Solitude vs. Loneliness: A Deathmatch For The Times

Recorded January 20th, 2021

For your convenience, here are the key takeaways from the conversation:

• Ditch the computer for a (big) notepad to work on big ideas
• Meditate
• Nap (or at least lie down and close your eyes)
• Work out
• Go for a walk (look up EMDR) or moderate-intensity run
• Deliberate and limited social media time
• Work in uninterrupted blocks
• Leave your phone in another room while you work
• Only check your emails once a day
• Walk places and don’t look at your phone for the duration

TRANSCRIPT

Oliver Osborne: The idea for this piece came from Cal Newport’s phenomenal book Deep Work, which is an exploration of the importance of carving out very focused undistracted time in order to put yourself in the best position to create something rare and valuable

Whether that is work in the academic sense, or whether that is creativity, he lists numerous examples of highly successful people that have a solitude practice, such as Bill Gates, Carl Jung the famous psychotherapist, and the author JK Rowling. They have inserted solitude practices into their lives that have enabled them to be more productive, and in this way very successful. 

This topic seems particularly appropriate now, in the era of COVID, because if you're fortunate enough that the crisis hasn't severely impacted your ability to support yourself and your family, you are likely to have extra time on your hands. 

This has come mainly as a result of reduced travel time, whether in the form of a daily commute or the time it would take to fly to meetings or presentations overseas.  Additionally, movement control orders around the world have curtailed our ability to socialise in person.

If you find yourself in this scenario, there's an opportunity, I believe, to do more than we might ordinarily do with all of the run of the mill distractions of modern life buzzing around us. While this moment in history inevitably has resulted in an increase in loneliness, there is also an opportunity to embrace more solitude than we ordinarily would, and all the benefits that potentially come along with this.

So I wanted to open up the conversation about how this functions, and what kind of insights we might be able to tie up in a bow and write about. Nutshelling the key takeaways so that we can easily build into our own lives, and perhaps serve as a guide for other people in a similar position.

Essentially, I want to make use of the additional space we have because I think if we can try to ultimately boil it down to a heuristic, which we can apply quite generally, then we might be able to make something meaningful from this.

I’m interested in hearing what your experience has been so far in terms of having that extra bandwidth at this time.

Abhinav Gaur: For me, the isolation didn’t immediately switch me into a gear of solitude, because previously I was already used to working remotely. So it was more a case of all of a sudden everybody else being at home, and looking to connect.

So I actually had the opposite happen socially after the first lockdowns began, and I had to kind of take my own steps to say, ‘Okay, that door that normally is open to my “office” now needs to be closed. Everyone is at home, wanting to connect at all hours, so there was actually more going on socially. At least at first.

I had to create that solitude because it didn't naturally swing into this creative and extra productive phase right away.

The initial stages were a little bit hectic, now that I think of it, because actually the demand on your time increased. All these people were like, “Oh, we don't need to have a specific day where we invite people over. This is just all the time”. So you just kept getting requests. But eventually, people said that they had had enough of staring at a screen for hours (typically needing to be on their best behaviour because they could see 30 people watching them).

At the start, it meant that I had less activity that involved going outside. Almost all errands were now no longer possible. So as a result of that, it increased my productivity, but it didn't suddenly shift me to a state where I had less disturbances day to day.  That came later.

OO: Likewise, there was a bit of an evolution. 

I remember that from the beginning of the lockdown, I was in Singapore at the time, how I found myself doing a combination of getting on a lot of calls with people and soaking up a lot of time that way, but otherwise in my free time defaulting to what I do on a typical like hungover Sunday, which is just very passively engaging with moderately entertaining content. Given that I had a lot more free time to myself, this wasn’t ideal.

I became pretty dissatisfied with that pretty quickly, and the dissatisfaction came along with a lot of frustration about generally having large aspects of social habits of my life that were no longer available to me.

We are in part a reflection of the way the world treats us. Therefore you lose a little bit of yourself when you’re no longer able to be in the kind of scenarios in which you are used to operating. Netflix wasn’t filling that void.

So I married the desire to be more productive with a desire to be less frustrated with the new status quo. 

To be honest, I had to tell myself this for about six months before it really landed, but seeing this as an opportunity to get some stuff done that I might not ordinarily be able to, and then with that, making sure that I carve out that space where I'm not doing anything at times.

We are hyper-connected. I'm currently on two devices. The ease of access to our network playing field has been levelled. You’re a (video) call away from everyone in your network, while at the same time having this social itch you can’t fully scratch.

