How to Read More: Episode 1 of 3 - Understanding the Naive Phase

5 Minute Read

Whatever you're working on right now, whatever problem you're struggling with, is probably addressed in some book somewhere by someone a lot smarter than you. Save yourself the trouble of learning from trial and error. 

-Ryan Holiday

Ah, the benefits of reading. In addition to objectively making us smarter, habitual reading also has proven to reduce stress, improve memory and analytical thinking, increase vocabulary, and even stave off Alzheimer's. All this with no negative side effects. Put another way, reading makes everything better.

Despite these undeniable benefits, we don't read much. We claim we're too tired, we don't want to spend money on books, and we just don't have the time. Then, we plop down on the couch and watch an average of nearly three hours of television while shopping online. In fact, despite not having time to read a book, 95% of texts are read within three minutes of being sent.

Welcome to a three-part journey (my first miniseries!) where we'll be exploring our peculiar relationship with books (Part I), an audiobooks manifesto of sorts (Part II), and some sort of dramatic conclusion that will make you say, "today begins the new me!" as some sort of musical montage begins in the background.

The Naive Phase

Understanding our relationship with books requires a quick trip to the beginning of our lives and to the dawn of our relationship with the recorded words of others.

In his 2012 book Mastery (which is certain to make my top five books of this year), Robert Greene explains that compared to other animals, we humans enter the world remarkably weak and helpless. While baby birds fly after just a few days and infant giraffes can walk within a half hour and run within a day (!), baby Homo Sapiens are weak, vulnerable, and comparatively helpless for anywhere from 12 to 18 years (give or take) before we can truly function on our own.

This extended phase of dependence serves a vital purpose, Greene asserts, as it gives us time to develop our most powerful weapon--the human brain. This period comes at a peculiar price, however, as our childhoods involve idealizing our parents, teachers, and anyone in an authority role whose strength and reliability we depend on.

We are corralled into classrooms, mandatory books are imposed on us (which is Bad Idea Jeans), and we are instructed to carefully read every page because there might be some irrelevant detail in there that will show up on some bullshit scantron test. Then we're in big trouble, as our grade would be affected and our future employment prospects would certainly suffer. Scare tactics, baby!

As if this weren't torturous enough, anyone who went to elementary school in the 80s and 90s certainly had to deal with the judgement-fest that was popcorn reading. If you want to make a 9 year-old with a speech impediment (me in 1990) hate reading for 25ish years, force him to popcorn read in front of his peers.

Love the movie, but this scene haunts me

As a result of this Stalin-like approach to our literacy, we feel sensitive and vulnerable about our reading abilities.  Books become associated with chores, nerds, and feeling like we don't measure up to some arbitrary ideal, and many of us end up with contempt for books and a bizarre pride in how much we don't read. This is Greene's Naive Perspective to a T, and many of us (including the leader of the free world) never outgrow it.

Consequences

As we enter adulthood, this naive approach ceases to make sense. There are no tests on our reading anymore, it doesn't matter if we skim or skip a few pages (or chapters), and there's no absolutely no reason to feel any negative emotions whatsoever toward books. 

Considering the availability of the works of the greatest thinkers and leaders in human history (you can access them using the very object you're looking at right now!!), failure to move past this phase has undeniable consequences. As Greene explains, our naivete subtly drains us of curiosity and replaces it with conformity to social norms, pursuit of leisure and immediate pleasures, and a general propensity toward a mechanical, robot-like existence. 

Graduation

If you're still with me at this point, congratulations! You've recognized that the naive approach is for cowards, and you're ready to change your relationship with reading. Next week, we will explore several techniques to upgrading our approach to books. These include, but are not limited to the following:

• Audiobooks are not cheating
• Neuroscience proves the impact on the brain is identical to traditional reading
• The art of nonfinishing
• Develop the habit of nonfinishing that which is boring or unproductive
• You don't have to start at page one
• It's your book
• Talk to the text
• Write notes and make highlights
• It's your book

Until next week!

Our Evolutionary Need for Silence

4 Minute Read

Saying nothing sometimes says the most.

