video-making wasn’t quite part of the curriculum yet. It was often regarded by students as a shortcut: many of us already had basic video editing skills, and occasionally a teacher would give a video option for a project. Any video, no matter how badly made, was likely to impress the teacher and get a good grade. So, the choice was a no-brainer. It would be much easier and more fun to make a video than to study for an exam. A classmate and I recorded a parody song about Red Rock Canyon (in Las Vegas), then drove there and shot a music video. Our teacher was thrilled and gave us an A. We both felt like we’d gotten away with something.
I surprised myself when I returned to geology as an adult. Most of the knowledge I’ve retained about rocks comes from what I learned in that class, not what I read on Wikipedia. And I still remember all the words to the song.
And one recommendation:
Everyone’s talking about Bo Burnham’s Netflix special “Inside”—for good reason. It’s some of the best “content” (ha) I’ve watched lately. Below is one of my favorite songs. I’m putting it here because it feels relevant to Escape Velocity… and also because I just really love it.