I decided that mornings were going to be my time to take a break from all inbound communication. I now work out for an hour or two in the mornings, and for the most part try to avoid engaging with any external content or communications. The one exception being listening to podcasts around what I’m working on.

I take a notepad and paper with me, and more often than not end up getting some work done while I work out. Working out is essentially very mundane, very repetitive, and as such a very cognitively freeing activity. That's where I insert a bit of solitude.

Where are you actively shoehorning a bit of space and solitude into your week?

AG: I have a daily practice where I meditate for about 25 minutes every day in the morning. And that is my alone time where there's no one in my room or in my vicinity. There is no one talking to me. I'm not putting anything in my brain. So that is the most regular one. The other one has been running. 

For me, things like weights and plyometrics and sort of general workout activity aren't as freeing because I'm not as familiar with that, and I have to think what am I doing next, I have to think how hard do I go, the range of motion etc., I don't have that rhythm ingrained, but with running, it's semi-automatic right? 

I know my pace. I know my level of fitness, so I know based on that where I want to be. I'm never running to hit a time at the moment because I'm not at that level of fitness. I'm just wanting to have a good workout and a good experience. So running is the one where it's a moderate level of exertion. and I don't have to think about it too much. 

It’s a sort of mental processing time where I'm not trying to think through stuff but stuff seems to be thought through as I'm doing it. 

OO: You mentioned meditation. I've tried what's called Yoga Nidra, a kind of guided meditation. The results I get from that are good. 

When I was still in Singapore I spent many, many months oscillating between a bed and a desk in a studio apartment, which creatively isn't great at all. 

I had a huge amount on. I was juggling two pretty meaty contracts with two pretty meaty clients, and I found myself getting creatively a little low on gas. 

However, it was astounding how I could find the gears slowly clogging up with sawdust and/or spanners, and I would do one of these Yoga Nidras, or I would actually decide I was going to take a nap (which usually just resulted in me lying down and closing my eyes for a few minutes), and without even going to sleep I would feel recharged.

The process of lying down, ideally in a dark room, and switching from exteroception, which is being focused on what's going on in the external world, to interoception and really just focusing on taking kind of personal inventory of how you feel, focusing on your breathing, had a declogging effect.

In both instances I was awake, but essentially not receiving input from anywhere other than my own experience. What I found was that this essentially created a space that my brain, then my brain populated this space with solutions to the things I was working on. 

There was a kind of irony to the experience in that when working and seeking to find solutions, or to create music, or to construct ideas around a particular theme for long periods of time, adding more input becomes detrimental.

By creating a space and trying to reduce all of the external input, you allow your brain some space to assimilate the recent input and make sense of your experiences. 

Apparently, there's a technical switch in the way your brain operates when you are not engaging with the ideas of other people, not engaging with external concrete stimulus, your brain will switch gears and start to synthesise your experiences into ideas in a way that it's impossible to do when you have that external input. 

So I found those naps and/or Yoga Nidra sessions, even at sub half an hour,  very rewarding in terms of productivity and energy levels. 

Often I wouldn't get to the end of it, all of a sudden something would land in my mind and I was up and away and back to something resembling full productivity.

AG: You put it in a really interesting way, the way that when you create that space your brain fills it with the solutions that you kind of have in the network. The brain fills that space with a solution that you wanted to find but would otherwise not have been able to find.

OO: Yeah, and I see examples of this all over the place. Nikola Tesla has a famous quote around this, the famous investor Naval Ravikant talks about this on Joe Rogan, Isaac Newton, Richard Fineman, I mean, you go down the line, there are examples of this from all walks of life. 

Rory Sutherland, the chairman of Ogilvy says (and I’m probably butchering this) that sometimes you just need to stop and stare out of a window for 20 minutes. You need to not do anything and ruminate on things. 

[Side Note: Stare out the window becomes the acronym SOW, which I think is a great name for a pay-for-play type training program, right? I’m going to flesh that out, but there's some really low hanging branding fruit right there.]

Apparently, David Ogilvy would never write anything in the office. It was too distracting. He always wrote at home. So there is definitely something going on.

AG: Part of it is about continuity. Your brain can't always find that wavelength or that space in your mind, for all that creative thought that you're looking for, and when it does there is the risk of interrupting it. It is like waking up from a dream and not being able to get back to it.

OO: Absolutely, it is a process. People often assume creativity, innovation, problem-solving is like a lightbulb turning on, and it can feel like that sometimes, but I think most of the time it’s more complex than that.

