A couple of things on my mind this morning.
One of my favorite quotes I’ve come across in the past year is this one, from Marcus Aurelius:
Ask, ‘Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?’ You’ll be embarrassed to answer.
It’s a reminder that most of the outcomes we fear are not as terrifying as we think. It’s a reminder to spend time in advance of bad outcomes thinking through how we will react. If I lose my job, will I really be as screwed as I’m telling myself? What am I forgetting? During the pandemic, that mentality has helped me put all of my complaints and fears in perspective, which in turn made the things I was complaining about and afraid of much easier to deal with.
So why is this on my mind? Well, last week I broke my Apple Watch. I dropped it at exactly the right angle to crack the heart rate monitor, rendering much of the analytics useless and causing the battery to die every 30 minutes. My Apple Watch has been my favorite thing I own since I bought one five years ago. It’s a core part of how I track my running and other health metrics, and an effective way to stay connected to my phone without having to check it constantly. It is a 10/10 product, zero complaints.
So I was understandably annoyed when the watch broke. I would have to shell out a few hundred dollars for a new one, which wasn’t ideal, but what choice did I have – this was a critical piece of my life! I couldn’t go without it.
Well, that happened two weeks ago, and I’ve been using my old Timex ever since. My broken watch is sitting in my nightstand, and I’ve been tracking my runs with MapMyRun, the app I used before I bought that first Apple Watch. In the span of two weeks I’ve gone from having a 10/10 product I felt I couldn’t live without to… living without it. And I’ve been completely fine.
There is a Stoic practice of intentionally exposing yourself to hardship and adversity, and while I’m not sure that makes sense for more extreme examples, it’s incredibly useful for technology and other material goods. We should ask ourselves “why is this so unbearable?” whenever we feel that necessity towards something. We all feel we couldn’t live without our phones, but people did so just fine not too long ago. We all feel like we need big wardrobes, kitchen appliances and the like, but it’s worth asking what life would look like without them. Even better, it’s worth experiencing life without them. “Why can’t I endure it?”
Minimize Yourself
This isn’t some philosophical garbage. It’s a tactical recommendation that has changed my life for the better in the last week: Minimize yourself on video calls. I’d read in a few places that one of the hardest parts about remote work was the obligation to stare at yourself every day, and I think that has some merit. It is exhausting to see yourself speak as you do so. The inclination to moderate your appearance is too great to overcome, even though we don’t do this in normal, face-to-face conversation.
So hide yourself from the screen and see how it feels. For me, it was a huge relief.