This is a bad comment, in that I can't bring myself to complete reading the article.<p>What <i>steams</i> me about the recent "quiet", um, "discovery" and advocacy, is that many of those proclaiming it are the same fools who, last decade, were proclaiming the value of "collaboration" and cramming me into smaller cubes that eventually started to lose their walls (sort of a notched "ueber-bullpen", without naming it such).<p>I've known all along that I need peace and quiet to be productive. Not a monastary, but my own quiet room and the ability to use it, and to leave it, as I please.<p>Even on the shop floor, the relentless, day-long blaring of a radio becomes a significant distraction. There is, for me, a greater satisfaction and productivity in being <i>present</i>, even in the midst of what some dismissively consider to be "menial" tasks. (But which seldom really are; and if you pay attention, you notice the difference in execution, and how this affects things both downstream and up the hierarchy.)<p>I'm done with the words. I look for actions, now. If you give me a good workplace, a good neighborhood, etc. I'll respect this. If you talk and bloviate about it, no matter the particular words and sentiment of the moment, I'm going to start viewing you as part of the problem.<p>An attitude I think we should all consider.
<p><pre><code> recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my
wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful
to bring to them.
</code></pre>
That is deeply true. I picked my 3 year old son up from school two weeks ago, and sat on a bench in a churchyard near the school. Normally we rush through there hurrying to a playdate or just giddy on scooters with friends.<p>But this time we sat, ate a sandwich and stopped. I pointed out the bird song and it was like a different world for him - the church had become something new, an extra layer to the world.<p>I won't try to hold him back from the giddy rush of three wheeled scooters and playground running. But I must try to just show him some stillness - perhaps a little more often too.
The more I disconnect from various information sources, the more I realize how utterly unnecessary they were to begin with.<p>It started with quitting Facebook back in February. After going through a short withdrawal, I deeply appreciated the "silence" that came from not knowing every single thing about every single "friend" I had on there. These days, not having Facebook is just a minor inconvenience: sometimes I don't find out about upcoming events until the last minute. But even that seems to happen less and less often, as my friends find out I don't have FB and the ones who are my <i>real</i> friends make sure to invite me via email or SMS.<p>Then I implemented GTD for work email. I use Outlook (sad face) so I disabled the utterly annoying desktop notifications, then went from checking email every few minutes (out of habit) and responding to every email then and there, to checking email twice a day and responding to emails en masse. At first I thought people would be annoyed by not receiving email responses right away, but then realized that's what instant messages are for. With personal email I was more brutal: I disabled push notifications on my iPhone, and started checking it once every other day.<p>With iOS 6, I've been experimenting with keeping my phone on DND mode most of the day. I changed my voice-mail message to say that I only answer calls between 6pm and 9pm, and tell them that if it's urgent, they can call me again within 3 minutes to override DND mode. I've found that most people don't in fact have anything urgent (maybe they realize it wasn't urgent after hearing my VM message) so that seems to be going pretty well also.<p>It's difficult to overstate the benefits I've seen from limiting my information consumption. For the longest time I had felt like my life was controlling me, and I was simply reacting to stuff happening. But once I started voluntarily restricting my exposure to stuff that demanded my attention (usually overblown in importance), I realized that it was all bullshit. I have become calmer, more productive, and happier. Feels good, man!
For those looking for ideas to break away, just try the St. James way in northern Spain(or any similar walking experience). You only walk, eat, rest. There is nothing else to do for a month(if you start from the Pyrenees). You sleep mostly in pilgrim hostels, or cheap hotels.
You can start alone but surely will finish with at least 10-15 new friends (if you want to of course). Every day you´ll walk for 5 to 8 hours, get to the hostel relax, talk to people from around the world, have an amazing dinner in some cheap small town restaurant drink some wine.
Just awesomely simple, but really enjoyable.
I really recommend it.
It makes you think how we are somehow a nomad species.
