The Art of Manliness - #539： Life Hacking, A Reexamination

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:11.220 In an effort to get more done and be our best selves, many of us have turned to life hacks

00:00:14.880 that we find in blogs, books, and podcasts. I've personally experimented with several

00:00:18.940 life hacks in the past decade, and we've even written about some on AOM. But are there downsides

00:00:23.220 to trying to hack your way through life? My guest took a look at both the positives and

00:00:26.720 negatives of life hacking in his book, Hacking Life, Systemized Living, and Its Discontents.

00:00:31.240 His name is Joseph Regal, and he's a professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.

00:00:35.340 We begin our conversation with a history of the life hacking movement and how blogging in

00:00:38.660 the early 2000s made this obscure cultural movement amongst computer programmers go mainstream.

00:00:43.200 Joseph then discusses how he distinguishes between nominal life hacking and optimal life

00:00:47.400 hacking, and between geeks and gurus. We then discuss some of the beneficial productivity

00:00:51.480 and motivation hacks out there, and also how there are ways they can go astray, including

00:00:55.280 only working for a certain class of people and becoming too much of a focus in life.

00:00:59.440 We also discuss how the minimalism movement can sometimes lead to contradictory impulses,

00:01:03.460 and we end our conversation talking about how using spiritual practices like meditation or

00:01:07.260 stoicism as hacks can strip them of their deeper spiritual context. After the show's over,

00:01:11.560 check out our show notes at aom.is slash hackinglife. Joseph joins me now via clearcast.io.

00:01:25.280 All right, Joseph Regal, welcome to the show.

00:01:28.940 Thank you for having me.

00:01:30.300 So you just published a book, Hacking Life, Systemized Living and Its Discontents. And it's

00:01:34.960 a look at the life hacking movement that started in the early 2000s and has had a big influence

00:01:41.720 on internet culture. And it's something that I've experimented with over the years and done

00:01:46.240 different life hacking things. Before we get into the specifics, for those who aren't familiar

00:01:50.880 with the phrase life hacking, what is a life hack?

00:01:54.460 At the simplest level, it's a quick or clever fix that's often systematic. Either you build up a

00:02:00.340 system for taking advantage of something or you figure out a way to maybe bend the rules of an

00:02:04.640 existing system.

00:02:06.540 Gotcha. And where did the whole thing come out of? What's the history of life hacking?

00:02:12.180 Well, since we spoke of the definition, it's actually interesting to think about

00:02:15.680 the origins of the term itself. And back in the late 1950s, believe it or not, there was a model

00:02:23.760 railroad club at MIT. And they were building this huge train platform. And there was various groups

00:02:29.200 in the club. And the one was like the systems club subcommittee. And they had this mass of wires

00:02:35.000 and relays. And they really loved this system. And they were fascinated about how all the interconnections

00:02:41.320 work together. And they ended up developing a lot of jargon. And one of the terms they came up with

00:02:48.060 in the 1950s was hack. And they called it a hack as a way to avoid the standard solution.

00:02:54.080 So that was the birth of this geeky term way back in the late 1950s. And that term has continued on

00:03:01.620 over the decades in the computer realm. And life hacking is really the emergence of that approach

00:03:06.540 of avoiding the standard solution into all domains of life as a type of self-help.

00:03:13.000 Right. So yeah, I remember hearing, even in the 90s, I heard the phrase hacker, referring to a

00:03:19.460 computer guy who was able to subvert computer systems. But when did the people start putting

00:03:24.040 life in front of hacking? When did that first start happening?

00:03:27.320 That was thanks to Danny O'Brien in 2004. He's worked at the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

00:03:33.280 He's been an author for O'Reilly, the technical publisher. And there was a conference happening in

00:03:39.000 the West Coast. And he noted that what he called alpha geeks, really good programmers, were very,

00:03:45.980 very productive and efficient. And they could stay on top of the deluge that everyone else was

00:03:50.780 overwhelmed with. And so he said, let's have a life hacking sort of session where we look at these

00:03:54.940 alpha geeks, at these really good hackers, and ask them how they managed to do that. And to what

00:04:01.880 extent that the people who are coming to this session have figured out little tips or tricks,

00:04:06.240 we can share them amongst ourselves. So that's really where it came from. It was a gathering

00:04:10.700 of writers and programmers trying to figure out how they could stay on top of the information

00:04:17.040 that's just deluging all of us.