Coming up with new and valuable ideas is more like an intellectual plate-spinning exercise, in that in order to really break ground on new ideas, or even just significantly increase your understanding on a particular topic, it usually involves an amount of simultaneously holding several ideas up in such a way that you're able to draw connections between them. 

There is a certain fragile balance to this that if you're interrupted will reduce your ability to be productive. There are actually studies on this, I believe Cal Newport talks about it in Deep Work. There are studies that give people cognitive tasks to perform, and then randomly, but momentarily, distract them. They are tested on their ability to perform these cognitive functions vs. a control group, and as you might expect, performance in the undistracted groups was better. 

[The concept is Attention Residue, a term coined by Sophie Leroy]

It might feel more productive to be whacking down these moles of demand for our attention as they come up, but in fact, they're detracting from your core task, which actually leads to one of my recent habits. I ideally check my emails once a day and that's it. And I chunk my Facebook time to around 20 minutes to half an hour a week. 

I try as far as possible to compress activity that has the potential to spiral, and has historically done so for me, and try to find the smallest most meaningful unit of time I can spend on that per week in order to do everything I need. 

You could easily spend an entire day on a combination of LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and email, answering Whatsapp, and feel incredibly busy, but A: not get much of any importance done, and B: feel incredibly kind of wiped out by it. 

There is a guy called Andrew Huberman who's a professor of neuroscience and ophthalmology at Stanford, who describes it as a quarter slot machine. Sure, you're not going to go broke straight away, but over the course of the day, as you slowly dole out your attention across all of these different points without necessarily making much progress, you just become cognitively exhausted.

AG: There are infinite rabbit holes now with the Internet, and the combination of the internet on every device you own, devices becoming smaller, like your phone. 

Your phone is the most interactive thing ever known to mankind, more accessible to you than anything ever was before, and now your fridge is connected to the internet and it’s telling you what to eat

But our ability to be disciplined, or tools at our disposal to manage or avoid those rabbit holes hasn't really grown. We haven't suddenly become more disciplined creatures. We haven't got rid of our human impulses, so your hormonal response when seeing that attractive person or photo on the internet is the same as it ever was. However, now there are 100’s of new places where you might see those. 

The need for us to manage ourselves is infinitely higher because basically the odds are stacked against us, and unless you take those drastic measures and take intentional measures like you're talking about, the natural path is to find a rabbit hole, because they are designed to be engaging, and they are everywhere.

OO: To their credit, they're incredibly well designed to lead us in a certain direction. If you hit search on Instagram, it'll feed you content similar to the stuff that you've already engaged with, or similar to accounts already follow. 

With these kinds of platforms highly engineered to keep us there, we need to have a level of intentionality about our usage. Especially on our phones, which we can have on our person at all times.

AG: Thinking about which social media platforms we need to be on, and how much we need to be on them is all well and good, but I have started to question how much I really need my phone.

Do I need to be accessible by my phone throughout my waking day? I'm not getting phone calls all day, and there is a low probability that missing a call will lead to huge personal or professional losses.

Why do I need my brain to always think that there's a potential call incoming? If we missed a call, it's not a big deal. They're probably gonna drop you an email anyway or WhatsApp, so we’re not likely to be missing out on anything. 

So why not just say like, ‘I don't need that phone for a block of three to four hours per day'. A lot of people are having discussions around social media, but that discussion should also be about just having a phone in general. The ‘excessive use of social media’ issue is nested inside the ‘excessive use of smartphones’ issue.

OO: It is, as Cal Newport puts it, the constant companion versus useful tool distinction. 

We've slipped into, most of us, myself included, although I'm trying to resist it to try and find better tactics for it, a state where we can’t resist the draw of the constant companion because being bored is frustrating. 

There's a bit in between doing something and where solitude and not doing something becomes interesting. That's objectively boring. Questlove said this in an interview, where he explained that he embraces those moments of boredom and that he has to actively force himself to be still. 

He's a professional musician. He's a professional creative, who's been highly successful, and he says that it's still not easy. He has to actively push himself to resist that temptation to pick up the phone when boredom starts to creep in. But that actually it's those quiet moments of discomfort where great things happen. 

This ties in with the idea of the liminal place of growth that Jordan Peterson talks about, where the moment at which things become difficult is where they become meaningful. That we should identify that discomfort as a kind of biting point, as in, that's probably the point at which we're starting to get some good work done, or at least starting to push the boundaries of our ability.