-Emily Dickinson

We're now at a point where noise is almost unavoidable. As I type this in my mother's backyard, I hear pleasant sounds of nature: birds singing, leaves rustling in the breeze, and the occasional bumblebee. In addition, the M-14 expressway, about a mile from where I sit, constantly hums in the background. Two houses down, a power saw has been in intermittent use for the past two hours, and two neighbors just began mowing their lawns. To top it off, some lady set off her own car alarm and apparently doesn't know how to disengage it.

A few months ago, I wrote of learning to not let car alarms infuriate me. More recently, however, I've learned I don't really have a choice in the matter. The human body has evolved to constantly scan the environment for dangers and opportunities, thus it subconsciously reacts to every stimulus it encounters. In the case of noise, sound waves vibrate tiny bones in the ear, and these vibrations fire electric signals directly into the auditory cortex of the brain.

Even while we sleep, environmental noise causes stress hormones to be released, and recent studies have found that people who live in cities experience chronically high levels of these hormones--particularly cortisol. Cortisol increases blood pressure, which contributes to heart disease and cellular damage, and has a debilitating effect on the immune system. As Michael Finkel writes in The Stranger in the Woods: "Noise harms your body and boils your brain."

Noise is pretty much global now

For evidence of this brain-boiling, look no further than a recent global survey by the World Health Organization which concluded that people in wealthy countries--equipped with expressways, power tools, and Steve Miller's Abracadabra--suffer from depression as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries where the sounds of nature are more common. Further, suicide rates have shown to increase alongside economic prosperity. To paraphrase Sebastian Junger, rather than buffering people from depression, increased wealth in society seems to foster it.

Silence is Beyond Golden

You don't need to voyage to a Tibetan Monastery to win your brain back from lawnmowers and car alarms,  but you do need to regularly seek out a soothing environment. Researchers have found that a daily fifteen-minute walk in the woods will cause significant decreases in cortisol, and that two hours of silence per day prompts cell development in the hippocampus--the region of the brain responsible for memory.

Other studies, including one conducted at the University of Michigan titled Your Brain In The Woods vs. Your Brain on Asphalt, have found that time immersed in nature makes us calmer, less depressed and anxious, with improved cognition and memory. In other words, silence makes us smarter and happier. Evolutionary psychologists believe our bodies relax in quiet, natural environments because our senses evolved there and thus remain calibrated to them.

The burgeoning world of neuroscience agrees. An experiment at New York University placed 20+ Buddhist monks and nuns inside MRI machines, tracking brain activity while they meditated. The result? When we choose to sit in silence, the brain is as active as ever. What changes is where the activity occurs. While talking, texting, and keeping busy, the activity occurs in our cerebral cortex--which is a thin layer on the brain's surface. When we experience silence, the cerebral cortex rests, allowing deeper and more ancient brain structures to come alive. Those of us living busy, noisy and distracted lives almost never get access to these areas. As Finkel brilliantly writes, "Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self."

Afraid of Silence?

Despite the obvious benefits, few of us seek out silence. In fact, a University of Virginia study recently found more than half of men and at about a third of women would rather endure painful electric shocks than to sit in silence for 15 minutes. How can this be? Too much technology? Too many obligations? When we were hunter-gatherers, the average Homo Sapiens needed about 4,000 calories of energy to get through the day. This was pretty much food and a daily campfire. Today, Americans burn an average of 228,000 calories per person per day to feed our stomachs, propel our cars, charge our devices, and to keep our homes between 68 and 72 degrees (I'll be damned if I put on a sweatshirt or open a window!). We're burning 60 times more energy than our ancestors. Is life 60 times better?

Perhaps this is all a result of the disease of more. In our modern culture, as my man Yuval Noah Harari points out, the idea seems to be that if we have a problem we probably need more stuff. To get more stuff, we must produce more.

We don't have to buy into this idea. 2,500 years ago a Chinese fella named Lao-tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching, and there's a reason it's the 2nd most popular book in the history of the world (next to the Bible). "Those with less become content," says the Tao, "those with more become confused."

Lawns: American Dream or Waste of Time?

6 Minute Read

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?