00:04:20.620 And it was all about, I mean, it sounds like what it was about at first was like getting more done

00:04:24.300 more quickly, correct?

00:04:25.620 The people often turn to this idea of efficiency, that if you're feeling overwhelmed, if you have

00:04:31.360 too much email, then problem is necessarily to somehow be able to process your emails quicker,

00:04:36.960 more efficiently, and get down to inbox zero, which was one of Merlin Mann's ideas. He was an early

00:04:42.980 life hacker too. And Merlin Mann actually promoted the idea. I think he's one of the first ones that

00:04:48.600 really made a going practice of it on his blog. And Merlin Mann, Danny O'Brien, and then Gina

00:04:54.620 Trappany, she created the site lifehacker.com. So I think that's when it really went mainstream.

00:05:01.140 There was a website dedicated to the topic. People could go and read daily blog posts.

00:05:06.640 And then Tim Ferriss came along. And I think with his four-hour work week, he took the idea mainstream.

00:05:11.880 And he doesn't like to use the term life hacker. He prefers to call himself a guinea pig or a lifestyle

00:05:16.680 designer. But you can still see the hacker ethos. It's very much present in Ferriss's work.

00:05:23.040 And so this was around, I remember when this happened, this was like 2005, 2006, right? When

00:05:27.880 Merlin Mann and Gina Trappany with the lifehacker, that's when that started getting going, right?

00:05:33.860 Yes.

00:05:34.780 Yeah. Because I remember when I first discovered lifehacker, I devoured the archives. I thought

00:05:39.280 I discovered this just amazing well of useful knowledge and helped me get, because when I was in

00:05:44.920 law school and I was really worried about getting a lot done, because I had a lot on my plate.

00:05:49.100 And I remember Merlin Mann, uncovering him and learning about the hipster PDA. I even made a

00:05:53.280 hipster PDA. And we'll talk about some of the specific tactics that they talked about. But

00:05:57.360 before we get on staying broad, staying high level, how is lifehacking different from just general

00:06:03.860 self-help and productivity advice that we've had in America and in the West for hundreds of years?

00:06:10.020 Lifehacking is a type of self-help. I call it a type of self-help for the 21st century.

00:06:14.320 And if you look at the history of self-help, there's a really nice history written by Stephen

00:06:18.640 Starker. And he writes that self-help is a reflection of the fears and hopes of a people

00:06:23.400 in their moment in time. And if you look back at that history, say you go back to the 1890s when

00:06:28.380 self-help really first became a genre, you can see a lot of the self-help was predicated on the idea

00:06:34.160 of being open to divine intervention. So the self-help was very kind of spiritually Christian

00:06:39.960 inflected. And then in the 1930s, when we have the Rockefellers and the Carnegies, 0.96

00:06:45.720 the self-help was kind of about how you could be like them. Why don't you follow their lead?

00:06:51.900 And similarly, through the subsequent decades of the 20th century, and then into the 21st century,

00:06:56.860 self-help is, well, let's look at the alpha geeks, see what they do, and then we'll follow their lead.

00:07:01.920 So lifehacking is a type of self-help. It's not different at all. It's just self-help for

00:07:06.840 our current moment. And that current moment is coming, like a lot of the culture that we have

00:07:12.140 in business is coming out of Silicon Valley. So what's going on there influences what lifehacking

00:07:17.540 is. Right. Lifehacking is a response to a world in which other people are both, we're a bit alienated

00:07:23.920 from them, but they're also just a button click away on our phones. And it's not even a button,

00:07:28.220 it's a swipe more often. It's a world in which we don't have fixed schedules so much, but we still

00:07:33.340 feel like we have this bleed over from our work lives into our personal lives. It's a world where

00:07:39.660 we can outsource. It's a world where we're being outsourced and we experience, as some scholars

00:07:44.780 refer to it, increasing precarity in terms of knowing who we are and how we can earn our living.

00:07:51.200 It's also a moment in which we're overwhelmed with choices. We now have so many choices between

00:07:56.460 how we proceed in our lives. And a short-sighted way of looking at modernity in the current moment

00:08:03.660 is all of this stuff is good. All these choices, all these opportunities, all these things that we

00:08:08.360 can or can't do, the flexibility we have, that should make us really, really happy. But it turns

00:08:13.460 out we're still just animals. We're social animals and all that choice is overwhelming us. Lifehacking

00:08:18.600 is a self-help for responding to that glut of information and choice and flexibility.

