Why Your Life Needs Quiet
Every time the door to the bathroom at work swings open, I panic and hide my phone. When no one is around, I like to read Medium stories or check instagram whilst peeing.
As using the toilet is not what I would normally call a mentally taxing activity, multitasking seems like a good use of time. Nonetheless, I’m embarrassed if anyone else is around, even though I can justify it to myself.
Recently Ryan Holiday has been a guest on a lot of my favorite podcasts. It seems he’s doing the circuit, promoting his most recent book, “Stillness is the Key.”
By the way, he’s created quite a fascinating life. Surely he’s put in the work. But he seems to have also made some rather deliberate choices regarding where and how to live. There’s definitely a valuable lesson there. But more on that another time.
During his interview with Dr. Peter Attia, it struck my how little stillness most of us allow into our lives. In modern times, much of this lack of quiet, which I’ll call loudness, revolves around our phones and computers.
Perhaps we chalk it up to efficiency, or maybe it’s habit.
Sometimes the term gets thrown around, but this attachment isn’t true addiction. There are no chemical dependencies to staring at a glowing screen. You won’t die from running out of electricity or data; no…