-Henry David Thoreau

Out for a few jogs recently, I've observed massive amounts of manual labor in pursuit of beautiful lawns. Pausing to take note of the machinery, fuel consumption, man hours, and monetary considerations, I've become increasingly curious for the following reasons:

• Aside from being nice to look at, lawns are objectively worthless. We don't eat them, don't graze animals on them (for fear of trampling and ruining aesthetic value), we don't harvest our grass clippings and sell them at a farmer's market, and many lawn owners forbid people to even set foot on them.

These policies are often enforced by snipers

• I'm fairly certain our hunter-gatherer ancestors never gave a rat's ass about lawns, nor did anyone have a lawn around the entrance to their cave.
• At some point in human history, we collectively agreed that a well-kept lawn was to be desired, and that a poorly-maintained lawn was good reason to believe ol' Gil Carruthers had been laid off from the hat factory again, and that his wife probably left him for good this time.
• So where did all this come from? Why do lawns dominate the landscape despite a bewildering amount of upkeep and an equally bewildering lack of objective value?

History of Lawns

The concept of beautiful, worthless lawns at the entrances to private residences and public buildings dates back to the late Middle Ages in France and England. Back then, no peasant could afford to waste land, time or energy on grass, so lawns were reserved for aristocrats interested in showing everybody up. A rich, manicured lawn in front of the chateau shouted to every guest and passerby, "check me out, bro. I ball so hard I can just waste a bunch of land and have my serfs do all the labor."

Built in the early 1500s, Chateau de Chambord (roughly 200km south of Paris), is credited with originating the lawn as we know it.

During the ensuing centuries, we Homo Sapiens grew to associate lawns with power, wealth, and social status. As the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the middle class and provided it with mowing machines and automatic sprinkler systems, suddenly millions of people could afford to cultivate a home field and let all the neighbors know what time it was (metaphorically).

King Francis I? Nope. Kenny Powers.

We tend to think of the destruction of animal habitats as caused by industry, agriculture, oil pipelines, and republicans, but don't lawns do the same thing? According to this article in the Chicago Tribune, roughly 95% of land in the lower 48 United States has been developed into cities, suburbs, golf courses, and farmland. Lawns account for more land usage (over 40 million acres) than corn, wheat, and fruit combined. In fact, a whopping 20% of the land areas of Massachusetts and New Jersey are lawns. 

Meanwhile, the honey bees that pollinate our food are dying off at troubling rates, monarch butterflies are nearing extinction, and the global ecological balance grows increasingly out of whack with every new subdivision.

Some more fun facts:

• Americans spend an estimated $40 billion on lawn care each year. This is just shy of the $47 billion we spend annually on child care. Read that again.
• We pour 800 million gallons of gas into our mowers each year, while spilling an estimated 17 million gallons in the process. To put that in perspective, the Exxon Valdez disaster of 1989 spilled 11 million gallons of oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound and is considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters in the history of the world. 

To be fair, I'm aware that there are people who pride themselves on their lawns, that genuinely enjoy lawn maintenance as a meditative hobby, and that possess limitless wisdom when it comes to various sods, fertilizers, and edging techniques. If this makes them happy, of course they are free to mow.

But it is also true that one in five Americans rates lawn maintenance as his/her least enjoyable chore--below raking leaves, folding laundry, and even emptying the dishwasher (easily the worst one). Perhaps Washington Post columnist Christopher Ingraham was on to something when he wrote, Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.

But what would go in their place? Field turf? Japanese rock garden? Having spent the majority of my life around homes in cities and suburbs of the American Midwest, I've had a hard time picturing a front yard without a lawn. What would that even look like?  Out for a jog earlier today in my native Plymouth and Canton, Michigan, I found two contrasting properties:

Hanford Rd., Canton, Michigan

Gyde Rd., Canton, Michigan

Which of these properties is more visually appealing and which is a more desirable place to live are both debatable. However, there is no debate when it comes to which requires more time, money and energy to maintain. The average American spends 70 hours per year on lawn care and that's including people who live in apartments AND those who don't enjoy that household responsibility. For those in charge of their lawns, that number is certainly much higher. 

Time is a non-renewable resource. Are lawns worth it?