The digital holiday I went on in April has become a blueprint for how I want to live my life. It is a common thought while on holiday: I wish this could go forever. The beauty, then, of a digital holiday is I could both have that thought and then do something about it.
How have I made my digital holiday into a life with (slightly less) technology? In essence, I made the conscious decision to embed the practices I have written about here already: simple things like turning off notifications, enabling do not disturb mode all the time, and deleting apps that did not serve me well.
These small changes have made a big difference in my quality of life. I still have the same amount of hours in the day—alas, the search for the 25th hour continues—but how I use those hours pleases me a lot more. And this has got me thinking about the ways—small, large and in between—that we might wish to make change in our lives.
Change is more afraid of you
I—and perhaps you, too, dear reader—sometimes convince myself that making change in life is hard. And in some respects, making change can be hard, for a wide variety of reasons. But at the very same time, making a change in our life can, in fact, be the simplest imaginable thing. One only has to make the change and see how it goes.
Why, oh why, do we twist ourselves in knots and act as if a change has to (/must be) permanent? We can try it out, like we’d try out a new recipe, and see how we feel about it. It doesn’t need to be permanent, but there’s such value in trying.
I’m acting as if I have this all figured out, I know, which obviously is impossible, as no one has it all figured out. Yet I rather think the point is to simply be willing to try. In this case trying a life change worked quite well for me; but the experiment would have been as valuable even if the change did not work out for me.
I’ve been reading about design thinking lately, and specifically applying design thinking to our daily lives. A key takeaway is to learn how to approach parts of your life with curiosity and a sense of experimentation and problem solving. In other words, the approach a designer would use in thinking of a new idea. And then put that curiosity into action and do something. Experiment. Test. Play.
And so this mentality has trickled through into how I am thinking about my life. Taking the digital holiday was one example of how I’m trying to live a life that reflects my values—in this case, curiosity, of which I wrote about earlier this year.
Joy + joy = more joy?
The thing about change is that when you get started it becomes quite exciting. You realise that some of the initial fear and anxiety you had was not at all connected with reality. This is so both when the change is minor—as giving up technology for a month was—as well as when the change is bigger, like moving to another part of the country.
And so you get inspired and find other things to change and experiment with or think of things to mix together as ways of making new change. All under the auspices of just giving things a try, with no more commitment to at least giving the change a fair try.1Turning my phone off for a night would likely not have been a fair try, as an example.
One of the things I noticed during the digital holiday was that I often felt I had to bring my phone with me because I might see something that I very much wanted to take a photo of. And so, even though I often didn’t want to, I’d bring the Pandora’s box of distractions with me on walks and adventures, tethering me. And so, to cut another cord of dependency, I bought a wee little camera that I have fallen quite in love with. It fits in my pockets, it is a delight to use and takes lovely photographs.
It occurred to me one day when I was out on a walk with my new camera, trying out new compositions and ideas: I could combine two things I liked to make something new and exciting.
This new thing is a project to walk and photograph every street in the inner city suburb that I live in over the next few months. According to various estimates there’s somewhere between 150 and 200 streets, which sits in the nice spot between achievable and challenging.
I will walk at least one direction along every street and take at least one photo on every street of something that captures my attention and hopefully speaks to some sense of place.
These sound like unambitious goals, perhaps, but thinking about the reality of the task (and knowing myself) I’m sure I’ll end up walking both ways through a significant portion of streets and take an order of magnitude more photos than just one per street. But the trick to doing anything new is to start with almost laughable low standards and expectations.
I like this project very much for a few reasons:
You can too
The seed I want to sprout in you is the desire to make a change in your life. Try something new. Test an idea that has been rattling around your head. It can be big. Or small. But I think you’ll likely have fun. And even if you don’t, you’ll at least gain experience in design thinking and that itself is a valuable thing.
Don’t overthink. You can, heck, should start something right now. Life is finite, so we only have a certain amount of nows left to experiment with. I’d rather you use them for something fun, or at least, to experiment and see what more of the world there may be.
Notes
- 1Turning my phone off for a night would likely not have been a fair try, as an example.