I’ve Spent 80 Hours In Silence And Now I See Dead People

What happened when cave people got their first phones

This week marks 80 hours of doing absolutely nothing in my daily commute.

80. Hours. Of. Nothing.

I have been through boredom and come out the other side. I can’t imagine ever being bored again. (This is a new superpower that would have been very helpful when the kids were young. It could have really come in handy watching In The Night Garden.)

The whole point is to gain wonderful benefits in the rest of my life, so generally that’s what I write about. I don’t normally talk about the experience of the commute itself. And with good reason.

Since joining Substack I’ve really enjoyed reading writers like Leyla Kazim, who combine brilliant writing about midlife reinvention with the beauty of rural Portugal. What you get here is me describing how I am worried about the stupid thing I said at work combined with the beauty of the Bank/Monument Complex.

An ally kindly took this photo for me to show that actually it isn’t all gloom on the commute. Look at this excessively cheery gambling advert brightening our day.

I was hoping I could find some beauty in the commute. After 80 hours I was hoping to be like the guy in American Beauty who videos the plastic bag. By now I should be telling you why seats on the tube are secretly beautiful. Unfortunately they have remained resolutely seats.

Although it’s not euphoric, it is pleasant. It’s a haven. When I close my eyes, the rhythmic movement, the ruffle and fuffle can be soft and cushioning. I can get quite focused here. I’ll come back to this.

The other day I opened my eyes, and someone asked me if I was meditating. I said no, not so much, more than anything I was just deliberately not using the phone.

They said oh, okay. And left me to it.

And that was the only thing that happened on the commute that whole week.

So I’ve had a lot of time to chew on their question, and what I should have actually said. (If they’d have stayed to listen to a crazy middle-aged man wearing high vis).

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Meditation, phones and me

I first became interested in meditation as Tactic 458 in my long-running battle against the phone. I've been doing it for a year and a half now.

I learnt there’s a lot of options available.

The standard advice is to go to a quiet place, set a timer for a short period, sit and concentrate on your breath. When your mind wanders, you gently bring it back.

Others say as long as you concentrate on any aspect of the present moment - like sounds for example - and then train your attention to come back to it, then that works too. Others go further with the same idea, and focus on chanting.

Some types of meditation need no object of focus at all, but ask you to be fully aware of what’s going on in your head. (Easier said than done.)

The variety is endless. People are relaxed about eyes open, eyes closed. Sitting in any posture is fine. Standing is fine, as is walking. There is an honourable tradition of using simple chores like gardening as meditation.

After a while, one begins to suspect the word has become a little meaningless - in popular culture I mean. Sure, it’s generally solitary and there’s a unified respect for a daily training ethos. But If you ask, “can I meditate while doing x” there’s probably someone out there who’d agree with it. You might start to think… what isn’t meditation?

But there’s one red line. One thing that can’t go anywhere near it. One thing that feels anathema to meditation. Phones.

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The opposite of phones

The idea seems immediately absurd. Of course scrolling couldn’t count as meditation.

When you line up phones and meditation, they seem opposites in every way.

Science says heavy phone use is bad for your mental health. The heavier the usage, the worse you will feel.

Science says meditation is very good for you. There have been thousands of clinical trials now evaluating different types of meditation. The broad headline is after 8-10 weeks you feel a great deal better.

If we’re completely honest about the science, in neither case is it 100 per cent clear exactly why.

But I could take a guess from my felt experience:

• Meditation says focus on the present moment. Phones say Hey look at these photos of when your kids were tiny, now they are big and you are old. Oh, and soon AI is going to take your job and we’re all going to die.

• Meditation is about where you are. Phones constantly transport you to the other side of the world, often in the company of Donald Trump.

• Meditation says look inward. Phones say Nah, look at everyone else, look at their beautiful living room, look at their new job on LinkedIn.

• Meditation is about accepting dissatisfaction, that you don’t know and that’s okay. Phones say, Uh oh better check that. Oo, what’s next in the scroll. Now check that first thing again - might have changed.

• Meditation says you must anchor your mind in the body. Phones say Screw that! You’re just a floating mind. Stand for hours with your back hunched over and your pathetic finger moving up and down, doesn’t matter. I once visited that place in the Netherlands where they show you the inside of the human body. To see a collection of organs and muscles holding a phone looks weirdly absurd.

• Meditation is about mental training, sharpening focus and placing your attention. Phones are… do I even need to finish this one?

In all of the above cases, the absolutely crucial thing is that the effects aren’t just felt in the moment - they set a mental baseline in a way that makes the original cause hard to identify.

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Humans have a default setting

Much of what meditation “says” is entirely obvious, true and unremarkable. We do have a body and are in the present moment.

These truths would have been evident to cave people. But then once cave people used their first computers, their minds started to depart from this default setting.

Fortunately when they they shut down their computers (with Windows 95 they had to do it properly, they couldn’t just hit a button) their minds settled back into their baseline.

Then the cave people got phones, which were the first devices that could be used 24/7. Phones are so compelling and useful that they have entirely eradicated what would have been incidental mental rebalancing.

Previously the cave people would have got their mental reset waiting for the bus or waiting to pick up their cave kids or walking from the train station back to their cave. Those gaps are now gone, because the phone fits into any hole. (I wrote about that here, I think it might be my favourite piece). No-one planned the eradication but it happened all the same.

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The real price of getting a phone

Take physical exercise as a parallel example. Our ancestors would have cheerfully got exercise from hunting mammoths. At a certain point, human civilisation noticed the eradication of that incidental exercise. And CrossFit was born.

Yes, many argue today you can get your physical exercise incidentally. Yes such things are possible, especially if your job isn’t sitting at a desk all day.

But many of us have decided that realistically that doesn’t happen, and feel that swinging a kettlebell is a necessary price to pay for enjoying modern life.

I fear it may be the same with phones. They are so useful. And addictive. The gaps that remain aren’t enough. The resultant fog of anxiety is permeating everyone, and might be why the world seems to have spun off its axis since phones appeared.

Unfortunately the way out is far from easy. Phone use makes us so anxious about everything that we then badly need distraction - which we get from phones.

And you can’t just take occasional detoxes, that’s no good for resetting your baseline. Unfortunately neuroplasticity demands consistency to do its thing.

A regular training programme is what lifts your mood and clears the fog.

And so here I am.

Paying the price for having a phone.

In a necessary daily gym for the mind.

Wandering around the Bank/Monument complex.

(If you find drawing a parallel between mental rest and exercise a little odd, last week’s post may help).

That’s what I might have said to the person… if they’d have stuck around for it.

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I see dead people

Before I go, something to confess.

Recently, I’ve felt myself sucked back into Phoneland again. I felt my mood darkening with it. The other day I repeatedly caught myself using the phone without ever having chosen to. It reminds me that the battle with the phone is never fully over. I hate those automatic pickups - I feel so machine-like and dead.

I said there were thousands of types of meditation. I only mentioned the modern ones.

Meditation fans don’t talk much about Asubha Bhavana.

It is the practice of visiting a charnel ground to stare for hours at rotting corpses. The intention is to train the mind to - among other things - counteract lust.

The Tube is the charnel ground of dead, thoughtless scrolling. I can see my own automatic pickups multiplied by a million. I say this with solidarity and contrition - after all, I’m the one who made my daughter cry - but it really puts you off phones.

Actually, on reflection, probably for the best that the guy ended the conversation when he did.

See you next week.