Uncomfortable on Purpose

A portal key to sublimity

Claudine Wolk

was gracious enough to invite me onto her podcast a couple of weeks ago, and the episode went live a few days ago.

Is the "Attention Economy" Curtailing Your Creativity, Writers?

Like the good little narcissist I am, I listened to the whole thing (at 2x speed, because I’m not also a masochist), and decided it might be fun and maybe also a little bit useful¹ to edit down the transcript of our conversation into something a lot more readable.

In the parlance of 1980’s marketing jargon, if you liked The Notebook Rule, you’ll love this post!

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Uncomfortable on Purpose:
A Conversation with Claudine Wolk

Claudine Wolk: So I read this article and it really resonated with me, and I was hoping to tell the audience what it's about, and how you came to write it.

J.E. Petersen: I realized sometime in the last year that what I thought of as this parade of addictive problems -- like TV or games or whatever -- it was really just screens, or digital media, and that this is my Achilles heel.

So for the last six months or so I've been tooling around with different strategies and tactics, and trying to figure out how how can I have a healthier relationship with technology.

Because I don't want to be a monk. I don't want to go live in a cabin. I'm not gonna swear off Netflix or podcasts or whatever. I like this stuff. It's just a problem of excess and moderation, and I'm trying to figure out how to live my life in a way that is more deliberate, and less passive. I don’t want to just follow compulsive desire, which is predominantly seeded by the media itself, or be led around by the nose, so to speak. I want to make conscientious decisions, iterate my behavior over time, and try to be a more agentive human being.

CW: How did you come up with the idea for the Notebook Rule?

JEP: I actually can't take full credit for it. Another writer that I follow named Justin Murphy, published a short suggestion to his readers saying, “Hey, I've been trying this thing lately that's been working for me. And it is that I keep my computer closed except for when I've made a specific decision about what to do with it. And then I'll open it up and use it. And then when I'm done, I close it again and then walk away, until I make another specific decision.”

So I tried that for a few weeks, and the results were absolutely amazing. I would get more done in a day than I usually would in a whole week. It felt like the solution to all my problems.

But then I slid back into old behavior patterns, and it became this fight for the next couple of months, like how do I sustain this?

And so the notebook rule is just the latest iteration of the battle plan, the next stage of the war I have on my own compulsive behavior.

I’ve been studying a lot about how behavior change really works, and it turns out ritual is really important -- the physical, tangible behaviors. Which is why I think, so far, my experience with the Notebook Rule has been more successful than previous efforts.

CW: Just to give you some context, Jordan, I read this, and my husband and I were both sitting at the island, and I was starting to make some eggs, and I said, oh, I had to turn off the eggs. I'm like, Joe, you got to listen to this.

We're talking about social media and interacting on your phone and interacting on all the different social media channels, how addictive it is and how it's done on purpose. That was fascinating to me.

JEP: I think there is a subset of people who have been thinking about this or writing about this, who understand that pretty much all of the tech companies know that -- in what we call the attention economy, but which is, in many ways, just the economy now -- that if you can't get someone's attention, you cannot get their money. And so the big winners in the attention economy are going to be the people who are the best at getting and keeping attention.

There's been a lot of conversation around why social media is so toxic. “It's because it's an outrage machine.” Well, why is it an outrage machine? It's because psychologically we understand that people are more prone to pay attention to things that make them angry or fearful.

So when you're doom scrolling and you can't look away, it's because your brain is essentially being hijacked by an algorithm that understands you better than you understand you. And it knows that if it can keep your attention, that attention can be monetized.

And this is how tech companies win in the attention economy.

Unfortunately, the big loser in the attention economy is all of us. Because while we have our agency and attention and brains colonized by all of these things, we lose ourselves. We don't get to decide where to allocate our attention. It’s decided for us.

And a lot of people are starting to become aware of this, but unfortunately, becoming aware of it doesn't solve the problem. Like any addict can tell you, becoming aware of your addiction does not stop you from being an addict. You could be perfectly aware that you have a drinking problem and still wake up in a gutter.

My work and my efforts over the past few months specifically have been trying to figure out what drastic measures I need to take to actually solve the problem for myself because being aware of it, like I have been for a long time, hasn't helped.

CW: I had never really heard it explained that way and it made perfect sense to me what you were saying, but I had never thought of it in terms of addiction.

Another thing that you brought out in the article was that the idea behind the monetizing, and I would call it the business model, is to make it so that you don't have to make a decision. That really hit me and I thought, then what happens to my critical thinking ability? And then what happens to my creativity?

JEP: Honestly, it's hard to talk about this stuff because the situation is pretty dire. And the more you describe it and think about it, the more disturbed you'll get about it.

The idea here is that the best way to keep somebody's attention is to make sure that they don’t have to decide again whether or not to continue giving you attention. You just want to hold on to it.