This feeling is us starting to get into a place where we're doing something meaningful and doing something productive. Andrew Huberman talks about this in the context of David Goggins.

His theory on Goggins being that Goggin’s ability to push through some incredibly physically and mentally challenging scenarios, is a result of him being able to link that feeling of difficulty to the sense of progress, and lean into it. That's what he's going for, and it's that moment of friction that he's aiming at. 

I think to generalise that out, we need to be aware that when things start to get cognitively difficult, that's actually where the good shit is, but that is where it is all too easy for us to insert moderately entertaining content of whatever type. 

That's why we find ourselves all of a sudden looking up and we've spent an hour and a half doing really not a lot across half a dozen different social media platforms. But if we can successfully reframe that moment of difficulty, and that feeling of friction as the transition point to a more productive and valuable state, then it will make us less likely to push away from it.

If leaning in can be our knee jerk reaction and not picking up our phone, then I think we would be in a really good place.

AG: Goggins starts when everyone else has given up. That's where his sweet spot is. 

OO: The guy is a fountain of motivation.

AG: It was interesting earlier about the point where you convert from ‘I’m bored’ to ‘Okay, let me use this’?

You said it took you like six months before you kind of made that switch. I think the key things that, for me, when I went through that same thing was, number one, it was the acceptance that the situation [COVID lockdowns] was going to continue. 

It was that you weren't expecting it to suddenly end. So there came a time where when everyone said, ‘well it's now rolled on for five more months than I thought it was going to. I can't just continue to do this because this is stagnation.’ 

At that point, I think people started to realise that they weren’t going anywhere so they started exploring where they were.

It ties in interestingly with something I learned from my meditative practice which is from the Isha foundation. One of the things we learn is called the Shambhavi Mahamudra, which is a 21-minute practice. And I think the two things for me that ring true with this is that it's a practice of doing a sequence of things, and in doing that sequence of things you find that meditative space which I find similar to running. 

You're supposed to land on 21 minutes, if you're doing it right. So when you first start doing it you're asking yourself ‘how am I going to do something for exactly 21 minutes? That’s intimidating because I don't have that kind of mental clock.

So you naturally start basically setting an alarm, because you'll do it and you'll be like at 35 minutes, or 12 minutes. You're way out of whack. But they told us not to do that because you are setting an expectation for an external event. Then all that’s happening is for 21 minutes you're waiting for that bell. 

So the difference between expecting an endpoint in time vs. not expecting an endpoint in time makes it easier for you to focus on what is going on in the present when you are not waiting for a fixed endpoint.

The same thing happened in lockdown is when people gave up on waiting for lockdowns to ease and started taking an internal inventory.

OO: It reminds me of that exteroception versus interoception idea. So just the knowledge that there is an alarm, that there is some external stimulus that is going to add shape to your internal experience, disrupts the flow of the experience and disrupts the amount of value you can get out of it.

AG: Those lucky enough to still be earning at this time are finding a lot more space in their lives, and I think we’re having a hard time working out how best to use it.

In the ancient Greek era great thinkers would be sponsored by kings because it gave them the freedom to be creative, because they just didn't have to think about day to day survival.

OO: Yeah, as I said when I was kind of kicking off the conversation: The very fact that we're having this conversation means that there are a whole load of things that we are not having to worry about. So I definitely accept that we're in a very fortunate spot, and that this is quite kind of rarefied air. 

There are a lot of things that technology does for us now. Doing a family's laundry doesn't take two or three people a full day or two. Getting food, doing the dishes. The time is heavily reduced.

There aren’t necessarily regular instances, especially if you're a knowledge worker, where you are doing something that is slow and repetitive and mundane. However, those are instances where, like I said earlier about working out, your brain naturally populates those moments with its own creations because what you're physically doing is creating such a small draw on your cognitive capacity that your mind naturally fills that space.

AG: You make a great point which is those little things that you had to do, like, doing your family’s laundry, cleaning the house, whatever it was, now that is taken care of by washing machines, dishwashers etc., so we’ve lost a little of that mental space.

OO: It's something I definitely need to be very deliberate about, and if I'm not well rested it can fall off the agenda. But if I do have to do something physical and repetitive to do, like the washing up, I'll try as far as possible to resist the temptation to just put on a YouTube video while I do it. Because often my brain will default back to the last cognitively challenging moment, or that idea or concept I was trying to wrestle with, or piece of work I was trying to get underneath and get into.

