I’m currently on day 36 of giving up alcohol for Lent.
To me, one of the simple joys in life, is a pint at the pub with friends, a good glass of wine with a lovely meal or a fine single malt (never with ice) at the end of an evening to warm the cockles.
Giving stuff up causes problems. It can be uncomfortable, inconvenient or make things difficult. There have been times over the last few weeks, when watching England narrowly lose to France in the rugby for example, where I really would have liked, OK needed, a drink. But I've stuck to my guns.
Why have I done this? Amongst many reasons was to assert my willpower over something that I know, if uncontrolled, could cause me harm, to remind myself who was in charge here, to give something up to allow me to focus more on my faith. And to reap a few benefits that I’d forgotten about - good sleep, reduced anxiety, happier liver, a sense of discipline.
Going without can be good for us. Uncontrolled more, more, more is like cancer. It eventually kills us.
The machine thrives on ‘more’. Things become more complicated, require more of our time, attention and energy to maintain. Think back to when you started using any social media platform. To begin with it was easy, you could check in with a few friends you had, read and turn off. But as your friends, followers or “liker’s” grew you needed to spend more and more time on the platform just to keep up with it all. More, more, more. More growth, more engagement, more attention.
"Work harder, consume more" is the pattern of the machine, despite the fact that this growth is unsustainable. Eventually something has to give, and often that is self care or nurturing real world relationships, or resting. We are finite beings, not cogs.
One way to begin to unmachine is to simply give something up. Just say no. And then hang on in there, ride the feelings of FOMO for a while, let yourself re-calibrate and find what was always there before. I closed my Facebook account years ago now. To begin with I kept wondering how people would find me. I had such a sense of self-importance.
Guess what. Most of those people didn’t find me. They didn’t contact me to ask how I was doing, or where I had been. It hurt for a while. Until I realised that actually, in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. I leaned into my lack of importance to many people. It was freeing. And I became OK with it.
The people I really cared about, those good friends (and my definition of a good friend being someone who you could call up to say you’d been arrested and maybe could do with someone to bail you) these friends remained. The signal to noise ratio improved hugely in their favour. Because I was not taking up time servicing the machine’s pings and pseudo friend updates and getting aggravated by pseudo "news" - when my real friends phoned or messaged me, I was there, able to engage with them, distraction free.
And because we were not sharing every single thing that had happened daily, when we did meet for a pint, there was lots to talk about. This is how it has been for hundreds and thousands of years. We are built for this. We benefit from this.
But for this benefit to happen, I had to give something up. To begin to be unmachined, you have to think about which parts of it you will put aside. To start with, maybe it’s just one social media account, maybe it’s a particular app, maybe it’s once just not carrying your phone with you on an errand ‘just in case’, maybe it’s deciding not to order pseudo food online rather than walking out to speak to a human to get it. Maybe it’s turning off your screen for one hour to go outside or to read a paper book.
Take a first step. Choose something and just give up. Ride out any initial feelings of discomfort and see what happens. You might be surprised.
We’ll explore more of this later, but I'd love know what you have given up and why to push back at the machine? And what benefit did you see? Or maybe you're considering giving up. If so, what, and why? Do tell!
This is bang-on Alastair, utterly bang-on. Is it OK for me to share it on social media? I’m trying to convince some people to reclaim their lives from The Machine.