00:08:23.260 Right. And it's responding to like, and it's, I think that's an interesting point,

00:08:26.540 how self-help, the self-help genre changes based on the culture and the governing maybe business

00:08:33.600 practice or whatever. So in the 30s and 40s, it was more, you know, like you said, the Rockefellers,

00:08:39.280 maybe in the 50s and 60s is more managerial. I guess when Peter Drucker's stuff was really popular

00:08:44.620 about managing yourself and now it's computer. So like we, the analogies we use for self-help is

00:08:50.640 often very computer-based. Right. Both the stressors are coming from this information world

00:08:56.140 and the analogies and the metaphors we use to approach and deal with those stresses is also

00:09:01.800 by way of computers. And I think you can see this in the online dating world as well, particularly

00:09:06.280 like maybe pickup artistry. Mystery said in his book, he came up with the algorithm for seducing

00:09:12.560 women. And so again, they're using those metaphors as you just alluded to. 1.00

00:09:16.860 Well, so you make some distinctions within life hacking. The first distinction you make,

00:09:22.060 there's a difference between geeks and gurus. What's that difference and why is that important?

00:09:27.140 Yeah, I think it's important to make distinctions, at least in the academic world, when people do

00:09:31.320 something critical, like Matt Thomas wrote a really nice dissertation of life hacking,

00:09:35.740 a critical history. And it's important to be critical, to point out the flaws and the short-sightedness,

00:09:41.880 but then you just sort of damn the whole phenomenon. I wasn't interested in that. One,

00:09:45.560 because I have a geeky hacker-ish kind of sensibility myself. And two, people are struggling.

00:09:51.640 They're trying to figure out how the best path to pursue in life. And just to say, well, you know,

00:09:55.960 anyone that makes use of self-help as a fool or a tool or something like that isn't very helpful at

00:09:59.860 all. So the thing I am interested in is making distinctions. And so one of the first distinctions

00:10:04.940 I make is between geeks and gurus. So I don't want to condemn anyone and everyone that's been

00:10:09.460 interested in life hacking. That would include myself and a lot of people I know and care about.

00:10:16.100 But nonetheless, there are people out there pushing some snake oil and it begs credulity.

00:10:24.660 And so I want to make a distinction between the ordinary people who are trying to cope and who are

00:10:28.660 trying to live good lives. That's not such a bad thing. We should all be aspiring to live a good life.

00:10:34.000 And the people then who are then selling the snake oil, right? And guru also, I don't mean to be

00:10:39.600 intentionally insulting. Gurus are people who offer you advice. And I could say there's good gurus and

00:10:44.300 bad gurus. But then the questions that we should ask of the gurus is, is the advice that they're

00:10:50.860 giving us solid, reasoned, and how much are they charging for it? So I would ask different questions

00:10:57.200 of both of those constituencies, the geeks and the gurus.

00:10:59.900 And also the gurus, one thing is like another question you asked, I've started to question

00:11:04.900 is like, well, is this applicable to me? Like it might work for you, right? Because you're in a

00:11:09.780 position where that works for you, but it might not work for average Joe who has a regular job,

00:11:15.160 might not work for them.

00:11:16.460 Yeah. And this is one of the inherent biases in self-help is very often the people who are

00:11:21.480 offering their advice is very much predicated on their own life experiences. So one of the distinctions

00:11:26.240 I make that I think is important about life hacking is it's really self-help for the creative

00:11:30.240 class. And I think there's two constituencies in our contemporary economy. There are people that

00:11:36.020 have a lot of flexibility who have the ability to control their calendar, the ability to pursue

00:11:43.320 their path in life. And again, that can be a stressful thing, but that's very different from

00:11:47.920 the person who is now working as a picker at an Amazon warehouse. They have a very regimented life.

00:11:53.760 And to speak as someone, a member of the creative class and tell a picker at an Amazon warehouse,

00:12:00.340 these very individualistic entrepreneurial approaches that I'm using are necessarily

00:12:04.740 going to help you. And if you don't manage to help yourself through the advice that I'm giving you,

00:12:08.860 it's your fault. I think that's problematic.

00:12:11.980 Right. It's not helpful for sure. And then so another distinction you make also is different types

00:12:17.220 of hacking. So you say there's nominal hacking and there's optimal hacking. What's the difference

00:12:22.060 there? Yeah. The nominal is kind of an engineering word. So in a way it's fitting, but I have people

00:12:27.780 who read the book said you shouldn't use the word nominal. It is too geeky. But the temptation is if

00:12:32.540 I don't use the term nominal is to use the word normal, but that just tends to be overloaded. So

00:12:37.420 life hacking is a type of self-enhancement as well as a self-help. You're improving yourself.

