Cost of modern lifestyle
This article by Dr Piotr Wozniak is part of SuperMemo Guru series on memory, learning, creativity, and problem solving.
Introduction
Billions of people live a modern lifestyle in a dog-eat-dog society. Rat race have devastating health consequences. However, do we truly know when we are part of it?
Using my scant experience of a two year "experiment", I hypothesize that it is very hard to sense the damage incurred by modern speed and modern cravings. I insist that the safest bet is to focus on productive creativity with an eye to long-term value.
Experimenting with "normal life"
For 3 months, I had an opportunity to experience modern lifestyle without many of the guidelines I hail in Formula for a happy life. I was extremely surprised by the degree of the drop in well-being. What is even more scary, I could not sense the problem until the 3 months were well over. While incurring potential damage to health, I did not sense the threat. Could it be that mankind is losing a great deal of its own potential by not following simple rules needed for maintaining health and a creative mind?
In January 2022, I became involved in organizing a student strike in Poland. The idea was born in a Discord talk that involved representatives of four student organizations. By January, there were some promising signs, that the idea of strike for freedom might succeed. From day to day, I took more and more jobs associated with the strike. Living my life ran by Plan seemed no longer sustainable! I decided to experimentally give up on many of my rules needed for maintaining health so that I could increase chaotic workload. The strike was scheduled to begin on Mar 21, 2022, so I figured that trying out "normal lifestyle" would be a great opportunity to see how it affects the mind, health, productivity, etc. Treating the experience as an experiment helped me plunge into the chaos with no regrets. I tried to use it for the good of science!
Of dozens of micro-rules, I gave up most except those that protect sleep, and exercise. I limited my exercise to only a hurried hour of soccer. My daily schedule was composed of chaos, followed by my exercise-cum-meal-cum-siesta rituals, followed by chaos till late in the night. This was fun time with a great deal of adventures, and solid productivity aimed at a single goal. However, when the transition to my usual well-organized life occurred, for a longer while I felt like a different man. I was most worried about the loss of creativity, the loss of the learn drive, and a substantial drop in sports performance (e.g. jogging). My sleep seemed less refreshing. When things turn out like that, there is an extra blow from a defeatist thought: "Could this be aging?". I keep telling people that a healthy brain can keep a healthy body, and the sense of aging is born of our anxiety of becoming less healthy, or less productive with age. I keep blasting my friends for age-related complaints (e.g. "My memory isn't as good as when I was younger", etc.). Krzysztof Biedalak humorously destroyed my suspicions: "If this lifestyle was so damaging, I would have long been dead. I have lived it for the last three decades".
Chaotic lifestyle
Here are some details on my 3 months experimental "normal" lifestyle:
- my sleep was protected as always (no change)
- my sports were limited to one hour of football (often in darkness)
- warmup exercise before sports were very sketchy, disorganized, interwoven with other activities and incomplete (resulting in injuries)
- I nearly ruined an interesting record. I completed a decade without using any form of mechanized transport. The trip to the beach party on the first day of school strike was to involve a bus. In the end, students chose a few kilometers walk on foot. My record run free from transport was not affected
- I engaged in a great deal of activity on social media. If this happens at 3 am, it can affect the sleep. No "protected zone" often results in going to sleep later. The sleep may be shorter and less productive
- the most painful side effect of social media turned out to be the interruption. Again and again, with increasing frequency, I would start my voice conversations with "let me just finish the sentence" (while writing). This resulted in the disruption to the flow of thought, and many creative insights were lost
- another problem with social media is the lack of incremental tools. SuperMemo does not integrate well with Discord or Facebook. The action is too fast to keep a record, or organize. At the same time, if I cannot "stop" without preserving a full record of activity at the moment, I am becoming a slave of the tool. I need to continue to prevent disruption or potential losses (see: School strike concept network)
- I noticed a significant drop in creativity! I am accustomed to waking up with ideas. First thought of the day often determines the course of the day. Instead of being propelled by ideas, I was propelled by events, by people, by urgency, or by stress
- my usual sleep pattern stabilization problem stems from waking up too late. In those 3 months, I tended to sleep less and wake up early or too early
- I lost my urge to start the day with SuperMemo. Usually, I accept a few item repetitions as an appetizer before the main creativity slot. In those 3 months, I used SuperMemo mostly for strike related learning. I did not feel the morning urge. Most of my learning was determined by current needs
- my learn drive flattened. I was passionate about all things associated with the strike, and little else. Perhaps that serves the cause, but when all the colors of the world turn bland, it must be bad for development
- my trailing learn time in my main SuperMemo collection dropped to all time minimum on the third day of strike: 22 minutes (down from 90 min in October 2021, and 185 min some two years earlier). Similarly, trailing learn time in my incremental video collection dropped from 23 min. to 5 min. I still processed a great deal of lectures non-incrementally spurred by urgency rather than long-term importance
