Mindful Nerd #008
On silence, awe, and understanding emotions in a world of attention extraction
I spend several hours every week exploring and discussing content on technology, business, and society, with a focus on mindfulness and well-being.
Every other Sunday, I send out a summary of the best material and themes I've found over the previous two weeks and some new ideas from me. These can include articles, podcasts, books, shows, gadgets, research papers, quotes, practices, practical tips, and more.
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Hi friends 👋,
Here are my top picks and reflections for this week. I hope you enjoy and learn something new.
3 Top Picks
I. ☯️ Wisdom 2.0 takeaways
Last week, I attended - online for the first time - the annual Wisdom 2.0 conference. This is a gathering of people who made contributions in domains at the intersection of technology, mindfulness, and well-being. My jam, basically!
💡 Ideas from the talks I watched
Tony Fadell (creator of iPod, iPhone, Nest):
In 2018, he publicly challenged tech companies on “device addiction”, which resulted in the launch of features like Screen Time. That was a good first step, but it’s not enough. We need manufacturers and app developers to provide guidelines for having a healthy and moderate digital life, similar to how nutritional labeling is required for food items.
Is your business model ad-based, incentivizing you to show targeted recommended content? You’ll need to explicitly declare it in the “label”.He spent 2 years in Bali, where he participated in the Hindu celebration called Nyepi, a public holiday and day of silence, fasting, and meditation. One of the rituals includes staying in the dark, without any lighting or fires to symbolize the absence of “fire” caused by human anger, hate, and other negative emotions. It’s a society that makes time and space for deep reflection, connection, and for recognizing and investigating all types of emotions.
Pete Docter (director of Pixar’s Up, Inside Out, Soul):
He likes to use film and animation to investigate, inspire, and connect.
The core idea behind Inside Out is that all emotions have jobs, they’re there to serve the person, looking out for our best interest, trying to tell us something. This is particularly true for negative emotions, like anger and sadness.
His next challenge was Soul, an investigation into what life is about, what we’re meant to do with the limited time we have, and what we are before and after life. One of the goals of the movie is to trigger in viewers the feeling of awe - that sense of mystery, of being part of something bigger. A feeling that is also frequently described by people who go through near-death experiences (How the Science of Awe Shaped Pixar’s “Soul”). I wrote more about Soul in #002.
Tristan Harris (main narrator in The Social Dilemma, founder of the Center For Humane Technology) and Jon Kabat-Zinn:
The Social Dilemma is the second most seen documentary ever on Netflix, watched by 120M people, denouncing a global problem that affects everyone.
Tristan: universal human instincts - like tribalism, disgust, outrage, the need for social validation - are being exploited by technology. They are vulnerabilities. We’re in an “extractive attention economy” that preys on human weaknesses, leveraging predictable responses to exploit human attention.
The goal of the film is to create awareness of this “trap”.
We need to cultivate the ability of the mind to observe and diagnose what's happening with our interaction with the devices.Jon: attention is the gateway to awareness. Mindfulness is one of the fundamental ways to immunize ourselves and wake up as a species so we don't surrender our “analog being”.
We called ourselves “Homo Sapiens Sapiens”, which means “species who knows that it knows”. We’re supposed to have both awareness and meta-awareness. But we're not quite there and there are big existential obstacles.
II. 🌱 Documentary on regenerative agriculture and climate change
Kiss the Ground on Netflix. A well-produced and inspiring documentary that focuses on the role of soil and agriculture in the fight against climate change.
💡 Ideas
Science: plants draw in CO2 during photosynthesis and form carbohydrates (sugars). Their roots leak some of these sugars, feeding microbes in the soil and combining with stems and leaves to form humus, a stable form of organic carbon that can stay underground for centuries. This is great because it’s a powerful and scalable system designed by nature itself to capture carbon into the soil.
Problem: tilling and the use of pesticides have led to soil erosion and desertification, with great damage done to our ecology, health, and climate. Tilling also causes the CO2 captured in the soil to be released back into the atmosphere, which is an additional concern.
Proposed solution: regenerative agriculture, an ethical practice designed to restore degraded lands and facilitate climate drawdown, the point at which greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will begin to decline year over year. Farmers need to be educated to understand the value of managing for soil health: by changing their agricultural practices, US farmers alone could capture up to an additional quarter of a gigaton of carbon dioxide each year (the US emits 4.8 gigatons/year).
🔗 Links
The Soil Story by Kiss The Ground (YouTube) - a 5-minute overview of the science and proposed solution.
Could Paying Farmers to Store Carbon Help the Climate and Save Farms? The tech world is salivating over the idea. But some experts warn it’s a field of dreams (MotherJones.com).
III. 📄 New MIT research on the value of silence during negotiations
Silence is golden: New research out of MIT’s Sloan School of Management suggests that extended silence during negotiations leads to better results for both parties.
💡 Ideas
Extended silence during negotiations was found to lead to better outcomes for both parties.
Periods of silence interrupt default, zero-sum thinking and help foster a more deliberative mindset, which in turn results in both sides performing better:
“Pausing silently can be a simple yet very effective tool to help negotiators shift from fixed pie thinking to a more reflective state of mind”.Silence affords the initiator the chance to think more deeply about the problem and therefore enlarge the pie in an efficient way.
These results may seem surprising and new in the context of negotiations, but they are very much aligned with the theory of the value of Pause (and silence) that can be found in domains like psychology and mindfulness.
1 Idea from Me
🧘♂️ Meditation practice to train attention and awareness
Koans are short stories, dialogues, questions, or statements in the Zen Buddhist tradition that are used to practice and test a student’s progress.
In a secular, non-religious context, they can be used as puzzles or cryptic questions that, when raised during meditation, can evoke interesting observations and learnings.
A popular koan that I’ve been using recently is the following:
What is my original face
from even before my parents were born?
This is a short (free) meditation from the Waking Up app that guides you through the exploration of this koan: Huineng 1: Original Face.
Here’s why I think this koan can be a powerful tool in one’s meditation toolbox:
Like all koans, it can be used as a mantra - a short sentence that you can repeat over and over again as a point of focus for concentration. And as we’ve seen earlier in this update, attention training has never been so needed and useful.
The cryptic nature of the koan allows for it to be broken down into several parts. Each one opens up a world of reflections: what is a face? What is the “original face”? As you consider it, does the mind go back in time to visualize a younger face? Then adding the second part: what image of your parents comes up? How do you see them as you consider them being born? What about even before then? Is there something more than a physical face? And so on.
Note that the goal here is not to answer the question, it is just to ask the question and become aware of any responses that are surfaced in the mind, without getting caught up in the thoughts behind them.Try to work with this koan for a few minutes over the course of several days. You’ll notice that every time the experience is slightly different. It constantly changes, building up from previous sessions or sometimes suggesting completely new and unexpected ideas.
And when you give it a try, I’d love to hear about your experience.
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Be well and be kind,
Matteo