Here's a great example. Every time you open up the Amazon app, you are opening up the best possible version of that app that hundreds of millions of dollars can buy to make this experience as frictionless as possible, so that between you having a thought that you want something and you having spent the money to get that thing in as few sort of decisions as possible and as few taps or motions as possible.

And it’s the same way with everything.

Like the idea of autoplay for streaming services. If you're watching YouTube, at the end of a video, the default setting is to automatically play the next thing in the queue. And it will never stop playing. You don't have to make a decision.

If you are a company who is trying to capture and monetize the attention of consumers, users, whatever, you do not want them making decisions.

You want them making as few decisions as possible. You want to be making their decisions.

CW: I don't know what that means exactly, or what it says about the companies that come up with the strategies. I mean, it makes them evil geniuses or something. I don't know, but it can't be good.

JEP: It's a game. I think one of the things that makes my perspective kind of unique here, is I don't consider any of these companies evil. And I don't consider the people who run them evil. It's a bad set of incentives. We have created a game that makes you evil.

I heard an analogy once, where you try to imagine what would happen if the NBA changed the rules of basketball so that every team was allowed three punches during the course of a game. How would that change basketball?

It would ruin basketball. Absolutely ruin it. Because it would be so much less about the things people watch basketball for, and become instead about how to best utilize your allotment of punches.

So the problem with the attention economy is all of the rules are tuned to reduce us to our eyes and our wallets. Now, surely there are some evil people, but I think by and large, it's people just trying to do their jobs and play by the rules that are already set. And in playing by those rules, the result is the exploitation of almost everyone.

CW: Okay, so you have a list, kind of like a test that someone can give themselves to determine 21 signs you might be a digital dope addict. But I wondered as I was reading it, how many do I have to say yes to that determine that yes, I am a digital junkie?

JEP: Well, I mean, it's definitely a bit of a tongue-in-cheek test. There's no science involved here. I was basically just trying to enumerate all of the negative use signals, things that we do that we maybe wish we didn't do when it comes to our interactions with our screens. And frankly, if you do any of them over and over again, it's pretty good indication that you’re addicted. That's one of the hallmarks of addiction, like, man I really wish I didn't do this thing, and then you go do the thing again and again and again and again.

So yeah it's basically a list of as many of those behaviors as I could think of.

CW: We've identified it's a problem.But as you said, recognizing the problem doesn't solve anything. So tell us specifically what the Notebook Rule is and how you use it.

JEP: I designed it to be as simple as possible. The rule is basically that anytime I want to interact with a screen, I have to write it down, and then as soon as I'm done with the thing I wrote down, I close the computer or walk away, put the phone down or whatever. And then if I want to go back and pick the phone back up, or open the computer up again, it's the same thing. I just have to write it down.

The purpose of this is to increase friction.

We have made the idea of convenience the highest virtue of the consumer economy, right? Like, you want things to be as convenient as possible.

But convenience is what got us here.

This rule is designed to basically undermine all of the effort that these technologies deploy to try to make using them as frictionless as possible.

CW: I love that. And so how long have you been doing it? And what have your results been?

JEP: The current iteration, using an actual notebook, it’s been a little less than three weeks. When I published that article it was technically day six of my experiment, and now it’s day 19 because I started on December 31st.

And I have not been a hundred percent, but it has radically altered my life.

I mean, honestly the analogy in my mind, that I don't share with people, because it sounds really silly, is it’s kind of like I found like a portal key to Narnia, and staying in Narnia requires holding onto the portal key, and the portal key is using the Notebook Rule.

And what it's like being in Narnia is that you just love life more.

Sometimes it's harder, sometimes there are moments where you're like, man, I really wish I could escape this moment and go check Instagram or something, but instead I'm just going to sit here and my kid's crying and dinner's terrible because the kids are just being total jerks and I'm tired and not feeling great and my wife is upset because she's had to deal with this all day and I wish so badly that I could escape this moment but I'm just gonna have to sit here.

But then it also means that there are these sublime moments, where so much of the substance of just being alive starts becoming available, and you realize that just being alive is this miraculous, beautiful experience. And you cannot communicate that to someone with words or with writing.

All you can do is experience it, and you can't experience it if you're on the digital dope. It suppresses the experience of just being alive, and it replaces it with distraction, amusement, outrage, whatever.

It's this terrible Faustian bargain where you don't have to be bored anymore, but you also aren't going to feel alive.

For the past several weeks, it's been this blossoming of feeling alive, and it's magical.

I want to keep doing this stupid, inconvenient thing of writing crap down before I get on the computer, because as long as I'm doing this, I am protected, to some degree, against this enslavement that shuts down my ability to experience life.

And also, I have two small kids, they're five and two, so they haven't yet been enslaved by digital dope. Thankfully we keep them off touchscreens for the most part. But they're going to run into the same world of wonders that we all live in. And it's very seductive. It's very, very hard not to get trapped.

