Accidentally Zen — How I Hopped Off the Treadmill of Life

So, you know all those self-help articles about how to slow down your life, to step off the overwhelming, too-much-information treadmill that is the basic existence of the modern world? Specifically, the ones that tell you to turn off your phone after a certain time each evening, or to drink a glass of water every morning as soon as you get up? Or to delete your Facebook account?

What do you think would happen if you actually did all of that stuff? Would you be relieved and relaxed? Or frantic that you’re too disconnected from everyone?

While I’ve always been an introvert, for years I was able to exist as one of those introverts who could actually go out and be sociable. I needed a lot of downtime to balance the energy expended running a concert production company, complete with musicians crashed on my floor; and during my time as a local food writer I had to impose a strict limit of no more than three food-related events per week, just so I could get some actual writing done. And I had no problem giving speeches, introducing bands, or barging into restaurant kitchens to interview chefs.

Then, a few years ago, that all changed. A series of injuries and illnesses — none deathly serious, but all debilitating enough that I had to slow down and rethink how and why I was doing a lot of things — meant that I no longer spent a lot of time with large groups of people. It also meant that I had much less patience with other human beings doing generally stupid stuff. And that I experienced no actual necessity to do the stuff (like check my phone constantly) that most people consider part of their daily lives.

I suddenly had the time (and need) to meditate. There was no reason to take my phone to the bedroom overnight so I started it leaving to charge on my desk. I no longer needed a huge wardrobe or to put on make-up more than once a week or so. This psychological paring down had a greater effect; where I once enjoyed window shopping, I suddenly felt it a waste of time, since I didn’t really need or want anything anyway.

I had, quite by accident, starting living a life that many people seeking spiritual enlightenment, or a sense of quiet, would be envious of. Call it pared down, zen, or just basic bitch, I was living a very quiet, and very inward existence.

The only problem was, that sense of spiritual fulfillment that is supposed to come with this much mindfulness wasn’t really there. The more I turned inward, the more inward I turned, if that makes sense.

Oh, there was a smugness. Definitely a sense of being ever so pleased with myself at the idea that I didn’t need all the trappings of a wild shopping trip or the ego-boost of social media likes. But in some ways I was kidding myself.

The more I turned away from the world, the more I felt disconnected from it. Should I write a blog post? Oh, nobody will care. Should I make plans with some friends for dinner? Oh, they’ll be too busy… This train of thought comes from a massive lack of self-esteem due to childhood trauma that I usually hide reasonably well. And of course, the disconnection was mostly on me — I was the one crawling into my shell and hiding away.

But have I truly found some sense of enlightenment (peace, calm, what ever you want to call it) in this withdrawal from society? I’m usually pretty happy as an introvert. I am more comfortable alone than with most other people (husband and dog excepted). I enjoy the more basic life that I now live. But if I’m doing all the things I’m supposed to do to be more at peace, why doesn’t it feel that way? Or am I actually deliriously happy and just don’t realize it? Is there more to this zen thing than meets the eye?

Boost Your Signal to Noise Ratio – Self Care Month Day 5

In olde internet times, we would talk about the quality of the information we’d encounter by referring to the good stuff as “signal” and all the other crap as “noise”. So a high signal-to-noise ratio mean that the group or community was enjoyable and useful. If the ratio was low, then that meant it was mostly people cluttering up a space and not contributing anything good. Believe it or not, back in olde times most of us actually cared about adding only good, quality information to the places we congregated.

Today, however, even before current political events, the whole of the internet is full of noise. Oh, you can still find good stuff if you hunt for it, but often it gets drowned out by the crap. And often the crap just makes us all feel… crappy.

Most of our noise tends to show up on social media, where we put up with links and posts by friends who we care about, even if we don’t really care about the topic they’re discussing. So today, to make your life more serene, some filtering tools for social media.

Facebook Purity is a plugin for the desktop that allows users to filter pretty much every single thing that shows up on a Facebook page, from all the stuff in the sidebars to certain types of posts. If you really don’t want to know that your Uncle Bob liked that post about the white supremacist, well you can filter that. Facebook Purity also offers a text-based filter, which means that all you have to do is add “Trump” to that box and any post that mentions the US president by name will not show up in your feed. Some stuff might still get through – it does not work on shared posts or posts where someone refers to him as “that asshole” instead of by your filtering term, but it does a great job of clearing out the majority of stuff you don’t want to see. Sadly this plug-in only works on desktops, and not on mobile devices. For my own sanity, I’ve deleted Facebook from my phone, but I totally get how that can be the hardest thing ever to actually do.

For Twitter, I am a huge fan of the app Twitteriffic. This one is mobile only, and not desktop, but it also allows users to “muffle” tweets based on user name, hashtag or text. Muffled tweets show up in your feed with minimal info, typically user plus the topic/user/hashtag you’ve muffled, which allows you to open that post or ignore it.

Don’t forget that muting on Twitter or unfollowing on Facebook are also great ways to take a break from someone without removing them completely, or without them knowing that you just can’t deal with their shit at the moment.

Do not feel obligated to read all the stuff in your social media feeds, especially if it stresses you out. You are absolutely allowed to filter, cull or even take a complete break if you feel the need.

And finally, please consider using good Netiquette – if you are writing or sharing posts on social media about things like Trump, make sure you’re using common keywords (“Donald Trump” instead of “Lord Dampnuts” for instance…) or hashtags to make it easier for others to filter out those posts if they don’t want to see them, while still being able to read the other, non-triggering stuff that you’re posting.

Me, I Disconnect From You

My husband is a huge Louis C. K. fan. When it was announced that C.K. would headline the JFL42 Festival taking place in Toronto in September, Greg’s brain near exploded with glee. More so when it was announced that another major act would be comedian Patton Oswald. But then we started looking at the ticketing system. Besides a whole bar code thing that prevents people from selling or passing on tickets to events if they can’t use them, it turns out that the only way to order tickets to JFL42 was via Facebook.

Too bad for me then that I’ve deactivated my Facebook account and have no plans at present to use it again.

I get that the festival organizers are trying to be hip or wired in or something, but the whole thing is incredibly illogical, particularly the part requiring attendees to use a particular social media platform to take part.

Over the past few months, while I’ve still been online in some capacity and still check a pared down Twitter feed every day, I’ve been using social media a lot less. At first, this was so that I could concentrate on getting my book written. Most of my previous writing gigs had required that I be tuned in to the local restaurant scene and it was actually a relief to stop worrying about who was opening what where, and which chefs were leaving to open their own businesses, etc.

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