Reframe Your Inbox (What Is Time, Anyway? 🤷‍♂️ Edition)

Hey everyone. I don’t know about you, but this week was the one when the days really started to run together. Not necessarily at any given moment—my sense of what day it is remains relatively intact, at least for now—but when I think back over the past few months, my understanding of the passage of time is getting seriously skewed.

The realer and realer the impacts of this virus become, the surreal-er and surreal-er it is to witness it from our little bubble in north London. The dividing line between our individual existence (day-to-day life in our apartment universe) and the rest of humanity’s existence has never felt sharper. Erin and I are living our own lives in person. Everything else—everything else, from what’s happening in the news, to what our friends are up to, to what we have to do for work—is on a screen.

There’s a lot of privilege and good fortune baked into that, of course. Not everyone has the opportunity to hunker down and ride this thing out from the comfort of their couch. But that doesn’t make the experience any less strange.

Heavy stuff to start this week’s newsletter. Not sure where that came from. Here are four things for the week.

FIRST THING

The best email that shows up in my work inbox every week is the “Friday Thought” from my friend Dan Gray. Last Friday (or was it two Fridays ago? At this point, what is time, anyway?), Dan wrote:

What a wonderful and powerful opportunity [this moment] is – to not return to “business as usual” once the crisis fades, but to preserve some of the good that will have come out of it as a “new normal.” To not bin those new ways we found to stay connected and have fun together. To retain and build on that deeper sense of our interdependence; to devote ourselves more fully to the ideals, people and relationships that are truly important to us, and to the health of the communities around us. And, yes, to keep reminding ourselves that maybe we don’t need to travel as much as we used to. […]

It won’t erase the months of hardship and tragedy that will have befallen so many. But it can at least mean that we emerge from the experience wiser – more conscious of the precariousness of so many people’s lives, and more acutely aware of the impact of our behaviors on people and planet.

Read the full post on Dan’s blog. And check out his book, Live Long and Prosper: The 55-Minute Guide to Building Sustainable Brands.

SECOND THING

The more the world seems to spiral out of control, the more important it is to control what you read about it:

When I manage to build self-imposed barriers around my news intake, I find my days are substantially less anxiety-prone and noticeably more fulfilling, without any decrease in how “up to speed” I feel about the events of the moment. In fact, waiting until a story has time to develop probably improves my knowledge of the facts and sharpens my understanding of their significance.

Implementing these self-imposed barriers hasn’t required any dramatic changes. I’ve simply tweaked the “what” and the “when” of how I consume media. These days, the “what” is a little less of the breathless drama and outrage and rumor-mongering that will be forgotten or supplanted by more breathless drama and outrage and rumor-mongering tomorrow, and a little more of the publications that require some work to process. It’s a little less time “doomscrolling” coronavirus headlines first thing in the morning, and a little more time focusing on activities that I control, like reading a meaningful book or meditating. […]

None of these tweaks to my media diet leave me metaphorically (or literally) off-the-grid. When it comes to phenomena like the coronavirus that impact every single person on earth, it’s unrealistic — not to mention irresponsible — not to keep up with what’s happening. Even before the virus began its traumatic and terrifying spread around the world, we were living in scary and surreal times. And just when we thought things might not be able to get scarier and more surreal, they have. Of course we’re going to be reading and talking and thinking about it constantly.

The argument here is not to build an alternative reality or cover your ears and pretend like everything’s fine. The argument here is entirely the opposite. The better you calibrate your news intake, the more informed you’ll actually be. The less you let yourself be yanked around by the emotional roller coaster of Twitter rumors and Reddit conspiracy theories, the more clearly you’ll actually understand the events around you. Most importantly, the more effectively you structure how you consume news, the more capable you’ll be of devoting your time and attention to taking care of yourself and the people you love.

The uncertainty of the present moment has left many of us desperate to reclaim a sense of control. When we check Twitter compulsively, or when we binge-read anxiety-inducing news stories, we feel like we’re taking control by collecting more information. In reality, though, the information — and the algorithm that delivers that information to us — is the one in charge. We’re not going to find any answers or any peace of mind in the seventeenth browser tab or the third hour of online perusing. Every time we pull-to-refresh, the world feels a little more out of control. One of the few things we, as individuals, still control is how we interact with it.

Read more of this (substantially modified) excerpt from Reframe the Day on Medium: You Are Not Obligated to Follow the News Every Minute of Every Day.

THIRD THING

For the past few years I’ve been wrestling with the tension between what I’ve found I love doing—writing and publishing—and what I feel like I should be doing, which is fighting the good fight in some form—volunteering, campaigning, making phone calls, contributing some type of public service. I explore this tension in more than one chapter of Reframe the Day. I also wrote about it here. And here. And, clearly, here in this newsletter.

You may have been wondering why I’m donating profits from the book’s preorder sales to the coronavirus response efforts of Direct Relief. (Or, perhaps you’re not wondering this at all.) The main reason is obvious: Like many of us, I want to do a tiny part to help out, beyond just staying home and socially distancing. But another reason is that it’s a small way to finally align what I want to be doing with what I should be doing. It doesn’t resolve this tension—I doubt anything will—but at least it feels like these two things are sort of swimming in same direction for a bit.

(I won’t know the profits from preorders for a few months, so I’ve made a contribution to Direct Relief in advance and will top up the difference as soon as I get the numbers. If you’re curious, check out the work Direct Relief is doing in response to the crisis.)

FOURTH THING

I’ve heard from many of you who have already preordered Reframe the Day. Some of you have even ordered multiple copies. (Shout out to my friend Micael for discovering, and then purchasing, the maximum number of copies one can get in a single Amazon order: eight.) All I can say is: THANK YOU.

If you’re interested in/waiting for the e-book version, stay tuned—it’ll be live soon!

Stay safe, everyone. Thanks for reading.

—Adam