Choosing Not to Binge

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If I am being honest, I love being entertained. As a young boy I loved watching cartoons and movies. In those days, Indian TV channels didn’t have variety. I remember all us kids on summer break piling into a neighbor’s flat because their TV was the only TV that received a grainy signal of Spiderman. No one had cable.

By the sixth of seventh grade, I don’t remember when exactly, we got cable TV in every home. HBO became a household name. It opened the door to a western world that was filled with variety. Way more variety that I was used to. I loved it! Ate it all up!

Now that, I am grown and make my own living, I can access entertainment when and where I like. No parents to nag, no homework to do. The internet modem replaced Cable TV provided even more variety.

To binge meant to over-eat food. Synonyms are engorge, stuff and pig-out. Today, it refers to watching entire seasons of shows in a few sittings. Inhaling it, like you would a drug. Here is The Onion’s jab at it. None of the definitions to binging come from an inspiring place. Another word comes to mind: Cramming, as you would before a test. Cramming can be positive, it means to memorize a lot of subject matter to be successful in a test. But we never say I crammed the second season of Witcher. We say I binged it.

The reason binging fits over cramming is because it is compulsive. No one crams compulsively. Internet-TV hosts like Amazon make binging easy by playing the next episode automatically within seconds after the credits start rolling. You can turn that feature off, as I did, but it didn’t stop me from watching half a dozen seasons of Wheeler Dealer. I have no interest in fixing cars for a living.

Matthew Crawford introduced the idea of Attentional Commons in his book The World Outside Your Head. It is a simple idea, like good ideas are. Crawford proposes untrammeled attention is as valuable as clean air and clean water. We must be free to give our attention to what we choose. At first read, it seems Crawford is talking about Free Will. It also seems our free will is intact so far — Jeff Bezos did not turn on the TV, I did. Bezos did not pick Wheeler Dealer for me, I did. I hit play. And when the show ended, I hit play again to watch the next episode.

Now, imagine a binge-eater’s trouble to choose if every street had an all-you-can-eat restaurant for a low annual subscription of $119. Can you blame them for making the wrong choice? Crawford makes the case that companies with a lot of interest in your attention make it harder and harder for you to make a different choice. Let’s call them Choice Architects — those who are in the business of producing or promoting content you can’t ignore. Shiny new TV shows, Hollywood level CGI, big name performers, and flashy adverts target the same parts of our brain that alert us to the presence of a predator in the Savannah. We are wired for it!

Jeremy Dean said in his book Making Habits Breaking Habits that if we do something weekly then it is a habit, not an intention. At the end of a work day, when I switch on the TV, pick a show and hit play, nobody made me do it. I thought it was my intention and Free Will. But this was the habit working itself out.

This is the recipe for binging: First, Choice Architects plunder our Attentional Commons with sophisticated tools, then our brain habituates and perpetuates. We binge.

Quitting cold-turkey is one option. I considered cancelling my Amazon and Netflix subscription. But I like movies and some of my friends do too. My friends and I have bonded over Crown and Expanse. Last Detective on HBO was a delight of story telling. Jeremy Dean says vigilance can curb the habit at first but the habit comes back stronger. Ask anyone who has tried to quit smoking.

I followed Crawford’s advice and opted for the Epicurean option. Crawford quotes Iris Murdoch:

“Deliberately [changing a habit] is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.”

First, I acquired the habit of reading profusely. And then I made a goal to write about what I read. Collecting good ideas, cultivating them, connecting them together into a rich web, and then writing about them are strong attachment points for the mind. I found they are strong enough to choose the book over the remote control.

Slow Hunch

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Good ideas generally don't come from a bolt of inspiration. They first form as a slow hunch.

Here is the hard part: we have to be open and receptive to slow hunches so they grow in our brain.

The bolt of inspiration lands when a slow hunch crystalizes into an idea. Newton must have been thinking about Gravity before the apple fell. Archimedes must have been immersed in thinking about mass and weight before he had the "Eureka" moment in the bathtub. They all had slow hunches or intuitions.

Here are some of my slow hunches:

  • Re-read books from the last five years that left me sad because I had finished reading them
  • When I don’t feel like following my schedule, it is a sign that I need rest
  • Pick up woodworking again, even if I have not done it in five years
  • Take a pause on my hobby of Grassroots car racing
  • Double down on Attention, hone it, craft it, deepen the roots

Further reading on this topic is “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnson, 2011. It’s on my reading list.

Fleeting Notes

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If I am going to devote a lot of time reading a book, I want to remember what caught my attention. This is my way to honoring the attention I give, by capturing ideas in the book that provide an attachment-point for my attention.

Attention comes from the latin word Tenere which means to stretch and make tense (via Matt Crawford The World Beyond Your Head).

So I take notes as I read.

  • I read with a notepad and pencil by my side
  • I mark the books with a pencil — underline or double vertical lines in the margin
  • This is key — I don’t mark sections that don’t interest me and only mark those ideas make my eyes go wide. My job is not to write a book summary, but to distill those ideas that provide a robust-enough attachment point.
  • I note the page number on a note pad and the name of the idea, just a few words
  • Sometimes I will quickly jot down a connecting thought or story that surfaced so I can explore it later

Once I finish reading, I will use the Fleeting Notes as a prompt to write Literature Notes, more on this another day.

I find this incredibly helpful when I pick up the book after a few days break — a quick refresher of the ideas that caught my eye.

Writing by hand is found to increase retention in a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in 2014.

How do you read non-fiction?

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens