Sedating and Rest

It’s 16:32, I’m mostly finished up with work for the day, and I’m laying in bed, fully clothed, scrolling. I’m watching YouTube shorts. A very informative video about weightlifting and nutrition follows one of those Hank videos about something science-y follows a day-in-the-life video of a personal chef. The algorithm has learned that I’m not really into silly videos of cats falling off chairs, so it serves me up mostly cooking, science, and fitness related stuff. A lot of it is super informative, while some of it feels soothing, like watching guys make parathas through a glass window in Paris.

Now its 17:37, and I changed positions to plug in my phone because the latest Android update absolutely decimated my battery life. Maybe I’ll save up 600 bucks for a new phone that I’ll be addicted to but ultimately hate. I’m still watching YouTube shorts because I deleted TikTok last week in a desperate attempt to stop watching short-form videos. I can’t delete YouTube from my phone, because its a Google phone, and Google says YouTube is essential to my phone functioning properly. I’ve watched Jeff Nippard tell me the best way to work my glutes, triceps, and quadriceps. If I watch long enough, I bet I’ll see the best way to work my chest. I’ve watched a serious looking guy debunk four or five different viral videos using some really fast math. I’ve seen most of Ironman 3 at this point (how could that bad guy stomp on the watch that little kid gave Tony? Tony will later murder this man for his transgression; superhero justice!).

Now it’s 18:17, and I decide to get up. My head hurts, because I’ve been watching mostly with one eye, mostly without my glasses on, which means I had to hold my phone about 10cm from my face. I feel sort of groggy, like I had three beers last night and I got six hours of sleep. Mostly I feel super anxious and restless. I don’t know what to do. I know I shouldn’t be watching YouTube Shorts because I’m self-aware enough to note how I feel before I start watching and how I feel after. I’m listless. Do I make dinner? Fuck me, I need to clean the kitchen first. Maybe I’ll just order something on Wolt again. Do I get back to work for a little bit? Maybe, but the idea of hitting cmd+tab a few times to cycle to my text editor feels more exhausting than doing a 140kg deadlift. Do I call a friend? No, I don’t want to be a burden on anyone; I’m not in any shape to be social. Maybe I go for a walk! I slip on my barefoot shoes (The Squat University guy on YouTube Shorts tells me I can get strong feet by wearing barefoot shoes!), grab my keys and head out. I bring my phone, and after a moment’s hesitation, I bring my earphones as well. Might as well listen to a podcast. I throw on the latest episode of Ezra Klein, and his concerned, serious sounding voice fills my ears. I feel a little relief when I hear his voice; it’s like he’s sitting across from me in my parents’ comfortable living room. He cares about all the crazy shit going on in the world, so I don’t have to. I know that’s an insane take.

It’s 19:03 and I’m back from my walk. I’m a little sweaty because its 22 degrees outside and I climbed 5 flights of stairs to get back to my flat. I decide to make dinner, but I also decide to not clean the kitchen. I balance more dirty dishes on top of an already precarious pile sitting next to the sink (my biggest pet peeve is when people put dishes in the sink; it means I have to take them out before I can clean anything). I eat some homemade refried beans with avocado, sliced cherry tomatoes, finely diced onions, arugula, and feta cheese. I watch American Dad! while I eat. I feel sort of bored watching the episode; I can’t focus enough to finish it. I switch back to YouTube Shorts, my phone resting against a bottle of Valentina hot sauce thats sitting out on the table. Ah! Jeff finally told me which chest exercises are the best. Maybe I’ll add cable chest flys to my routine? No, no, I’m just focusing on compound lifts, no need for that isolation work.

It’s 20:07 and I decide to get into bed. I’m exhausted. I feel unsettled, and restless. I don’t know what else to do with myself, so I might as well go to bed, right? Maybe I can get a good night’s sleep and tomorrow I’ll feel more energetic. Tomorrow I’ll call up a friend and we’ll grab a beer. Yeah! A beer with a friend sounds great (Will I cancel last minute?)! I put on more American Dad!, this time casting it to the TV that I put at the end of my bed. I still can’t focus. With American Dad! playing in the background, I pull up YouTube Shorts again. Eventually I decide to do my nighttime routine and go to sleep. It’s 22:35 and I’m getting up at 6:00 tomorrow to go to the gym. I guess I won’t be getting the eight hours of sleep that I so desperately need. I put on No Such Thing as a Fish with a twenty minute sleep timer. Slowly slowly I drift into sleep. Hopefully I won’t wake up in the middle of the night.

