The Digital Fast

But there’s a quote that I like to come back to called, “Renunciation isn’t punishment, it’s freedom.” And we’ve kind of got to the end— well, we have come to the end now of another Lenten season. And I don’t know if you’re around people— some people may have grown up with this— but if you’re around other people who take on some sort of Lenten sacrifice, you may— I don’t know, anybody, how many people are familiar with this concept? This— okay, so there’s the idea, you know, that you give something up for 40 days of Lent.

And, you know, it’s not common in our culture to have a period of time where you give something up. That’s not exactly what our culture puts forward. And I really respect that spirit of renunciation and this push against the, you know, do, consume, have, do more, you know, kind of the beginning of the year we take on these, sometimes people take on these New Year’s resolutions where we add something and this is kind of a, you know, work to do a subtraction.

And so most years I take up this practice just for myself as something interesting to do. I mean, people who know I did a year of doing the Buddhist 8 precepts once a week where I would like give up sleeping in a bed and not eat dinner and not consume any media of any type during that day. Thank you all for putting up with that year.

But this is something that, you know, I like to poke myself every once in a while about these things. It fits into a lot of different practices. I mean, there’s Stoic practices around this.

There’s— I mean, going on retreat in some way is doing that. There’s the meditation part of it, but there’s a lot that we have to set aside. And what I usually choose, which seems the most pertinent for me, is something in the digital realm.

And be talking a little bit about that because I think it is something that’s a broader issue, and it’s something that ties quite intimately with working with the attention, working with the awareness that we try to cultivate in this practice. So I’m going to give some stuff from a survey that I found that says on average Americans check their phones 262 times a day. Which is roughly once every 3.5

minutes. So during the period of this meditation set, like our meeting here tonight, which most, you know, we don’t have our phones out, that would have been 26 phone looks roughly that we already are setting aside. App developer Peter Mazyck says the success of an app is often measured by the extent to which it introduces a new habit.

And if we open an app every day, developers are satisfied. On social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the more time we spend on the platform, the more advertising revenue comes in. Attention is a currency.

Literally. So 3 criteria are required to form a habit. You have to have sufficient motivation, you have to have an action, you have to have a trigger, according to this app developer.

So there may be a certain feeling or motivation or prerequisite for opening the app at all. And that’s some of what influenced the meditation that I wanted to pick this evening, which is one of the 4 foundations of mindfulness. Often we’re working with the body.

The, the mind is another one of these foundations. Mindfulness, checking in on how the mind is. There’s a feeling, there’s a feeling in the mind.

That’s why we need to open one of these things. This could be anticipation, it could be fear, it could be curiosity, it could be a lot of things. But there’s action that’s then necessary to pull us into this behavioral loop.

We have to click the app. It has to be attractive enough. It has to give us sufficient motivation.

We have to hit a like button. We have to take some action. And the hurdle needs to be as low as possible.

And then whether an action takes place also depends on the trigger, and it’s the trigger that pulls us in— some vibration, the screen lighting up, a notification, something like this. And they also talk quite significantly about supplemental apps versus painkiller apps. So there’s apps that you open that are supplements to what we do each day.

You may have a nice alarm clock on your— you may have something that allows us to look things up that we need to look up. We may have a weather app, see what the temperature is going to be. Supplemental apps.

But then there’s apps that we open that are just there for some other purpose. They don’t serve, or— and often what happens is they start as a supplemental app and feed into the other one. They feed into something that we need to look at because of what our psyche happens to be doing at that moment.

And so it’s really important to be aware of how the mind is acting when we’re going through these things, when we’re interacting with these pieces of technology, because again, there, there’s— attention is currency. To me personally, I think there’s kind of a war for our attention going on. And what we do each week here, what we do with this practice, is working on cultivating the intentionality of that attention.

We sit here, we sat here for 30 minutes and intentionally focused our attention on something specific. Instead of, you know, we can’t just let things wander. We can let things, you know, most of the day where we may focus our attention at work, the rest of the time on our family tasks and things like this.

But there are times where the intention just can kind of go, go go off. And the more and more that that can be directed where money can be generated is, is what other people want and something we need to be aware of. So for me personally, and I’m going to go into some of these other things, I already have myself pretty locked down.