Iyer conflates a number of things here.<p>Quiet is generally good, but how important it is depends a lot on one's personality, needs at a given moment, and so on.<p>Not being constantly interrupted is also a good thing, but, again, it depends a lot on one's personality type, work being undertaken, and so forth.<p>Being disconnected from other people (I suspect but can't prove that Starck is basically full of shit, but there do exist people who could credibly claim such isolation) is something else entirely. Maybe it is good and maybe it isn't: I've never had the chance to try over an extended period. I'll submit that you can have isolation without quiet or lack of interruptions, by the way.<p>Get those mixed up and there's nowhere you can go, precisely where Iyer takes us.
My own personal version of this happens during my work day commute. No radio, no podcasts, no phone calls.<p>I've found that unless I have about 30 minutes/day or so of thinking time, I tend to lose focus on my longer term projects.
Robot apologist here, but for some reason neo-Luddism has become fashionable again and it bothers me. Is this really a war over little pings from email inboxes? Are we truly that oppressed by the ability to find out anything about anything? Do we need a virtual Moses to part the red sea of push notifications? I find it really difficult to sympathize with this line of argument. This is either a case of misconfigured notifications or of honest Amish-like fear of technology, and neither of these make sense to me.
Having moved in London two years ago, I struggle to find a moment of intense quiet. The reason is mainly the planes that are authorized to fly above the city (a stupidity in my opinion) and even in the middle of a park, you can still hear them, flying just above your head.<p>At night, cars, ambulances, you name it, will take the relay.. Frustrating.
If you travel, you may enjoy Iyer's Why We Travel story.<p>"If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal."<p><a href="http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/why-we-travel-20081213/" rel="nofollow">http://www.worldhum.com/features/travel-stories/why-we-trave...</a>
This was wonderful. Pico Iyer is an amazing writer from a family of intellectuals. The University of California obit for his father, Raghavan, notes that Raghavan was "an inspired and inspiring scholar and teacher on the Santa Barbara campus from 1965 to 1986". I have personally had teachers inspired by the works of both Raghavan and his son.<p>His point, too, is one that I have found increasingly important for myself. Joel Gascoigne's post "6 things I do to be consistently happy" (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4405127" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4405127</a>) in some sense echoes similar thoughts. Like Joel, I exercise most mornings, and like Joel, I stop all electronics at 11 most nights and read (fiction) for an hour. While it is often difficult to step away from computers and smartphones and the Internet, I find that exercise and books satisfy me deeply in a way the Internet is frequently unable to.<p>A friend pointed out to me that books possess a pretty much optimal SNR, which may have something to do with this.
This weekend I lost myself in the mountains of West Virginia on a whitewater rafting trip. The great thing about bouncing around class 5 rapids is that you have no time to think about anything but the present. The phrase "laser-like focus" is tossed around amongst the tech community, GTD folks, minimalists, etc., but I never knew what it actually felt like until I was on the water. Getting away from the computer for long periods of contemplative thinking is one of the best activities I've done for my mind in a lifetime.<p>If Iyer's ideas or my own experience resonate with you, I recommend checking out a copy of Hamlet's Blackberry: Building a Good Life in the Digital Age [1] from your local library.<p>1: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hamlets-BlackBerry-Building-Good-Digital/dp/0061687170" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Hamlets-BlackBerry-Building-Good-Digit...</a>
This is the first piece I have read by Pico and it reminded me of a quote by Gandhi I had noticed on the London Underground "There is more to life than increasing its speed".
If you enjoyed this piece, you might like the book "The Information Diet" [1]. It's not particularly compelling writing, but the author has good ideas that are very much inline with this post. Boredom is essential.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.informationdiet.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationdiet.com/</a>
To those who liked this article, I recommend Net Smart[0]. It eschews doing away with digital media altogether, acknowledging their unprecedented power, talks about the need for intention and focus when using the web and social media, and explains using basic literacies and mindfulness techniques to that end.<p>0. <a href="http://rheingold.com/netsmart/" rel="nofollow">http://rheingold.com/netsmart/</a>