The Unavailable Life

You're listening to The Uppercase Life, and I'm your host, Joseph Brewster. Are you listening? Statistically speaking, you're probably doing something else right now. Driving. Working. Some other task. Is occupying your mind at the same time. You're listening to this podcast. You have an average attention span of 4.2 5 seconds. That's pretty impressive. But it makes sense when you think about the fact that on average, you spend 7 hours a day on devices.
You see between 4010 thousand advertisements every day, both on your devices and just in the environment around you. And you deal with social anxiety, with mental fatigue, with feelings of unresolved tension. But this isn't how you were designed to live. In fact, it's difficult to appreciate just how incredibly fast the culture around us as a species has changed.
For the first time in history, we don't get lost. We constantly have a connection to a global satellite system that can tell us where in the world we are and how to get to where we need to be. For the first time in history, we don't have unanswered questions, so to speak. We have unlimited knowledge, for all intents and purposes, at the touch of a button in our hands.
And boredom today means something different than it used to mean. In fact, it's almost impossible to be bored. We have so many apps and games and movies and TV to watch that there's no possible way in an entire lifetime that you could consume something like YouTube or Netflix. And even our video games now are not designed to end.
They are designed to be open ended and continuous so that you can play these games every day for the rest of your life and not technically beat them. And all of this all of this noise, all of this available ability crowds out something critical to the human experience, something that deeply impacts your mental and physical health, your ability to focus, your investment in your relationships.
All of these things are crowding out stillness. We, as a culture, struggle with stillness. Statistically, we even struggle with taking vacations. So much, so that Americans report having great difficulty not doing work while they're on vacation, or even just relaxing when they're in their beds at night. And it's because we weren't designed for this. Our brains weren't designed for this.
And the great thing is, you have the power to end the tyranny of interruptions and constant availability in your own life to a great extent. And you must, if you want to protect your sanity, if you want to get the most out of every day of your life. And if you want to be in the right mind frame to really enjoy your relationships and to be creative in the long run, and to have ideas that are going to benefit your workflow, you're going to have to cultivate stillness.
So I want to give you what I think are some really vital practices that you need to consider. In fact, I will say if you are not doing these things, I can guarantee you that you're going to be enduring stress, anxiety, exhaustion, and you're going to experience burnout if you're not already. Just wait. It's there. In fact, I would wager that if you cultivated additional stillness in your life, you'd probably identify that you had some stress on your shoulders.
You didn't even realize you had because you hadn't been able to stop long enough to really feel it. Okay, so let's get into this. Four things I want to talk to you about. The first one is tame your technology. Technology is amazing. And listen, technology gets a bad rap. We blame technology as if it's the technology's job to manage our decisions.
And I just want to push back on that and challenge you. It is not your phone's job to protect your focus. That is your job. That phone is a tool and you need to tame it. You need to take control of how and when you interact with your devices. You really need to consider that statistic. Are you spending 7 hours a day on your device?
That's a lot. A lot of time. So take control of how and when you interact with your device, you need to delete some things. You don't need everything you have on your apps, on your television, in your house. I can almost guarantee you you need to tame that technology and delete some of it. There are some things you need to unsubscribe from.
There are some subscriptions you don't need. There are emails you don't need to get their notifications you don't need coming in. Tame that technology. And then here's one that I think is really vital. And a lot of people don't consider physically move some of that technology because let's face it, if you walk into a room and the central feature of that room is an electronic device that's going to suck your time away.
Is that what you want that room to be? So maybe you have a room in which you're going to regularly watch TV, but maybe you need to have some rooms in which there are none. Maybe you need to physically not take your phone into the bathroom with you. Because let's be honest, and I'm guilty of this. You spend more time in the bathroom when you have your phone in your hand.
You are killing time. And it's like, we can't spend a minute and a half in a bathroom stall without a phone because we don't have that long of an attention span. So you can physically move technology as a method of taming it. All right. But technology is not our biggest enemy. So that's it for technology. Let's talk about some other things.
I want to challenge you with an idea of leaving the room, leaving the room, as in not allowing yourself to be available to people. So think historically about the fact that in the past 100 years ago, there were things that we deal with today. There was violence. There was discrimination. There was bullying. But there was an aspect of culture at that time that we don't have today, which was that whenever this was happening, it was by default happening in person.
So if someone was bullying a kid at school, that kid was eventually going to go home. And when that kid went home, there was no social media, there was no texting, there was no tech talk, and they couldn't be bullied from that distance. We don't have that kind of culture now. We allow ourselves to stay in the room at all times.
Have you ever been having a difficult discussion with someone and you're texting them and you're waiting on a reply, but they don't reply right away and you feel stressed out like I don't know how they took that last text. I don't know what they're going to say. And you start feeling this tension of they better respond back. Keep in mind, that is a relatively new thing to experience in most of history.
You either have to physically be in front of that person watching them respond to you, or you'd be sending a telegraph or a letter which would take days, months, maybe even more than a month to reach that person. Now we have to sit with the anxiety of waiting on that response, and we don't allow ourselves to leave the room.
So be socially unreachable at times. And I don't mean being antisocial, I mean engage intentionally in social activities. Community is amazing. People are really vital, but then you need to step out of the room, which means you need to not be available on social media, on text, via email. You need to get out of the room literally and you need to get out of the room metaphorically.
And then when you're leaving that room, be okay with cutting off communications. I regularly do this where I exit my phone and just leave it somewhere. And I tell you what, not just putting it on airplane mode, not just, you know, silencing notifications, physically leaving that device is a method of leaving the room power off things. Make sure that you are making yourself socially unavailable at certain times and intentionally.
And this is not about isolation. This is not about you're dealing with depression and you're retracting from people. This is about making sure that you allow yourself space be...