'Who Will Answer All My Questions?'
Spoiler alert: nobody
Life has been wild since you last heard from me. Did a border run, saw a corpse, got sick, did a ten minute stand up comedy set. Never a dull moment.
I’ve had many ideas for today’s piece, but I decided to dedicate this one a question my last piece received.
In Less Is Less, I talked about how beneficial it is to do less, and received the following questions:
‘Drink less alcohol - what does it mean "less"? How can I measure it? And what should I drink instead?
Spend less time inside - how many minutes/hours/days? And where should I spend my time then, if the only place I spend my time in is "inside"?’
These questions are important for a couple of reasons:
It highlights our need for things to be quantified (‘what is less and how can I measure it?’)
It highlights our natural instinct for replacement (‘And what should I drink instead?’)
It highlights how desperately we look for someone outside to give us the answer.
I closed the piece with ‘And most importantly, spend less time looking for someone out there to give you the key to health and happiness.’ I included it as an almost throwaway line, but this question showed me just how hard it is for people to start from that place, so I decided to go into it a little deeper.
But first, points one and two.
What Is Less, And How Can I Measure It?
Nobody else can tell you what less is, because nobody else knows exactly how much of something you are doing. But in the context of alcohol I can frame some examples: If you normally drink three beers a day, two is less; if you normally drink five nights a week, four is less; if you normally drink 12 beers in one night, once a week, 11 is less. And so on and so forth.
But what if I only drink one beer, once a week?
Then drinking one beer, once every eight days is less. But the point I was making in the previous piece was focused on health. If you’re trying to improve your health, and you’re drinking one beer every week, alcohol probably isn’t going to be the big win that you’re looking for. That being said, 52 beers a year…
The same can be said for time spent inside. How many minutes/hours/days will be unique to your circumstances. If you are of the ‘Working From Home’ generation, then I assume you spend at least eight hours a day inside, five days a week.
Short of quitting your job, those hours are hard to reduce, so you have to look at the other periods of time in your life you’re spending inside. And remember this is in the context of trying to improve your health.
If you work inside, but spend the rest of your time outside, it’s not a big deal. But if you work inside, engage in recreation inside, and generally spend no time outside, there’s all manner of benefits to come from it. Fresh air, natural light, and human contact to name a few easy ones.
That said, measuring it isn’t the point. Bringing awareness to it is.
And what should I drink[do] instead?
This point is more important.
It highlights our need to be constantly doing. For whatever reason, we seem to believe that ‘boredom is bad, inactivity is bad, downtime is bad’, and I suspect it has to do with our current societal structure more so than our nature, but I’ll leave that to
to criticise.You don’t have to do or drink anything instead, you can just not do that thing, and try being. When you determine ‘I’m not going to drink, instead I’m going to…’ you take the same pattern and apply it elsewhere.
The alcoholic who drinks seven nights a week, quits, and goes to Alcoholics Anonymous seven nights a week, is now a dry alcoholic. Better for them, their family, and society, certainly, but they’re still enslaved by the habit pattern. Instead of hitting the pub, they hit the meeting. No hangover, but the pattern remains.
Doing nothing is always an option, and in the absence of any better options, it’s often the best one. Typically the chain of events is like this:
I want to do [thing]
Oh, but I wanted to do [thing] less because I want to improve my health
Then I better do [new thing] instead
[new thing] becomes replacement for [thing]
I do another health check, and see that I’m obsessing over [new thing]
I want to do [new thing]
Oh, but I wanted to do [new thing] less because I want to improve my health.
And so it goes, on and on.
As a culture, we’ve become terrible at doing nothing, and it’s absurd. Look at the elderly, look at animals, look at almost any other culture. There is a LOT of downtime. You better get used to it now, before it’s forced upon you through a broken ankle and a power outage. ‘No mobility and no Netflix? Life is not worth living!’
The shift is from doing to being, and it’s life-changing.
The Unasked, Ever-Present Background Question
And now we get to the juicy one. The undercurrent of both questions: the need for someone else to tell us what to do.
When you strip away the objects of overconsumption, observe the instinct to replace them, but don’t replace them, you may find yourself feeling something perhaps unsatisfying.
It could look like boredom, then confusion, then frustration, then irritation, then contentment, then happiness, then anger, then you name it, until you realise that, in the absence of something to do, you have to feel all of these things fully.
Even when you’re occupied, this is going on. It is the background noise that drives us to consume certain things, it is what establishes patterns that we don’t understand, and it is what enslaves us. Creating the space to sit and observe it helps you to understand how your emotions are motivating and driving you.
If you quit alcohol because you read my last piece, and you start to answer all your questions by reading through my previous articles, you’ve replaced alcohol with me. You might think you’re doing something beneficial (and it’s probably better than getting sauced on the reg, no doubt) but you are using me as an authority, as Someone Who Knows What’s Best For You. You trust that I can answer all your questions.
But I, as Answerer Of All Your Questions, am responding to your boredom by giving you something to do, and you are only entertained by my answers. They will be sufficient only until you decide they have become boring, then you will seek out a new Answerer for your questions, and the cycle will continue. See above.
For that reason, you must become your own Answerer Of Questions, find your own solutions, and make your own choices. It’s a path of complete responsibility, but it’s also the only one that will feel worthwhile long-term. Anything else will be distraction or entertainment, and it’ll only last so long.
Nobody else's answers will ever be perfect for you. They might lead you in the direction of something helpful, or be good for a little while (or a long while) but your needs are your own.
I don’t have the answers, you do. And anyone claiming to have the answer for you should be avoided like the plague.
