What did I Read: November Edition
It’s gifting season. And this year, I’ve become more aware of how much I appreciate a certain gift…
Time.
On one hand, looking back upon 2020, the silver lining of this year has been the opportunity to spend more time with my wife. Thankfully, we’re one of those couples where the pandemic has reinforced our bond, not tugged at the loose seams. Even just passing conversations in the kitchen before we both hunker back down in our work are welcome moments that were taken for granted in the past.
But on the flip side, this achievement in work-life balance has been accomplished by further blurring the lines between our mental modes. At one point, work was work: 9 to 5 in an office, in a building, in a “uniform,” even. As our workplaces eventually became more connected, work mode bled out into our off-time via our blackberries turned iPhones turned cloud servers. Over the course of just a few months this year, our other mental modes been called back into active duty, and have fused into work mode to create a new state of, well, gray. Work is now a Zoom call while walking the dog with my wife at 11:30 AM on a Tuesday in a button-down and sweats. My mind and mouth are working, while my body and behavior are more family-oriented.
All our modes are now always on at the same time. (My heart goes out to my friends and colleagues that are also parents; you have an additional always-on mode that demands a TON of your mental energy.) Whether this is a temporary adaptation or the new normal remains to be seen, but what we’ve inadvertently done is eliminated the ability for our minds to stop doing one thing and shift to another. We’re running all systems on full power—and anyone who’s plugged a few too many Christmas lights into the same outlet knows how that turns out.
So back to time.
Lately, I’ve noticed just how much I appreciate the gift of time—specifically of time when I can turn off all these modes and just be: the joyful opportunity to do nothing, even just for a few minutes. And I don’t mean do nothing like veg with Netflix, or hop on the Peloton, or even sit down to read. In my book that’s “relaxing,” but it’s still a mental mode. I mean literally doing nothing, taking a step back to witness what exactly is going on in your head from the perspective of an outsider.
The books I read this month helped me learn how to turn this gift into a practice, and then to reflect on everything that's transpired to get us to this very moment of grayness.
So, what did I read?
Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris and Jeff Warren with Carlye Adler
You’ve probably seen Harris before, as an anchor on NBC News, Nightline, and Good Morning America. Several years ago, he famously had an on-air panic attack, the boiling point of some deep-seated trauma, frequent recreational drug use, and PTSD from his days as a war correspondent. (Side note: Harris openly calls this the most embarrassing moment of his life, but as a viewer, I don’t think it was that bad. I’ve definitely seen way worse crash-and-burns in the board room.) To his credit, Harris managed to turn this potentially career-ending slip-up into a positive outcome. He founded an organization called 10% Happier, with the goal of bringing mental health for competitive professionals into the spotlight with open dialogue and constructive content. One tentpole of becoming just 10% happier is normalizing the practice of meditation.
A few pages in to Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, I was reminded of The Humor Code by Peter McGraw and Joel Warner. Both books promised a hero’s quest in pursuit of higher knowledge that turned out to be more of a buddy adventure between a self-aware journalist and kooky expert than useful analysis. However, in that last point, Meditation is significantly more successful.
Harris, as the organization’s founder and the known-name, is the main character and drives the story. A self-professed asshole, Harris is admirably vulnerable and transparent, openly discussing not only the context of his panic attack but how he’s dealt with it since and his own fears and doubts about his newfound purpose.
He’s balanced out by Jeff Warren, a Canadian meditation teacher known for his passion, energy, and approachable style. Although prone to deep tangent into spirituality, Warren and Harris click with a shared directness, flexibility, and willingness to speak openly about mental health. There’s a true friendship between the men that leaps off the page.
Whereas Humor Code took the authors all over the world performing “experiments” in the name of comedy, Harris and Warren’s journey is a national 10% Happier meditation bus tour that would become the basis of the book. Each stop on the tour focused on a single aspect—or barrier, even—of adopting meditation as a practice. (The tour also introduces a handful of supporting crew members, including co-author Carlye Adler, whose job was presumably to organize the rantings of two high-energy bros into a cohesive story. But these crew members are never fully developed and appear more as cameos.) In each chapter, Harris slips into journalist mode to set up the journey—where they were, whom they were speaking with, what was going on in the context of the tour, and what went down. Having identified the theme of the chapter—stigmas around meditation, time constraints, trouble sticking with the practice, etc.—he then effectively hands the reins to Warren, denoted with a different typeface, who guides the reader through a principle and meditation designed to address that specific topic. Each chapter concludes with a short “Cheat Sheet” with bulleted steps for the practice for reference.
