book notes/offline stuff: the less digital guide to creative work

“We are all bored and everything is boring. Busy 24/7 and doing absolutely nothing. There is no more boring sight than someone staring at their phone. There is no gesture more boring than the tap, tap, tap of a scroll. There is nothing more boring than the tapping of the pockets. No panic more boring than 1% battery. No sound more boring than no one talking on the bus.

“There is no suggestion more boring than ‘be positive.’ No belief more boring than work-life balance. No lie more boring than ‘To Do’. No place more boring than a cafe that looks like an office. No office that tries to treat life like a cafe still underpaid. I’m not sorry, I’m busy.’ No emotion more boring than loneliness, by choice. No night more boring than a sleepless one. No worries more boring than tomorrow’s.

“When I was bored as a child, I nagged to my parents for something to do. That boredom was uncomfortable and unbearable. We wanted to get away as quickly as possible. We would take action in an instant to escape it. This new boredom includes no energy. it doesn’t make us complain. We just accept it as the current situation. I dare not say that we are bored, so we pretend to be busy.”

“We are as numbed by the hustle and bustle as we are by the boredom. The hustle and bustle is as hypnotic as the dull… ‘Distraction offers the only relief from a perpetually incomplete to-do list. Not working becomes just as tiring and incessant like work… Life becomes linear, no peaks or valleys. Just a monotonous hum of uninteresting concern. It is a peace that consists not of silence, but of restlessness that leads to the constant hustle and bustle of simple distraction for action, too excited. to decompress I’m floating somewhere in between, inert but convincing myself that something will happen eventually We know the void We bounce between the two sides We live in the void create the depth we try to fill but at least denies any pain. How to break the hypnosis? What could break the monotony of bored but busy? A joke. A challenge. An inexplicable strangeness. Everything that is absurd. Everything for no reason”

“I’m so busy” could be the status signal of our time. Its products are the earbuds, the power banks, the multiple phones, the organizational apps – all the gadgets needed to never have to work again. A fully equipped office on the road. Work anytime, anywhere. And when you’re not at work, you can receive a status signal by holding your headphones in. Your busy resources allow you to use every minute, listen to an informative podcast Maximum productivity is an opportunity, a priority and becomes a point of pride”

“Being busy replaced leisure and relaxation as the status to aspire to. Remember when an ambitious life was advertised as a life of wealth, relaxing by the pool or taking long drives in a convertible, wearing impractically nice clothes, and with jewelry and time for The visible landscape of an imposed, ambitious life has turned into advertisements depicting ‘successful’ working, who, instead of having an abundance of free time, are pressed for time and therefore valued haggard, these admirable individuals ‘make it.’ Don’t feel sorry for them.

“Under the hypnosis of right living, the rush of achievement bleeds into reality and back again. It is used for status and provides the perfect cover for the inner turmoil of an uncertain work life. This unique form of turmoil combines (‘I could be later work in the evening,’ I could also work on a side project,’ I could do a diving course in the evening’, I could reach out to that person and ask them to start a magazine together’) with Shoulds… .in a confused, never-ending despair. Surrounded by hustle propaganda, we are forced by that inescapable next question: am I busy enough, regardless of the facts you can no longer tell whether it is automatic, imposed or by choice? Things to Do, Could Do, and Should Do provide an endless array of possibilities to do, all unfolding in an environment that encourages that always-on mentality.

“A laptop can be a link to work and a tool for after-hours exploitation, but it is also a central tool for performative busyness. If you stand behind it, you can be considered legitimately working. The exploited becomes the exploiter. If you were to do ‘connection phase’ while leafing through magazines at your desk, or doing research on the street, or even with the laptop closed, lost in deep thoughts, the body language would be ‘not working’, on the laptop you would be doing a can do an infinite number of non-work related tasks, but it will still undoubtedly be perceived as work”

“Today you always have to be busy. This means side projects, important work, lots of social obligations… seeing your friends becomes less regular because they know you’re busy and they’ll still be there when you are ‘free’. You’re a person with a lot going on and at the end of the day they know you care. There’s still that constant low-level communication: texts, comments, voice messages, emojis, Likes acknowledge each other’s existence and form the maintenance of the friendship. You’re just busy.