00:12:42.260 And when you think about normal, like what is a normal nose in a world of rhinoplasty or in a world

00:12:47.380 where a particular shape of nose is considered a better, more normal nose than other noses.

00:12:52.880 Normal is interesting and has all its own sort of complexities and problems associated with it.

00:12:57.860 But I just wanted to distinguish between the people who are trying to get back to a nominal state,

00:13:04.200 a state where they're not having migraines, a state where they're able to maintain a relatively healthy

00:13:09.200 body, and to distinguish between the people who are really pushing the leading edge,

00:13:13.780 people who are trying to, you know, do extraordinary feats of athleticism and health.

00:13:19.280 And again, that's not necessarily a bad thing, but they're two different classes 0.99

00:13:22.440 of people and approaches to life. And again, I think we can ask different questions of both of them.

00:13:29.660 Yeah, the optimize. Maybe we can get specifics of optimization or optimizing hacking. So like

00:13:33.680 one would be some of these folks who do like polyphagic sleep. I remember when that was a big thing

00:13:38.720 where you only sleep like a few hours a day, you'd use these naps. You're able to work

00:13:43.680 more. That would be an example of optimizing hacking, right?

00:13:46.740 Yes. A nominal hack would be, can I get a decent seven, eight hours of sleep at night?

00:13:51.260 And the optimal hack is, can I get through the day by taking, say, 10 minute naps every two hours?

00:13:57.540 And when you sum that up, it's actually very few hours indeed, and you can be so much more efficient.

00:14:02.520 And people have been experimenting with that for a period. Buckminster Fuller,

00:14:06.620 that guy who did geodesic domes back in the 1960s and 50s, he supposedly lived his life like that.

00:14:13.680 And I know that in the game, Neil Strauss's book about pickup artists, the character Herbal,

00:14:19.740 who also goes, his real first name is Tynan. He's experimented with polyphasic sleeping.

00:14:25.340 And the people who try it, again, it's very individualistic, very optimizing approach to

00:14:30.620 life, but people don't stick with it very long because they find it's incompatible with the

00:14:35.420 social world around them. Like the guy who wrote the WordPress blog did polyphasic sleeping for about

00:14:41.460 a year, but then he got a girlfriend and she wouldn't, you know, she's like, this doesn't

00:14:45.560 work for us.

00:14:46.640 Right. Cosmo Kramer also did polyphasic sleep, I believe, in an episode of Seinfeld.

00:14:51.920 Did he? I'm a big Seinfeld fan. I don't know if I remember that.

00:14:54.880 I think it was, I think there was an episode where he did that. I'm going to have to find,

00:14:57.880 I'm going to verify, but I'm pretty sure he did that. And it didn't work out. He just ended up

00:15:01.440 falling asleep.

00:15:02.600 Oh, that's right. Yeah.

00:15:03.500 And so, but I mean, I can see like the benefit of nominal hacking, just trying to like get things

00:15:08.860 in order, get your life, you know, running efficiently. And so it's not craziness all

00:15:12.940 the time, but one of the dangers of optimal hacking, it's sort of the Icarus effect. Like

00:15:17.300 you might reach too far and like optimizing, like you spend a lot of money and time for

00:15:22.400 very little gain. And it also might even make you more fragile in the end, because if you,

00:15:28.000 if you mess up one thing, like the whole optimization just gets thrown off the track.

00:15:32.760 Yeah. There's a lot of inherent dangers in optimization. One is that when people optimize,

00:15:37.120 they tend to be naive about it. And I think I could see that in some of the people that

00:15:41.260 were trying to hack dating and love, you know, one hacker went on like 250 dates in a couple

00:15:46.560 of months and it's like, that can't be very good. Nick Winter is another life hacker. And

00:15:51.880 he wrote a book about productivity hacking and he wanted to really maximize his productivity,

00:15:57.320 work 120 hour weeks, and he used all these motivation hacks. But then he also had to create

00:16:02.360 other things to track and optimize. So he like said, I want to go on 10 dates with my girlfriend

00:16:07.640 and I need to have 12 social events with my friends. And so the danger there is sometimes

00:16:12.500 maybe you optimize the wrong thing or you optimize one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

00:16:17.900 So when people were first introduced to this, they love it. They're like, okay,

00:16:20.840 I can solve my problems by optimizing my productivity. But then they realize productivity is just one piece

00:16:27.280 of their life. And maybe they've distorted their lives by fixating on that one particular thing.

