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Men who stare at walls

alexselimov.com

161–170 of 346 posts

Re: Men who stare at walls

#161

Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.

Yep, I think it's basically meditation with the branding stripped off

Re: Men who stare at walls

#164
post #20

Is this not a form of meditation? I've never been able to keep a meditation habit, but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like staring at a wall would serve the same purpose.

staring at a wall is basically the zen practice of shikantaza [1], except you’re not staring, it’s more of an eyes half closed yet alert gaze. you don’t do anything, not even counting the breath. you just sit, that’s the entire practice. in my experience, the more you intellectualize it, the more difficult it becomes! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza

Maybe the useful framing is: just don't optimize the break

Re: Men who stare at walls

#166
post #105

When I was a kid, I would often sit on my bed and stare at the wall. My Dad would walk by my room and ask if everything was ok. I would always say "yeah", since I was literally just thinking. It's a great feeling to just stare at a wall and think. My first thought is usually, "If I could think about anything right now, what would it be?" And this frees my mind up to think about what I want to think about.

A lot of "doing nothing" advice gets framed as clearing the mind, yet sometimes the valuable part is finally letting the mind choose its own direction

Re: Men who stare at walls

#167
This reminds me of an app we made awhile back with the sole purpose of finding 'Boredom'.

TLDR on the app is that you join real time 'boring' livestream rooms with random people.

The app never did really take off, but I still would love some fresh ideas around combatting information overload (outside of the 1000's of screen/content blocking type apps)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926461

Re: Men who stare at walls

#168

I hope people see this comment. Meditation is to mental training and focus, as going to the gym is to physical training. Socials killed our attention span. Agents are literally making us context switch even more. Putting aside the whole "I am at piece and one with the world" part of meditation, it is extremely hard. I'm also no expert. When I'm waiting for something to finish (agent, compilation, etc), I've found tha…

The hard part is that the training looks like nothing from the outside, so it's easy to dismiss (in a way)

Re: Men who stare at walls

#169

I've recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

I remember an Asimov short story about a guy who wished that he never waits on queues or for a taxi or for something to happen. He had his wish granted and deeply regretted it for it stall from him the moments of contemplation where his best ideas were coming from.

Re: Men who stare at walls

#170

I've recently realised that the biggest problem with smartphones is not that they steal your attention (which is bad enough), but that they steal your disattention I don't know of a better word for it than disattention. Perhaps downtime? But it's not so structured. It's just those moments where you'd previously let your mind wander. Gone forever.

I believe boredom might be the word you're looking for.

I recently watched this video (on my phone, naturally) about the need for boredom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8
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