Peak Technology

Technology has been on my mind in a big way lately. I’ve been noticing how much space it takes up, and I’ve started to cue in on how it affects my decision making. If you’ve read other posts of mine, you probably know I’m skeptical of a lot of the new technology we’ve created in the last ten years. This has coalesced into a theory (I’m probably not the first on this one…) I call “Peak Technology.”

Think Peak Oil, but with technology. Basically, that at some point technology will hit the top of the curve, and start to decline in either its usefulness (by making us perfectly happy) or will start to become actively bad (and maybe kill us all).

With Peak Oil, there is a finite quantity of oil on the planet. We don’t know how much oil there is, and in fact there may be more than anybody thinks. Even so, if we continue our oil consumption, at some point the Earth will run out of oil. It might be in 50 years, 500 years, or 5,000 years. A peak in supply occurs when difficulty in accessing new oil causes production to decline. Or, instead of peaking on supply, we might curb our use and peak on demand. If we switch to other fuel systems, oil production will decline. In combination, the fact that there will be a peak in oil production isn’t really the question. It’s just a matter of when.

With Peak Technology, there isn’t strictly “production,” “supply,” or “demand,” but a corollary can be drawn. I would argue that in some way, the purpose of technology is to make our lives better. I would also argue that there is a limit to how good our lives can be. It might not be anything any of us have ever gotten close to experiencing, but it is there. Let’s call it living in ecstasy every moment of existence. And perhaps that existence is nearly permanent. I don’t actually think our brains are capable of that kind of experience, but it seems like being fully enlightened and blissful for 1,000 years is at least a benchmark for how good life could be.

At some point, maybe in 50, 500, or 5,000 years (or 50,000,000, if we want to colonize the galaxy), technology could get us there. At which point, more technology won’t really be useful. Further advances would require nearly unlimited resources for increasingly incremental gains. Even if Moore’s law is true and processing power continues to double indefinitely, at some point it will so far surpass our own minds that we’ll either be overpowered or we won’t notice the difference.

These are rosy, although kind of weird, scenarios to think about. I’m sure the future will be stranger than any of us can predict. But these are theoretical “peaceful endpoints” for technology. There are a lot of other scenarios which are more troubling, and perhaps more likely.

For instance, technology may advance to the point where it surpasses our own understanding of how it works, and decides we aren’t worth keeping around (the “Technological Singularity Theory”). Or, it may become so powerful that a few rogue individuals could effectively wipe out humanity (perhaps one corporation spending $1B USD to spray aerosol into the upper atmosphere and trigger a massive ice age).

Or, as I’ve been thinking may be happening as we speak, technology may simply begin to make our lives worse, not better. Instead of bringing us toward that blissful existence (if that’s even what we’d want), it will trap and enslave us, make our brains victims to their own greatest anxieties. I believe social media is already having this effect — making us more depressed and less connected to other humans.

Now technology is controlling world politics. Here’s a great article my friends over at Scout, a new technology journal, wrote. Basically, big data, predictive analytics, fake news, and bots were used in a coordinated way to convince people to vote for Brexit and Trump. We’re being manipulated by people with more data than us, a better understanding of the internet than us, and a good grasp of psychology. Right now they’re tipping close elections, but I don’t see a limit on what this powerful, efficient, and person-specific propaganda could do. From the article, talking about “likes” on social media:

According to Zurich’s Das Magazine, which profiled Kosinski in late 2016, “with a mere ten ‘likes’ as input his model could appraise a person’s character better than an average coworker. With seventy, it could ‘know’ a subject better than a friend; with 150 likes, better than their parents. With 300 likes, Kosinski’s machine could predict a subject’s behavior better than their partner. With even more likes it could exceed what a person thinks they know about themselves.”

Perhaps this is just a dip in the curve. Maybe we’ll find our way out of technology addiction and manipulation, and truly embrace it for peaceful betterment. But whether it’s blissful world peace, massive destruction, or insidious propaganda and control, peak technology is real. The question is whether it is a far-off dream of science fiction, if it’s right around the corner, or if it already happened.

Noticing Smartphone Addiction

The other day I listened to an interview with Nancy Colier, author of The Power of Off, about technology addiction. Smartphones feature prominently in the conversation as a driving force in our increasing distraction and disconnection from our own bodies and from our loved ones. If you can find an hour, take a listen.

Nancy makes one point which resounded with me in particular: We often leave a smartphone on the table when we’re meeting with a friend, and it hurts our connection. I’ve been vaguely aware of this as an issue for a while, but she describes it very precisely.

When the phone is on the table, we’re telling our friend, “you’re not enough.” We’re willing to be interrupted by something else that might be more interesting, important, or urgent than what we’re doing right now. Maybe that’s true. If we’re waiting for a call about a birth in the family, or about whether a house sale went through, we can let our friend know how important that is. But usually we’re just getting text messages from someone we’re going to see later, emails about work, or meaningless push notifications from an app (Life Pro Tip — turn them all off). Those all can wait.