00:16:33.300 Yeah. And the one thing I've seen in my own life, say like, you know, a big idea amongst life

00:16:37.620 hackers is the idea of a morning routine or an evening routine, which can be helpful, right?

00:16:42.660 It's have some things you do. So you set your life in order for the next day or whatever.

00:16:46.960 But there comes a point where people try to optimize their routine and get it down perfectly.

00:16:53.340 I found when I've done that, it's like, well, if one thing gets off, I feel like the whole day's

00:16:57.700 ruined. It's like, well, my morning routine, my optimized morning routine is off the rails. So

00:17:03.460 the rest of the day is... Psychologically, it does something to me.

00:17:07.280 And that is, again, a lifestyle, a position where you control your morning. The kids haven't woken up

00:17:13.720 screaming, right? The traffic isn't bad. So you have to rush out the door to get to the office.

00:17:19.220 So it has problems both for the individual who's trying to do it. And again, it assumes a lot about

00:17:24.440 the individual's position in life. Right. My morning routine became much more flexible once I had kids

00:17:29.940 because you can't control them. If they're sick, they're throwing up, well, you can't meditate and

00:17:37.420 drink your Yerba Mate that day. Right. Exactly. 0.93

00:17:40.260 So let's talk about the different areas that life hackers have tried to optimize. And as we said

00:17:44.880 earlier, a big area that early life hackers focused on was time, getting more done in less time,

00:17:52.220 being efficient. And people have various reasons for wanting to get more done so they can have more

00:17:57.140 time to do what they want, make more money, et cetera. So what are some of the different life

00:18:02.340 hacks people have used and shared with one another to help individuals save more time?

00:18:07.080 There's a couple, and I actually think they're quite useful. I use a couple of them myself.

00:18:12.560 Pomodoro, on the cover of my book, actually, there's a tomato timer. And that's the guy who

00:18:18.660 came up with the idea, said, instead of getting distracted or working in bouts that then he's

00:18:25.380 exhausted at the end, why doesn't he break up his work into like 30 minute or maybe 50 minute segments

00:18:30.560 minutes and then take a little five minute break and then return to a particular task?

00:18:35.140 So I approach my day very much like this. I have a typing timer that tells me after 50 minutes,

00:18:40.440 I should take a typing break. And that allows me to approach even big tasks by saying, okay,

00:18:45.040 in the next 50 minutes, I just want to get a start on the big task. And then I'll take a break.

00:18:49.720 And then, you know, maybe I'll have something else I want to do in the next task.

00:18:53.720 And, but if I want to continue on with that big task, I have a good start. And that's often the

00:18:58.320 hardest thing to approaching a big problem. It also allows you to say, okay, I want to spend,

00:19:03.680 you know, three tasks on my big project today, and then I'll spend a 50 minute chunk of time doing

00:19:08.740 email and a 50 minute chunk prepping for a class. And Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits

00:19:16.140 of Effective People, he said, don't prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities. And so this

00:19:21.780 allows us to sit down and say, okay, what's the big thing that I really want to do today? And that's

00:19:26.200 important because otherwise we're often overwhelmed and we're just dealing with the, you know, the fires

00:19:31.000 that keep emerging instead of focusing on the things that are going to sustain us and lead to

00:19:35.960 our growth. Besides those, any other useful ones that you found that are actually, hey, this actually

00:19:40.580 does something. Something when I'm trying to write, I actually do keep account of how much time I spend

00:19:46.660 on task and how many words I write a day. And again, it's not as if I'm going to be really hard on

00:19:52.240 myself if I don't hit my target, but it makes me a little bit more accountable. And Nick Winter is the guy

00:19:58.740 who wrote the book, The Productivity Hacker. And he has a, it's, there's a good book by Peter Steele

00:20:06.480 called The Procrastination Equation. And the question is, why do people procrastinate so much? And he had an

00:20:12.580 equation in there that said, your motivation is determined by the expectancy times the value. So what's the

00:20:18.660 likelihood you're going to be able to achieve something by how much value it is to you, divided

00:20:23.740 by the impulsiveness, the degree to which you're going to be distracted and the delay. How long are

