About Daydreaming

"Next time you have a minute to spare, instead of reaching for your phone, be rebellious: Daydream."

If you only read one thing today, read this.

An excellent guest post from Christine Rosen on Jonathan Haidt's Substack: On The Death of Daydreaming

It summarizes so well a lot of what is going wrong in our 'always on(line)' society.

We keep filling the moments in between things with our phones.

Killing boredom immediately when it starts creeping up to us.

And with it, killing the opportunity for our mind to wander. And to wonder.

Which reminded me of Monica Parker's book The Power of Wonder, where she wrote:

"Wonder makes us less stressed and feel like we have more time. A very prosocial emotional experience, wonder simply makes us want to be better, more tolerant people."

It makes us feel like we have MORE time.

Yes, you read this right. In our perpetual race for more efficiency, killing all idle time, filling it all with 'productivity', we keep running down a spiral of subjective time scarcity.

So, to feel like we have more time, stop filling it up with stuff.

Stop, wonder, let your mind wander, daydream.

As Jonathan writes in the intro to the article:

"I began to see that the phone-based life, and social media in particular, push us to live in ways that are directly contrary to those recommended by nearly every ancient religious and philosophical tradition. These traditions tell us to be slow to judge and quick to forgive. They offer practices like meditation to quiet the mind and open the heart to deeper truths and greater communion."

Which in turn is also what late Mihaly 'Mike' Csikszentmihaly envisioned with his pioneering research on Flow.

Living a 'flowprone' life is a lot about giving our mind SPACE. When the mind wanders, the pattern recognition ignites and starts connecting the dots. If we never let our brain disengage and let it do its thing, we overload and overwhelm ourselves cognitively.

Nowadays, Flow is often reduced to hyper-productivity. However, that was never Mike's intention. The true intention was to improve the quality of our lived experience. Individually and collectively.

Yes, Flow can be highly productive if applied to work or other 'productive' activities where there is a tangible output at the end.

However, Flow is also about autotelicity, ie. doing something for the activity's sake, irrespective of the outcome.

And about enjoying and savoring the moment while we are at it and especially afterwards.

But when we run to the next thing, or immediately check our phones afterwards, we can't savour it. And so, the quality of that experience is compromised.

So, next time you've done something pleasant or even been in flow, don't reach for your phone to share it, or run to the next thing.

Instead, stay in the moment and savour what you've just accomplished.