- creativity associated with incremental reading was weakened by monothematic nature of learning. Instead of the usual flow of knowledge, I had to rely on subset review to quickly learn things needed for individual projects
- after the strike, in recovery phase, for 1-2 weeks I was lethargic as if in drug withdrawal. This must have been a change in the balance of neurotransmitters. My stimulants came from stress and chaos. I was like an officer at war. My recovery from the slowdown came through learning, creativity, and exercise (primarily long-distance running and cold-water swimming). It is important to stress that the change in well-being was noticeable only in the transition period (as if the brain was missing the action of the war)
- in recovery, I did as much learning as possible and used all creative opportunity I could take. I did not mind watching interviews with Russian soldiers at 4 am, or digging into some complex bugs in SuperMemo. I would maximize the creative flow with little care for rationally set priorities. As expected, a rational direction is emergent. One cannot unlearn one's passions in 3 months of chaos
- my optimal diet failed me. Despite following the prescription (more or less). I gained 3.8 kg in 3 months (maximum recorded vs. minimum recorded). The gains were mostly registered in injury periods. However, I could literally sense becoming less sprightly in sports. When I resumed jogging in March, for the first time in my life, I seemed limited by the ability to take in enough oxygen. In the past, it was always muscle, tendons or injuries that would slow me down
- at the moment of writing (Jun 18, 2022), incremental increase in jogging (currently trying a stable 13 km barefoot daily) seems to have resulted in longer sleep, more refreshing sleep, improved jogging performance, and a remarkable stretch of injury free period
- my best formula for recovery in sports is religiously incremental prep plan for the summer ultramarathon. The marathon was to provide a good yardstick for the recovery. If my result was better than any of the last 5-7 years, I would know the "damage" was undone. On June 29, 2022, the yardstick test was inconclusive due to changes in the route, however, I celebrated minimal injury. This could possibly by explained by being particularly religious and incremental in the last 700 km of preparations
- I apologize for all the unanswered mail. I managed to skim 80% of the mail but did not have mail slots long enough to prioritize and import to SuperMemo, let alone reply. I am still to recover from 1616 pieces backlog (as of July 6, 2022)
Loss of creativity
I am a creativity prima donna. Perhaps I am overly dramatic. However, the scale of the change surprised me a lot. I always thought that messy life can be over in minutes. I believed that the mess can be terminated easily with getting down to preparing a good schedule. I thought that recovery would be as fast as a full night sleep after an all-nighter. If the change surprised me, I bet, there are many things I still do not appreciate enough. People read my formula for happy life and usually report on how difficult it is to implement. Today, I agree more. Just a few factors can upset the balance in life. What is worse, during the mess period, I was never really in any kind of coercive situation where my freedom was limited. I plunged into all activities voluntarily, with pleasure and pride. Freedom is what many people still cannot afford, esp. at adolescence. If a free man can mess up so easily, what does it say of modern lifestyle
Recovery
July 6, 2022: I propose a litmus test to detect if things go well in life:
In the last 3 months (Apr-Jun 2022), I made a solid transition from the messy state of short sleep and problems to the state, in which I wake up with ideas! Off the top of my head, the most important factors were:
- religious Plan that adjusts the life to the circadian cycle
- daily long distance jogging that purifies the mind (singular focus)
- packaging social media to the usual "fast and tense" slot before exercise (the same slot in which I used to limit myself to e-mail)
- starting the day with a fat block of creative slots centered on SuperMemo
On July 10, 2022: I symbolically declared the recovery process complete. On a hot summer day, I tried 60 minutes of heavy "aquathlon" in which I ran for 7 km with short swims every 300 meters (interestingly, the aquathlon was done with no vision correction, which provided extra psychological boost to the effort). Totally exhausted, having done a thorough introspection, I sensed the times of lesser productivity are over. The recovery took as long as the duration of the "modern lifestyle" experimental period.
Re-testing chaos
In 2023, there was another school strike. Again, I got involved. Again, the involvement lasted 3 months. However, I did not want to incur similar "injuries" as a year ago. Here are a couple of differences between 2022 and 2023:
- I was far more reliant on a strict schedule
- I engaged in the chaos of social media only in strictly determined slots (before exercise)
- I was more careful about "protected zones" before sleep (see: How to solve any problem)
- I participated in the annual 15 km race on Mar 19, 2023 (one day before the rally preceding the school strike). As I always run barefoot, this necessitated a regular jogging in the preceding month to avoid injury
- I was more methodical with incremental reading (some help came from the fact that I could focus on subjects closer to learning, such as education reform)
- I was roughly 2.5 kg lighter throughout. This is a good litmus test of well-being as I do not use any form of dieting (see: Optimal diet)
- after 3 months, my e-mail backlog was 3x less despite similar time allocation. This was a result of a heavier reliance on incremental mail processing in SuperMemo
- I did not see much change in creativity and the learn drive
- on July 3, 2023, on the hottest day in Earth's history, I completed an 18-hour ultramarathon in a relatively good shape. I closed the experiment on the chaos of modern lifestyle. Nothing beats life based on Plan (see: Planning a perfect productive day without stress)