I’ve been working at this for a long time. But some interesting things that I noticed— I noticed this some when I went on my retreat probably 2 years ago when I did the, uh, 7-day retreat at the monastery— is if you go on retreat, it cuts down on a lot of stuff. You usually— you might have a book, but it’s usually some sort of Dharma book.

It is usually not just like super interesting literature around. There’s no TVs, there’s no music really going on. You know, our sensory sensory inputs go way, way, way, way down.

And what I’ve found personally, and I think this happens to other people as well, is that what often becomes our main sensory input throughout a retreat period is food. And if you do this practice, if you watch the mind, if you’re, if you watch the climate of the mind as you’re doing things, and you’re on retreat, you know, you do a sit period, you walk period, sit period, walk period. Yeah, maybe the body’s starting to hurt, there’s some thoughts around that.

But man, you start eating some food, start getting some, you know, the anticipation for food, the sitting down, the eating of the food, like, and then I don’t know, has anybody ever really watched the mind when they’ve eaten food? Is this something people have done on retreat? It really For me, it goes from like, okay, if the mind’s at a nice, like, 10 miles an hour, we’re like at least 50 now. Like that, that just, just from getting some, getting some sensory juice going. And on that retreat, because of transportation logistics of being in a really remote part of Canada, I ended up needing to look at my phone.

I’d had my phone turned off, put away for about 4 or 5 days at that point. And I needed to get the phone out again and turn it on and check one thing and basically send one email and turn it off, make sure that I could get out of the retreat basically at the end of the time when the thing was up. Um, and it was a really interesting experience to notice that the same type of mental acceleration happened.

Just from turning it on and looking at it as I got from eating the food during this period of stillness. And so there’s things again, I’ve taken a pretty strong stance on social media. I don’t use it.

I do happen to have a Facebook account that I was forced to make for a college class. I don’t think I’ve posted in 12+ years. I don’t go on it.

Um, and I don’t have any other accounts, but I do use Reddit. I don’t know how many people are familiar with Reddit, but I do use Reddit. So most Lenten periods I give up Reddit, and that’s what I did again this time because it’s the closest thing to social media that I engage with.

And the more I’m around my meditative practice, the more I see the mind wanting to grab hold, wanting to grip onto these things. You can start to see how, and I have it pretty well curated, but even still there are things that sneak in because the algorithms that run these are looking for our mental states of fear. They’re looking for anger.

There’s fear and anger equals engagement. Engagement equals attention and attention equals money at the end of this. And so there are some subreddits like I enjoy looking at maps.

Maps are a thing that I find very appealing. So there are subreddits that show you cool maps. Well, the maps inevitably, the way the algorithm— cool, it’s going to show you a map, but the map may be linked to something that then introduces fear and anger.

Sneaky. I also very much like flags. I like the graphic design of flags.

I like history of flags. If you show me most flags, I’ll probably know what country it is. I’m a flag person.

Yes, yes. But the same thing. And it’s something that I started noticing where the flag subreddit became asking over and over and over again, like, say, which extremist flag is this? And it doesn’t really matter what ideology.

It’s just extremist flag after extremist flag from no matter any ideology you can think of. And that’s where the subreddit slowly got curated to this. And it’s something where if we’re not noticing where the mind’s going, you don’t notice what stuff’s doing.

But having this period where it’s like, okay, for 40 days, I’m not going on this at all. It gives you time to reflect. It gives you time to observe how the attention is.

You can watch the mind say, Oh, I need to check that. Oh, I need to check that. You can, you can see the habit that’s been formed.

And how much, and there was, during this period, there’s an interesting Houston Matters radio show that came on and they had somebody on talking about phone usage and that the human mind has an inclination towards novelty. We like to see new stuff. And you can basically, with this, you just swipe down, it’ll show you new stuff.

If you swipe down again, it’ll show you new stuff. You swipe down again, it’ll show you. And, and that there can be this, you know, day-to-day routine, a lack of novelty.

And watching that appear in the mind, watching that create— once, once I was able to identify that, being able to look at the mind and see when that inclination and desire for novelty was arising. And then, okay, what are— being aware of that was quite intriguing. And so now that it’s over, I’ve been back on Reddit.