It’s 16:32, and I just picked a wood tick off the back of my leg. My friend and I just finished a two and a half hour mountain bike ride through some hills in Northern Vermont. It was a little boring compared to some of the stuff we’ve seen over the past two days, but we definitely found some gnarly single track that pushed us to our limits. We get some non-alcoholic beers, quietly slurp them down and then head to get some pizza. We talk about anything and everything, and it feels like a breath of fresh air. I love this friend so much, and I’m so happy we get to spend this time together. Later, we watch two episodes of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. It’s fascinating and hilarious; we curse some of the women for their antics while praising the integrity of others. We wonder how it’s possible to live among so many shades of beige. I go to sleep physically exhausted, but my mind is at peace. I’m not feeling restless, or wondering what else I could be doing. I’m not berating myself for not being productive.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about rest. I think I spend a lot of time doing what I think is rest, but in reality I’m actually just sedating myself¹. My work stresses me out. I never feel like I’m doing enough. I feel like I’m one tiny misstep away from unemployment. Even after four and a half years, I still wonder if I’m smart enough to do the tasks that I agree to do. Sometimes when I’m at work I find a flow state, and for 30 minutes or 2 hours my computer becomes an extension of my mind, and I bang out 3 days worth of code. This flow state is immensely satisfying, but its also exhausting. Even more exhausting is context switching. Sometimes I find myself jumping between merge requests, backlogs, meetings, Slack messages, and three different code projects. Each time my attention moves from one thing to another, I incur a tiny cost. After a few hours of this madness, I’m spent!

When I’m not working, I’m trying to optimize my time. Go to the gym, work on my blog, fix my bike, go to the supermarket, respond to an old friend, write to my Iowa senator, see my partner, see friends, investigate ways I can get involved with local bike advocacy groups. Everything is bouncing around my head, all the time. I know that this monkey-mind is the symptom of a tired mind, and I know I need to slow down for some time. That’s how I end up in bed at 16:30 on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of the summer. I’m trying to rest my mind, but instead I’m just drowning out the noise with more noise. The problem is that I’ve been saturated by all sorts of different inputs all day. Much of the time my solution is to sedate myself by consuming all sorts of mindless input. When I go out for a walk and listen to Ezra Klein I’m not doing so to actually listen to his nuanced takes on current events. I’m doing it just so I don’t have to sit with my thoughts. I can’t finish an episode of American Dad! at dinner because my attention is fried after spending 3 hours in a flow state at work. I scroll through hours of YouTube Shorts, half watching, half listlessly looking. My attention can be fractured and yet I can still watch those videos because they require such a short attention span. Those videos are like cookies; sugary and fatty but devoid of much nutrition.

How do I create space for my mind to quiet itself, instead of trying to drown out the noise? In other words, how do I rest? I actually know very well what the solution is. I go out into the world and wander around without input from other minds. No podcasts or music, just my body, pounding the streets of Kreuzberg. I inevitably spend the first ten minutes of these walks freaking out. I’m terribly bored! What am I supposed to do?! After about twenty minutes I usually find that my mind starts to unclench. I start to notice things going on around me. My mind has to work at the pace of my body, which is limited to how fast I can walk. I start to notice details. New posters going up in the neighborhood. Galleries I’d never seen despite living in the area for two years. People’s weird outfits. Couples kissing. Angry couples. Kids crawling over their parents as they walk down the street. Piles of trash. Dog shit.

The other antidote to monkey-mind is to spend time with friends. Grab a beer, go for a walk, go bowling, hit the gym, grab dinner; the activity doesn’t matter. I find that my mind feels satisfied after spending time with people I love, like it ate a stick-to-your-ribs type meal. The monkey-mind is still there, of course, it just feels a whole lot less relevant.