But like with anything, the only place I can start is with myself.

CW: Absolutely.

And this joy that you speak of. Tell us a little bit about that in terms of your work life. Has it helped your creativity?

One of the things I hear a lot from from writers or authors that I speak to is like, I never have the time. And I'm wondering if maybe the digital is replaced with creativity time that might change.

JEP: Oh, my gosh, yes, 100%.

And it's funny, because it's only been a few weeks since I've specifically been doing the Notebook Rule, but already, it's so obvious.

I have a full time job -- a business that I started last year, so it's very demanding -- and two small kids. And yeah, it's very, very challenging to juggle and balance everything.

But it is impossible to get certain things done, if I am wasting a lot of time every day. I don't know if I could say like, oh, I'm more creative.

I'm pretty sure I am, but it's more about how I'm more able to show up and just do the work than I am when I'm caught in the compulsive cycles of avoidance, when things are hard or challenging or confusing or whatever.

Why does writer's block always look like surfing the internet? It's not writer's block. It's an opportunity to escape the difficult situation via this really easy, close-at-hand source of digital dope. Writer's block is mostly a fiction. When writing is hard, do you still sit down and do it anyway, or do you not? And for most of us, including myself, when writing is really hard, often the answer is no, I will not do it. I wait until it feels easier, I wait until the inspiration strikes, or I wait until whatever.

But as any real writer knows, real writing is just sitting down and doing it regardless. You just sit down, you just show up. And showing up for writing is the same as showing up for anything. It's extremely difficult to do, and maybe impossible to do if your default is to escape boring or challenging situations through a screen, which most of us do.

CW: You've said the word escape by my count four times now, and I've never even thought of it as an escape, and you're right. You're so right.

It is an escape, isn't it? And one that doesn't make you feel good.

JEP: Well, often no, but here's the thing too, and this is a really critical point. Any kind of discomfort -- whether that's fear or the feeling of overwhelm or sadness or frustration or just not knowing what to do next -- we have been given a myriad of tools to escape that discomfort, and almost all of it is digitally mediated, screen mediated.

And you can point to social media, or the news, and talk about how it makes you feel bad, but one of the interesting things that I've discovered is that there are means of escape that are not unpleasant at all.

In the article I mentioned TikTok, which I think is profoundly dangerous, because it does not make you feel bad in the way other digital means of escape do make you feel bad.

It’s a little easier to be scrolling Facebook or compulsively doom scrolling headlines and say, why am I doing this? This makes me feel bad. So I will take action to stop doing this, because it makes me feel bad.

But it's a lot harder when the thing that you're doing makes you feel good, and just keeps making you feel good indefinitely.

I had been struggling with what I would call a full blown addiction to a particular video game, which I won’t mention by name, to spare your listeners. But it’s the kind of game where the more you play, the more you want to play. And it's a great game. It's very well designed. It's very fun. There's a lot of problem solving. There's just enough randomness to make it exciting. Anyway, I could sink so many hours into that game.

And I noticed that the more that I played that game, the less I wanted to do anything else. Writing, spending time with my family, doing my job. I cared increasingly less and less about that stuff. And I was just like, man, I feel like I could be low grade happy all the time if all I did was play this game.

Which sounds insane, right?

But, you know, we’ve heard this hypothetical thought experiment, which is, if someone could put you in a chair and hook you up to some matrix type thing and you could be happy and content and feel great forever until you die, would you still want to stay in real life instead? And people will say, well I want to stay in real life.

But I think we're learning that the answer is no. Most of us, if we're not really careful, if we're not really, really thinking about it, we will default to the decision of no thanks on the discomfort. I'm just going to feel low grade happy and comfortable all the time and I'll be satisfied with that.

We're quickly approaching the point where a large percentage of the population can be sort of pleased enough throughout the course of their day. They don't have to be very uncomfortable. Sure, it’s a kind of death, but it doesn't feel bad. It feels pretty good.

CW: And there's also that numbness, and it's taking you away from all the other good things you could be experiencing or creating if you weren't spending time on that.

JEP: Yeah, and when you step away, if you hazard to ask yourself the question, is this what I want my life to be? You won't like the answer.

And that's where the misery comes back, which again, like any addiction narrative, will most frequently drive you back to the thing because it's way more comfortable in there. It's like being in a warm bath, and the air is chill and you get out of the bath and you're like, it's so cold. And so you get back in the bath.

The purpose of the notebook rule is to give me just enough space to decide, do I really want to sacrifice all the things I'm going to sacrifice for the sake of being a little bit more comfortable right now? And if I have to answer that question over and over and over again, hopefully sometimes I can say, no, I would like to live my life.

I would like to not just be comfortable.

1. Not necessarily to you but definitely to me, since I plan to eventually write a book on this topic