Harris and Warren champion the idea that a regular practice of meditation has a proven impact on the mental well-being of even the most cut-throat professionals if they can ignore the stigmas associated with allowing oneself to be vulnerable and push past the excuses that people often make to avoid ceding control. Their particular philosophy on meditation is far less “sage on the mountain” and is more about everyday accessibility, trial and error, and cultivating mindfulness. To prove it, the tour takes them to interviews and speaking engagements with celebrities, police officers, military cadets, busy working mothers, and formerly incarcerated individuals, as well as questions and observations from the general public at various public forums.
Although the book avoids a lot of the new age vernacular often associated with meditation and instead builds a compelling case for normalizing the practice, the banter between Harris and Warren can be grating. In their dueling typefaces, they trade barbs and bro-y jokes that read more like text messages between college buddies than experts on a mission, but if you can push past the cringing, the content is truthful and actionable.
And although the format was far more successful than The Humor Code in terms of using each chapter to address a piece of their hypothesis, some of the guided meditations did feel redundant. Between Harris’s set-up, Warren’s guidance, and the cheat sheet recap, sometimes I was reading for 15 minutes about 5-minute exercise.
Regardless, I give credit where credit is due—and perhaps the redundancy is part of the formula. Because in the weeks following, I saw a marked improvement in my own practice of meditation. I went from simply enjoying the stillness to actually being aware of what was happening in my own mind. Warren’s simple mantras and down to earth guidance gave me tools to better tame my own mind. I’m still hit or miss in my meditation, but I’ll concede that since reading Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics, the hits are significantly more rewarding.
For those who’d rather skip the journey and get right to the meat of it, the 10% Happier app includes free guided meditations as well as (pay-gated) videos from every leg of the Skeptics national tour.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
After a few weeks of working on being present, I decided to shift my attention to the past.
I don’t have a ton of history books on my shelves, but the glowing accolades of this New York Times Bestseller from Barack Obama, Bill Gates, and just about every media outlet from The Atlantic and Wallstreet Journal to Wired and Forbes, as well as a review from behavioral economist Dan Ariely, piqued my curiosity. And Harari delivers.
The scope of the book is ambitious: the entire history of mankind, from our great ape cousins to the present, in four parts:
- The Cognitive Revolution, in which Homo Sapiens leaped from just another animal to the dominating organism on the planet
- The Agricultural Revolution, analyzing the intended and unintended ripple effects as we shifted from hunter-forager societies into agrarian societies
- The Unification of Mankind, in which text, currency, imperial rule, and religion began to create an interdependent worldwide system, and
- The Scientific Revolution, wherein our own acknowledgment of how much we don’t yet know triggered relatively recent innovations in industry, government, business, and ethics—which may be trending towards our own obsolescence.
Right off the bat, Harari’s succinctness is one of the things that impressed me most about this book. He has a gift for taking massive subjects and boiling them into precisely what you need to know about them, without being dismissive of their complexity. The pros and cons of having larger brains than other primates: two pages. The tenets and spread of Buddhism: four pages. The Spanish conquest of South America—from Columbus to Cortes to Pizzaro: six pages. How wheat evolved from a wild grass to a staple of humanity: what Michael Pollard spent a whole chapter analyzing in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Harari summarized in just a few short paragraphs. So you can imagine how much insight is captured in 400+ pages.
Another achievement of Sapiens, for better or for worse, is its ability to be at once incredibly inspiring and incredibly depressing. For example, a main theme of the Cognitive Revolution is that all government, religion, human rights, and social cues are essentially shared delusions—evolutionary constructs that emerged to organize and control ourselves when we suddenly outgrew the limited tribal structures that we lived in for a hundred thousand years. (Presumably, this same logic extends to brands. The literal origin of branding arose from livestock, when one farmer’s herd needed to be distinguished from another’s—first for simple separation of property, but later because one farmer’s product was considered inherently better than another’s. So as modern brand builders are we protecting a difference in quality or benefit, or simply perceived preference of different ownership?) This viewpoint isn’t necessarily wrong—but no one welcomes the suggestion that what they spend the majority of their lives doing is not only fantasy but actually reinforcing social divisions. Regardless of some of these hard truths, Sapiens is chock full of nuggets that opened up my mind to a world far broader than the ethnocentric curriculum of my high school History class.
The last part—the Scientific Revolution—included an in-depth section asking whether modern people are happier now than their ancestors. The broader question Harari deals with is how to quantify happiness, delving into studies of how happiness varies by gender, age, nationality, economies, and of course context. (Harari references many of the same studies and findings that behavioral economists Kahneman, Thaler, and Ariely have included in their respective books, asking similar questions.) This section was an unexpected philosophical detour in a book that dealt largely with accepted fact, but for me, it was a great exercise in not only studying history but reflecting on its meaning and context.
So while Harari would argue that my time on earth is insignificant based on the larger scale of Homo Sapien accomplishment, at least I can fall back on Harris and Warren to help me navigate that fleeting time more mindfully.