Things are often leaping to the fore within minutes, and the amount of times I've had as I said earlier on, I reached that cutoff point where I feel like the gears are really grinding, and I say all right I'm going to take a nap for 45 minutes. I'd say probably about half of the time I get a light bulb moment in sub 10 minutes and I'm back up and at it feeling energised. 

What's interesting about this is that I am essentially physiologically in exactly the same state as I was 10 minutes before. But the dopaminergic system has been triggered, and all of a sudden I feel like I have loads of energy, whereas 10 minutes earlier I was literally ready to sleep, and feeling exhausted. 

I'm all of a sudden now in a state of forward motion, metaphorically speaking, and that light-bulb moment created by that little bit of space I gave myself propels me for the subsequent hours. 

Andrew Huberman makes the example of the two teams at the end of the Superbowl. You've got to assume both of them have been physically going at it to the absolute limits of their capacity. Now at the end of the game, the winning team is leaping up and down and throwing themselves around. The other team is often motionless in defeat and appears exhausted. 

That is the dopamine propelling people forward.

Essentially they've reframed their physical state in the context of them winning or losing and that's what sets their level of action going forward. 

We've probably all been in a scenario where we're working with a team on a particularly difficult project, or been at a particularly stressful moment, and then someone cracks a joke, and all of a sudden everything's okay. All of a sudden there is this burst of energy.

It's something I'm aware of when I've been working on developing teams. Sometimes you have someone who is getting very frustrated with what they're working on, you know, and over a period of weeks they know they have this shortcoming, they know it's a point of focus. And they don't feel like they're actually making as much progress as they want to. 

Sometimes just enabling them to more accurately understand how far they have come is enough for them to reignite their enthusiasm to hammer away at it.  Sometimes when you're very close to something you can lose perspective on the ground you've made. 

I realise I’m diverging slightly here for solitude vs. loneliness, but it is this ability to reframe and reshape how our minds are approaching any given scenario that opens up so much potential for improvement and productivity.

AG: What are you specifically doing when you're trying to create the space? What are the specific actions that you're taking? I assume it will be things to do with your phone and such like.

OO: At the moment I work in a separate building to where I live, for the most part. And I will often leave my phone in the main house. And that's a big one. 

Only having one tab up at any given time, closing anything that's going to send me a push notification. 

Getting some exercise, a quick run, or even an indoor workout, but with zero external inputs.

AG: Do you count music as an external input? 

OO:  Very much so. Listening to music is an active thing for me. I'm thinking about production technique and structure, timbre, and I’m working out how the producer or act has done, what they’ve done sonically. Working out time signatures, how they've swung the beat, what weird instruments they’ve used or the origin of the samples. Suffice to say I can't passively interact with music anymore.

AG: You’re making it sound like a headache.

OO: Ha, it’s not. It's incredibly enjoyable but it can be quite all-consuming. 

Ironically, given that I'm probably coming up on 50 releases, I do very little recreational listening to music at all. So music’s definitely a no-no when I’m trying to be productive. 

The last one is scheduling time to work on specific stuff without a computer in front of me. Just a notebook and a pencil in a quiet part of the house.

Actually, this has been a great one.  I use an A2 size notebook for these deep-dives. I mentioned earlier the idea that coming up with new insights is like intellectual plate spinning. The large pad makes it easier to keep these ideas present in my mind and helps me draw links between ideas that I might not have made on my own or with a computer in front of me.

So by having this huge sheet of paper I can organise it - Actually, I retract the word organise because it certainly won't look particularly organised a lot of the time - but at least you can have all of the prominent ideas at once in front of you and that helps keep the plates spinning and up in the air. 

AG: Jim Quick the memory expert, and is sort of a champion in terms of his memory, but also in terms of teaching people how to get good and helping people to make their brain work at its best. 

One of the things he says is that memory doesn't exist in isolation. It's a triangulation of different points. So just continuing to put those things on paper and kind of draw the connection between them seems to reflect this.

It's a super powerful thing. I love this big notepad idea.

OO: It's definitely worth exploring. And it actually becomes quite satisfying once you've sat in front of this thing for two hours, and really fleshed out an idea without any external input. I always find myself with some pretty solid insights. Also keeping track of it much as I'm sure you can do a lot of work, problem-solving wise, without the addition of the notepad, I certainly think that enables me to like you say more easily draw links between different areas of my thinking upon a certain subject. 

Because you might be an hour and a half into this task and very easily be able to link back to where you initially entered into the problem. 

AG: That's super interesting. I'm gonna get myself a big Notepad.