#103: The one thing we can control.
Reducing inputs, options, and reasons to feel like I’m missing out.
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“What is all this crap??” I blurted into the crisp Swedish air.
I was sitting on the tiny porch of my even tinier log cabin, strides away from an unpronounceable lake, checking email.
The practicalities of a home, kids, and responsibilities kept me from an email-free pilgrimage. But as the days unfolded and my routine of communing with nature, myself, and my lunchtime cheese-and-cucumber sandwich solidified, almost every email crowding my inbox began to look more and more strange. Intrusive. Preposterous.
Not the ones with bills or the notes from friends. But the ones selling me things I didn’t need, telling me news I didn’t care about, hitting me up for donations for this or that university I didn’t want to support.
Why was I giving these so much of my time??
In my Virgina-suburbs life, I’d have opened these missives, read the first few lines, then ignored them. Maybe I’d leave some unread, hoping to come back to them later, make a featured recipe contained within, ponder an idea highlighted in the text. But on the pilgrim trail? It just seemed like death by a thousand cuts. Compared to the free-wheeling hens, the surprise lakes, the hidden-in-plain-sight trolls, these emails didn’t deserve even five seconds of my attention.
Buddhist Dave helped me understand why these emails infuriated me so much.
They didn’t just steal my time, they stole my peace.
Every time I thought, “I don’t have time to make this vegetarian lasagne recipe from the NY Times now but I’ll save this email so I can sometime soon,” I started a vicious cycle. I’d see the email again in my inbox, or randomly just remember the lasagne recipe, and a little pang of “shit, I haven’t done that yet” would wince through me.
Emails like this started to cause me to feel disgust with myself. Disgust that I’m not superwoman, that I don’t have time to do it all, that I’m not cooking more meals at home, that I’m prioritizing the wrong things, that I’m a terrible mother, that I’m going to die of diabetes… Omg, how did I get here??
An email. A well-meaning, “here’s a delicious recipe” email.
It’s not really the email’s fault — it’s just the way my brain categorizes and then relates to the contents of the email.
I started paying more attention and these were some of the surprising reactions I had to emails:
FOMO — Omg that bomber jacket is so cute. I’ll just keep an eye out for when it goes on sale…
Despair — Just another terrible thing in the world I can’t really do anything about.
Self-judgement — Jim got a big promotion! I wonder where I would be if I hadn’t retired early… Now I’m just irrelevant…
Overwhelm — Another recipe I don’t have time to cook, a newsletter I don’t have time to read, a workout routine I don’t have time to try.
What good was all this information if I couldn’t interact with it without feeling bad?
Was the excess information actually helpful if at the same time it was sapping my hard-won peace?
More information does not mean more happiness.
In fact, it might be the opposite — especially when we’ll use the information to berate ourselves.
There are never going to be more than 24 hours in the day, and it’s highly unlikely we’re going to discover a new productivity hack that finally makes it possible for us to do all the things we’ve been putting off for ages. So why do we stay engaged with the firehose of news, sales, tips, editorials?
Probably because we don’t realize how much the onslaught is wearing us down.
Since the pilgrimage, I’ve become aware of how things I had previously thought of as insignificant were actually pulling me farther from both my goals and my contentment.
Nothing like being under-stimulated for four weeks to realize you’ve actually been over-stimulated for years.
Since I’ve been home, I’ve been smashing those psychic mosquitos in all sorts of ways:
Un. Sub. Scribing. From. Everything!!!!
Getting rid of the books that I’m never going to read, so I stop judging myself for having bought them and never cracked their spines.
Keeping my work space clear of clutter so when I sit down to work I actually work.
Putting catalogs, bulletins, and "limited time!!” offers straight in the recycling.
Hiding the TikTok app on my phone.
And suddenly… I feel in control.
Over the last seven years I’ve been realizing how much I can’t control, and learning to be okay with that.
The kids are going to do whatever extra-curricular’s they want; my investments are going to ride the stock market waves; my body is going to continue to soften no matter how many kettlebells I swing and pool laps I swim.
But now I’m realizing that there is one MAJOR way I can control my life — I can control how I spend my time, where I allocate my brain space, and what I give my attention to on a daily basis.
We can’t control what life throws us, but we can control what we fill our lives with.
FOMO and self-judgment will probably still plague me, but I don’t have to give them my email address, read their messages first thing in the morning, and create special folders where I save them for years!
If I miss that adorable bomber jacket going on sale, who cares. It’s worth it to trade obsessively scouring emails and always feeling like I’m falling behind for sipping coffee and watching the autumn leaves swirl.
This is a choice I didn’t know I had. Now I will never go back.
Uninformed and at peace,
Yes!! Reading this newsletter while drinking coffee and watching the autumn leaves swirl, I recognized a kindred spirit.
I first began shedding input during Covid, when I was isolated and sad and first realized that could do nothing about the parade of tragedies, so why was I letting them into my life, where they sat and festered and mocked me, contributing to my black, sad mood?
It’s a constant project. The newsletters from the Washington Post and The Atlantic, which I used to enjoy, now go directly to junk mail because they now are only about politics and add nothing to my day; in fact they are a detriment.
It’s so freeing *not to know—or care.* Highly recommended.
Glad you’re finding this peace as well.
The only downside is that these days everyone’s life events are announced on Facebook. No more cute baby announcements snail mailed to you; no more personal communication. So I miss a lot. But eventually I find out. Alas.
Happy Saturday.
Sheryl