I’ve unsubscribed from several of those, you know, I’ve re-curated my list, but the habit’s diminished now. You know, it’s not as much as it was before. And it, it’s really an important thing to realize which of these things are tools that serve us and which of them are balms for something else that’s going on in the mind.

When is that novelty kind of pasting over something else that’s going on that we need to address? And really you can get a lot of time back to do other interesting things. Like I got back to reading The New Yorker. I engaged with a different app on my phone, Libby, where you can get things from the library.

If people aren’t familiar with Liddy’s excellent. There’s magazines, there’s all kinds of good things. Um, reading more physical magazines, reading more physical books.

Um, there’s just a lot of time, honestly, just to watch the breath a little bit more. You know, it’s filler time. It’s just stuff that seeps in.

And for me, this isn’t really a question all the time of what’s like, say, good or bad, but it’s what I want to try to do with my intention, what I want to do with my attention. How do I want to train the habits of my own mind and noticing where that’s getting co-opted? Um, because you will notice that there are, for myself, like there are things even for Facebook and things like this where it starts off as a tool. Meet with this group, to interact with this community, and then it morphs and grows and changes from that.

Um, a good thing that I started noticing is what percentage of stuff that shows up is stuff that you asked to see versus what percentage of stuff are you being shown. And There’s, there’s pretty well documented research app to app about— there’s, there’s a clear model of going from high to low. But we— it’s important to be able to notice these things because they affect how our attention and awareness react throughout the rest of our time, the rest of our days.

To end on a positive note, there are a lot of useful apps that I like to use. Access to Insights, one of them. Sutra Central is another one.

The Waking Up app from Sam Harris is quite good. I think the 10% Happier app is now just called Happier. There’s Insight Timer.

I’ve started using more because my previous meditation timer app was discontinued. Dharma Seed has a nice app for with tons of Dharma talks on it. There’s also the WeCroak one that I mentioned before that pops up little reminders that you’re going to die throughout the day.

Um, maybe a little weird for some people, but I like to have it on my iPhone. Um, something to sit there beside the email. Notification shows you what’s important.

And so I’d encourage everybody to think about this concept. Think about how you use your phone. Think about, I mean, this is the thing again, we check it all the time.

It’s necessary. I mean, okay, I won’t say it’s necessary. Elba and I actually have a friend who does not have a cell phone.

He’s probably 40 or so, and he has refused to get one. He does not have a cell phone at all, not even a flip phone. He refuses to get one.

Owns a Tesla. He owns a Tesla but does not have a phone. And so hypothetically, that is a choice as well.

But as far as things that are around us that have the potential to sap our awareness and attention, I don’t know that there’s something more powerful than these around, and I don’t think they’re getting any less strong. And so I, I’d encourage you, think think about a period of letting something on them go for a little bit. That could be just deleting the app and forcing yourself to use it on a browser instead of the phone.

That could be hiding the app, not making it searchable, setting a timer. There’s many ways that we can create some friction. You know, as I say, they want to make it as easy as possible to click and go.

And so Allowing there to be friction. Another member of the sangha I know changes his phone to be black and white all the time, so you don’t get all the nice pretty colors from all the apps and stuff. I can’t do that because I have to take a lot of photos for my job and they need to be in color so I can see what they are.

So that’s more challenging. But if that’s an option for you, think— there’s, there’s many ways to mess with this and have a period of time to notice how it affects things. Notice how it affects your mind.

Notice how it affects your attention. Um, because I, I’d say for myself, as I come back to this over and over again, it is quite strong. And it’s something that I found then reinforces my ability to sit with still awareness and sit and pay attention to how I want to be, both on the cushion and honestly more so off the cushion when I’m around other people.

Because if I’ve just, you know, what is the— what you could even think, like, what is the one app that I check the most when I’m around other people? It’s keeping me from having that, that’s interrupting perhaps the conversation, even if you might not see it as interrupting. How’s that? Just that one. But thank you for your kind attention.

Thank you for allowing me to be on my soapbox about it for a little bit, because I think it, um, it’s mattered for me, and I, I think it matters for many other people as well. So