A simple solution is to leave the phone in a bag during the conversation. Even having it in a pocket can be distracting, unless your phone is fully silent and non-vibrating.

I started to realize that this isn’t only an issue when we’re sitting with someone else. It’s just as much an issue when we’re by ourselves. I usually leave my phone next to me, screen up, when I’m working on my computer or writing in my journal.  Now I’m telling myself, “I’m not enough.”

It’s not enough for me to sit with myself, to focus on a specific piece of work I care about. I’m willing to be interrupted by anything that might come my way. That interruption, that distraction, has become more important than my connection with my work and my awareness.

This bums me out. I’m not sure another way to put it. I’ve had conversations where I’ve expressed this idea that technology is making us less in some way, and I’ve gotten a lot of push back. There is resistance to the idea that something new and useful could be worse than what we had. Intrusive technology, it seems, is inevitable. I do think there are responsible and healthy ways to use technology, but I also think that everything about how it is designed is to keep us from using responsibly. We’re driven to distraction, addiction, and dissatisfaction. Marketers and app-creators want it that way.

Of course there are exceptions. Of course technology does good things. But for the moment I’m going to revel in being a curmudgeonly luddite and dream about going back to a landline.

 

 

10-Day Vipassana Meditation Course, Round Two

I just got home from my second 10-day Vipassana meditation course, as taught by S. N. Goenka. I took my first course (each course has the same material every time) three years ago, and wrote about it here. So I knew what to expect of my external reality. In short, it’s a really intense silent meditation experience, with all sorts of physical pain and mental challenges. And I pretty much got what I asked for.

After my first course, I felt compelled to really lay out the minutiae, but this experience felt less about the details and more about a few overarching thoughts that I came away with. Some mundane, some important, some powerful. So instead of detailing every pain and joy and confusion of the experience, here are a few of the big take aways.

  • Food and eating are beautiful things. We should always give them care and attention, and appreciate when we get to share meals with other people.
  • Technology has really done a number on our attention and appreciation of the present. This is something I worry about a lot. It felt so peaceful to be disconnected, and I didn’t miss anything that happened in the world despite having no media or phone access.
  • We are not addicted to things, we’re addicted to the sensations those things create in our bodies. These sensations are subtle, and must be listened to carefully to be heard. Next time your smart phone vibrates with a text message, just notice your reaction to it. That is where the addiction lives.
  • Walking slowly outside for even just a few minutes without other distractions can be so centering.
  • It feels great to take an 18 hour fast (early lunch, no dinner, no snacks). We did this every day, and I gained a lot of mental clarity. Granted, we weren’t doing much physically. I want to do this more often.
  • A lot of pain in our bodies is referred from injuries in other parts of the body. I found that the searing shoulder pain I experienced after sitting for several hours was completely relieved when I brought attention to relaxing my psoas muscle in my low back/hip.
  • A lot of pain in our bodies is the physical component of mental and emotional discomfort: stress, anxiety, depression, worry, fear.
  • Waking up early is fantastic. We got up at 4 a.m. every morning on the course, and now I’m going to try to keep it going with a 5 a.m. wake up as long as I can. I love looking at the clock at 8:00 having already been up for three hours.
  • It’s nice to go slow, be early, and welcome delays. Got an hour to kill at the mechanic? Wonderful time to sit and reflect.
  • Our miseries come from inside.
  • Sleep works to rest the body and rest the mind. These two things don’t actually have to happen at the same time. I spent a lot of time awake in the night, unable to sleep, despite the early wake up time. Lying still and focusing on sensations in the body, rather than on thoughts or anxieties, allowed me to be fully awake and functional in the morning. It turns out it is the anxiety and those thoughts that hurt us the next day, much more than the simple lack of sleep.
  • Keeping my eyes closed all day gives me really vivid dreams.
  • To move beyond unwanted (or badly wanted) thoughts, we don’t push them away or crave for them, but instead observe and acknowledge them. The meditation technique teaches us to slowly learn not to react to those thoughts. They will likely never go away, so we have to learn to live with them.
  • All of these ideas, and important ideas in general, can be intellectualized, but they must be experienced to be fully understood.

People are always wondering if I would do this course again, or if I recommend it to others. It’s hard to say for either. I wouldn’t want to do it again in the next several months, but I could see the refresher being invaluable in a couple years or more. And I’m tempted to recommend it to everyone, except that it is such a difficult experience. If you’re curious, and better yet, committed, then I absolutely recommend it. If you suffer from anxiety or depression or addiction, again I recommend it. But if you are going because someone convinced you to, and you aren’t fully committed yourself, then maybe you should think again and strengthen your intention. I do believe everyone is capable of completing the course, and that nearly everyone will be able to gain benefit from it by sticking it out to the end. It’s a hard road to get there, though. Nothing good is supposed to be easy, right?

