My dear readers—hello, friends and family!—may (or may not) have noticed that I did not post to the Inquisitive Individualist last night. What gives? Am I done inquiring? Of course not! Instead of typing, I was reading, thinking through, and solving problem sets from Cabral’s1 Industrial Organization textbook in anticipation for my economics midterm today.2
While this may sound like a slog, at first blush, it was actually intensely pleasurable. In the modern age of email, Instagram, text, and Twitter notifications ceaselessly vying for one’s attention, we—I—find myself constantly multitasking. Flitting to and fro from this microtask to another while procrastinating3 on the important items.
To deliberately silence these notifications and commit oneself to major mental effort is not just crucial to being productive but to achieving tranquility. What’s so great about tranquility? Well, if one likes happiness, one must first achieve peace of mind:
Happiness consists in tranquillity and enjoyment. Without tranquillity there can be no enjoyment; and where there is perfect tranquillity there is scarce any thing which is not capable of amusing.4
I don’t know about the reader, but I experience neither tranquility nor contentment while sorting my inbox or feverishly responding to messages. Instead, I experience both these things, i.e., I flow, when the entirety of my attention, focus, and energy is directed at one major thing—not 50 trivial ones.
If the reader is an athlete or fond of physical fitness, she’ll immediately understand the state I’m describing. When you have your iPhone silenced, music playing, and your entire physical force and endurance is focused on one more rep, everything else falls away. Such is the case with performing a technically demanding song or solving Luis Cabral’s “challenging” problems at the end of his textbook’s chapters.
The power of putting one’s iPhone on focus mode, silencing these (almost always) frivilous distractions, and actually doing something substantive is edifying and incredibly enjoyable.
If you want to get real work done and be happy in so doing, embrace myopia.
Shout-out to Prof. Luis Cabral of New York University for his third whole feature.
Wish me luck!
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), III.iii.