A Decade of Purposeful Nonchalance
Your friend and mine, Jenn Bing, sent me this pic yesterday, and I thought I would share it with you. I am mostly familiar with the 2006, woodsy hipster as I was dating someone like that at the time. Though he wasn't really a hipster. He tried to be. He listened to the right fringe music, drank PBRs ironically, had a tattoo (one), and I think he may have even considered smoking a pipe. Be at heart, he was too big of a nerd to be a hipster. Too high strung as well.
I started reading The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J.Jacobs. Each chapter is him trying out different ways of being--what's it like to employ Radical Honesty with everyone, to have a naked picture of yourself appear in a national magazine, to live each day as a rationalist,etc. One of the things he mentioned in the rationalist chapter is this theory that applies to people always thinking that they're in the slowest line at the grocery store. And that applies to how our brains tend to remember unpleasant experiences more readily than good ones. So, he said that one way to combat this tendency is to pay more attention to the moments where you're not in the slow line--where you actually get through quickly. Because those moments happen more often than the slow line ones. I do that all the time--especially with getting to the subway. It feels like I always just miss the train. But there are probably more instances where I get there right on time, or just a few seconds before it arrives. Today, I heard the "doors closing" warning as I stepped into the station and was like, Damnit! Now I'll have wait 5 to 10 more minutes for the next one. But then I thought, who cares? What's the rush? I wasn't late or anything; I was early. But I didn't like the inefficiency of it. Then I remembered I had the Monday NY Times crossword in my bag and so everything was right with the world once again.
I started reading The Guinea Pig Diaries by A.J.Jacobs. Each chapter is him trying out different ways of being--what's it like to employ Radical Honesty with everyone, to have a naked picture of yourself appear in a national magazine, to live each day as a rationalist,etc. One of the things he mentioned in the rationalist chapter is this theory that applies to people always thinking that they're in the slowest line at the grocery store. And that applies to how our brains tend to remember unpleasant experiences more readily than good ones. So, he said that one way to combat this tendency is to pay more attention to the moments where you're not in the slow line--where you actually get through quickly. Because those moments happen more often than the slow line ones. I do that all the time--especially with getting to the subway. It feels like I always just miss the train. But there are probably more instances where I get there right on time, or just a few seconds before it arrives. Today, I heard the "doors closing" warning as I stepped into the station and was like, Damnit! Now I'll have wait 5 to 10 more minutes for the next one. But then I thought, who cares? What's the rush? I wasn't late or anything; I was early. But I didn't like the inefficiency of it. Then I remembered I had the Monday NY Times crossword in my bag and so everything was right with the world once again.
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