Please Be Quiet

Please, find some time to be quiet. Not for me or for the people around you. For you.

I read this David Brooks editorial in the Times this morning about smartphones and taking time to be with ourselves, and got excited to write a blog post about it. Then I read the article he referenced by Andrew Sullivan and realized there’s nothing else for me to say. So I’m not going to. Please read the article. It’s long and worth it. See if you can read it in one sitting without getting up to do something else. Better yet, see if you can read the whole thing without checking your phone. I couldn’t.

I wish that I could say my absence from blogging has been an intentional push to work on these things myself, but it hasn’t been. I’ve just been too busy to write. Or busy enough to tell myself that I’m too busy to write. Now I’m feeling inspired now to leave behind my phone and social media, to just be in the world. I hope to see you there!

Year in (P)review: Reflecting on This Year and the Next

A year in review, a year in preview. I’m gearing up to do this in the next couple weeks, and I hope you’ll find a chance to do so as well. The basic idea: take some time at the end of the year to reflect on the year gone by, and to set some intentions for the year to come. Maybe people do a version of this by having a New Year’s resolution, but I’m talking about a much more in-depth thing. Not just coming up with one item for a to-do list as you clink glasses on New Year’s Eve.

Instead, it’s a drawn-out process involving substantial reflection and introspection from a variety of angles. It can involve movement, meditation, long walks, bubble baths, sitting by a fire. Activities that turn us inward and allow us the opportunity to be quiet with ourselves. Sans smartphone.

I like to start with the year gone by. It can help to organize the internal conversation by asking some questions. Start simple. What happened this year? What were some of the big events? What were some of the small events that made a big impact? What was the overall feeling in the year, and how did that evolve?

Then, we can get into more substance. It helps if you went through this reflection process a year ago as well, but it’s by no means necessary. What was I hoping for this year? Did I move closer to that goal? Did I realize I needed to pivot those intentions? What worked? What didn’t? As Bob Ross said, “There are no mistakes, only happy accidents.” No need to think of the things that didn’t work as failures. They are places for growth and learning.

But we do need to get into them. We won’t gain much from our failures unless we allow ourselves to examine them. If we repress, we lose the lesson and build up future pain. What would I have liked to have done more? Done less? What was valuable to my life as a whole? What took a lot of time, but proved not to be valuable? Again, no judgement against the self, we just recognize these things.

Asking these questions allows us to get a deeper impression of the year. We can begin to ask some less tangible questions. What brought me joy? What did I love? Who were the most important people in my life? What can I do to express that to them, to show gratitude to them? How can I show those same qualities to myself?

There are unlimited questions we could ask ourselves about the year gone by, and it is valuable to come up with a few yourself, based on what’s important to you. At a certain point it is time to transition from the year gone by to the year to come. I’ll try to take at least a day for each. Not necessarily sitting at a journal all day, but having that intention for the day. Bringing it with me to yoga class, to the coffee shop.

The year to come represents enormous opportunity. One could argue that the transition to the new year is purely theoretical and arbitrary. Sure, I agree. The solstice is Tuesday, New years is in a week and a half. There are all sorts of other landmarks around this season that can be used. But regardless of what is arbitrary or true, the idea of transition and new beginnings can be very effective for bringing in new energy to our lives.

Imagine: if you wanted to, you could change everything in your life in just a matter of the next few weeks. If you are out of shape and overweight, you could start on the path of health and fitness by exercising every day. You could make that part of your life and your routine, part of who you are. You can start a new hobby, a new craft, and eventually make that into your life’s work. Never done much art? You could start painting every day, again making that part of who you are, and by the end of the year you would have enough talent and work to begin to sell art in a real way. These things won’t necessarily be easy, but they are achievable.

Or the changes could be much more modest. You could spend substantially more time with your family, your kids. You could cut out habits, get away from screens and pocket vibrations. You could start jogging regularly or learning how to throw pottery. All these take a strong will and a set of powerful intentions. They take more than a half-hearted New Year’s resolution. But New Year’s is still a great time to do them.

As we begin to look forward, we need to keep in mind the reflection we’ve done on the past year. Frame the questions in a similar way. What do I want to do? What big events would I like to accomplish? Any travel? What are some small things I could do that might make a big difference?

And get bigger: How do I want to live? What are going to be the main focuses of my energy? Who do I want to share my life and my love with? What one thing would I do every single day, if I could? What do I want to create? How do I want to grow as a person?

If you’d like, come up with a word for the year to come. Something that embodies the values and intentions you’d like to live.

There is reason to be optimistic. We have the power to create our own lives. Even with the complications and guidelines put on us by society, we always have the opportunity to choose how we respond to the world. We can create an internal state that is resonant with our values and with the people we love.

I encourage you to give it a try. Even if it’s just an hour sitting down with a notepad for the past year and one for the next, this exercise has enormous potential. The days are nearly the shortest they’ll be all year, and this is a natural time for reflection. Treat yourself, and have some fun with it!