“Of all the interesting people you have met in your life, we can speculate with great probability that the ones who captivated you the most – the ones who left a lasting impression and remain in your memory – are all avid flâneuses and flâneurs or flâneur was an essential figure in every street scene in 19th century France, flânerie was an act limited to those you could afford to wander the streets and observe society with ambivalence, today’s less accepted ‘sleeper’ , they were the embodiment of the ‘right to do nothing’. A wanderer through the city streets, disconnected from society while taking it all in. No plans. Give it up no phone see what the day brings”

“No one is too far away (except the dead). Write to the people you admire. Start a dialogue. Express yourself, be generous, don’t ask for anything. I wrote to Iggy Pop and he wrote back”

“You don’t need help yourself. We are great as we are, not perpetual works in progress”

“Discover. Evolved. Innovation. Purpose. Engaging. Groundbreaking. Disruptive… Get out of the hollow voting zone. Just because everyone says it doesn’t mean you should. These terms are overused and misused. We are anyway insensitive to these words.”

“Pro craziness, pro privacy, pro offline”

“The joy of sitting around, not doing much, someone who likes to joke around, killing time. These joys only a few can afford, can’t they? What would we change to have them?”

“In the same existence we can find the right to laziness, the right to exhaustion, the right to sensual indolence, the right to naivety and curiosity, the right to be unproductive, the right to complain.”

“When you consider offline forms of creativity, does your mind begin to bloom with ideas, or does it immediately fall into the habit of asking someone else for answers? Trust yourself”

“Solitude is a mind free from the input of other minds”

“Even in the quietest moments, solitude can be compromised. It doesn’t have to be another person interrupting us. Even so-called ‘lonely’ experiences – reading a book, listening to a podcast or consuming content on a smartphone – can becoming an experience that shatters our silent contemplation and robs us of sustained attention”

“It may seem obvious, but if you don’t have a phone with you, you remove the risk of temptation. Plan evenings without a phone. Make it a joint venture with friends. Arrange meeting points and discuss the fact that you don’t have a phone to reassuring yourself that it will be okay. Even leaving the house with our phones in a bag can be a simple deterrent to automatically prevent them from being used.”

“Boredom can be scary at first. So can that voice of guilt that torments our insides with the panic of productivity… you know what comes next: total radiant creativity. Original thoughts and vibrant ideas. Going offline gives us the power to manifest all that lies within and has little opportunity to emerge when you are distracted and drowned by input”

“Up for anything. This is the attitude towards the stay-at-home culture. Go to a concert before listening to the music online. Try a restaurant before reading the menu online or looking at pictures of the plates in advance. Experiment with life and see where the wind takes you away”

“Avoid opinion pieces. Form your own opinion first, then discuss the topic with the people around you and then maybe see what other people say. The last step is optional. The risk of exposing yourself to the opinions of others is that you excludes that from forming your own. Activate your own thoughts, ways and connections. This limits the input.”

“Wear a watch. Rely on your phone as little as possible”

“Think of today’s typical leisure activities: watching TV, ordering food, shopping online (overnight delivery! Free returns!), home decorating, browsing the bookstore… These activities are what today’s consumerism looks like. And now We are talking about These are not activities, they rather seem like passivities. We may feel active, but the fact that we are doing something does not mean that we are operating in the mode of ‘having’, which is a different mode of experience. that of ‘being’. Can you think of an activity where you can be actively involved?”

“We are being drawn away from our desire to come together and into an increasingly individualized existence. This is the distraction that diverts our innate, instinctive attraction to each other. Our libidos are dampened. Our driving lust for life and for physical encounters is to be dulled (this is and is not about sexual encounters). We can call the loss of erotic lack of people over goods.