Disconnect to live.

This week I disconnected from my IM and cell phone. No texting, no chatting.

It transformed my life in crazy ways which I hadn’t expected. I wake up before 9am, sometimes already at 6am. I am living more in the present moment. I get things done with joy and cleaned my room. I exercise to play the piano. I feel good! Let’s focus a bit more on why this small change affected me so much.

Less Distraction.

There is silence in my head. No unnecessary smalltalk with friends, no texting out of boredom. I become bored and choose an activity which excites me most. There’s no need to distract myself from boredom, I just stop being bored. Distracting yourself from boredom is distracting yourself from life itself.
I don’t want to talk down chatting or texting with your friends. But I consider that I would rather want someone to talk to me out of his own interest in talking with me instead of out of boredom. I think I may devaluate my conversations if talking out of boredom, with no reasonable intent?

More satisfaction.

I experience much more satisfaction. I tend to eat out of boredom to experience some kind of emotions right away, but that’s really lazy. Now I rather try to find something of real emotional value to me. This approach works really well. While the positive emotional reaction to food descents relatively fast, other activities give me much more satisfaction. Plus, there is the satisfaction after the activity itself. After eating a donut I feel guilty of eating it with no hunger and out of boredom. Instead, after doing something enjoyable (and maybe challenging?) I rather feel proud of me. There is longer lasting happiness, which I would not experience directly picking up my cell phone when noticing boredom.

What’s boredom anyway?

When I was a child my mother used to tell me only stupid people get bored. The intelligent man becomes creative in finding an activity. Boredom itself is nothing evil, although I tended to judge it that way. But if you think about it, all it does is indicating your activities current level of excitement. If you are bored, there’s no life force flowing through you. All your soul wants from you now is to choose another activity. But many people tend to suffer from boredom instead of appreciating it. Imagine your car’s gas tank being empty, so your car is bored and has no life force flowing through it (no fuel). What do you do? Fill it up with fuel! You don’t cry that it’s life has come to an end. It’s not over. There is nothing incredible happening. Compare your boredom to the gas tank. It’s only an indicator. How you react is your own choice.

Suprisingly, Joshua Becker from Becoming Minimalist wrote also about “Less Texting. More Living.” a while ago. Check out his blogpost, it really resonates with me. Although he encourages us to use our phones less often instead of shutting it down, he’s also saying that texting distracts us from our present lives.

I love the changes in my life. Maybe you want to go completely offline for a week, too? It will change your way of living. And remember, boredom is only an indicator and nothing lasting. Choose something that excites you.

Geschrieben am Montag, 07. Juni 2010 und abgelegt unter Simplicity, happiness. Verfolgen Sie die Diskussion zu diesem Beitrag per RSS 2.0 Feed. Sie können diesen Beitrag kommentieren oder einen Trackback von Ihrer eigenen Webseite setzen.