00:20:28.300 you going to wait until you see the actual result? And Nick Winter said about saying, I'm going to take

00:20:34.960 this equation and I'm not, I'm going to use it not only to get rid of procrastination, but I'm going to

00:20:40.440 use it to maximize my productivity. And his book, The Productivity Hacker is a wonderful engagement with

00:20:46.600 all the various techniques that are out there, including maximizing that equation. So for example,

00:20:52.360 when he was trying to write some software, he was spending a lot of time fixing bugs,

00:20:56.560 but he realized he didn't have enough users yet. So if he worked on the features, then he would get

00:21:00.960 the users and then he would want to fix the bugs because they would be more valuable to the people

00:21:05.720 out there. Hence, it would be more valuable to him. Other people make use of Ulysses packs,

00:21:11.540 which they're sometimes called, which is you commit yourself to a particular course.

00:21:14.740 I don't do this myself, but some people using apps like Stick and Beeminder, they actually,

00:21:21.660 it's a web app service where you say, I want to do X, like say, I want to walk so many steps in a

00:21:27.760 given day. And if you don't do it, you forfeit money. So they actually penalize you and say,

00:21:33.120 you said you're going to spend $10, give us $10 if you fail to do this. And if people fail to do it,

00:21:38.440 they spend the money. And the idea there is they can get you to the level that you want to be

00:21:43.000 doing the thing that you're doing at a reasonable price and cost. And people are happy to pay that.

00:21:49.360 Like if someone has to spend $100 to get up to that level necessary to really make them do the

00:21:54.360 thing that they want to do, they seem to be happy to pay it.

00:21:57.520 Yeah, I've used a lot of those techniques. The Pomodoro technique I use, I've set up my computer

00:22:01.860 so that it blocks distracting websites for 45 minutes. And then I get as much work as I get done.

00:22:08.320 And then in 15 minutes, it opens them up and I can check, surf whatever I want.

00:22:13.520 Yeah, one of them is called Freedom. I think on the Mac you can get it and it's called Freedom.

00:22:17.580 Yeah. No, it's been helpful for me because again, it's a way to deal. It's a way to cope,

00:22:23.080 right? A lot of these life hacking stories are a way to cope with the current environment we find

00:22:27.320 ourselves in. And the current environment is like lots of digital distraction. We're going to take a

00:22:31.180 quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So another area we've talked

00:22:36.700 about a little bit sort of goes hand in hand with time management, this idea of motivation,

00:22:40.320 where you can hack your motivation. There's lots of blog articles, like 10 tips to supercharge your

00:22:46.120 motivation. There's books about it. So one of the things is the Ulysses pack that can be motivating,

00:22:50.780 knowing that you're going to be writing a check to you, don't believe the task, that can be

00:22:54.480 motivating. But there's also other tactics you can use. So what are some of those other tactics?

00:22:59.120 Charles Duhigg has written a couple of books on creating good habits, on hacking your motivation,

00:23:05.480 not procrastinating. And another idea in there that I actually think is useful is that when you

00:23:10.040 specify your goals, they should be SMART. And the SMART is an acronym for specific, measurable,

00:23:15.140 agreed upon, realistic, and time-bound. So the idea at least then is when you're looking at your life

00:23:20.060 and you're thinking about what you would like to achieve, don't rely upon nebulous goals. Make them

00:23:25.480 very specific. Have some sense of, well, how will I know when I've achieved that goal? Get the people

00:23:31.160 around you to buy in on it and try to be realistic and set a reasonable time boundary too. So there's

00:23:37.280 a lot of apps out there. For instance, there's exercise apps that take advantage of this. You set

00:23:41.300 a very specific goal that you want to achieve in a day. Maybe it's part of a larger goal. You can

00:23:46.560 measure it because you have the health sensor or your step counter or your smartphone that can keep

00:23:51.960 track of that. And then even the social aspect is interesting. There are exercise apps where you can

00:23:56.880 have people watching you online, kind of like an exercise buddy, or you can tell that your friends

00:24:02.780 and family that you're going to do this and they can check in with you to see if you're doing it.

00:24:06.500 So those are things that can be useful, right? To get motivated. But where do you think

00:24:11.180 motivation and productivity hacking can go awry?

00:24:14.580 Yeah. So there's a couple of angles there. For the actual individual, I think a lot of life

00:24:19.540 hackers have encountered some disappointment in their own efforts to be productive and to be

00:24:24.960 motivated. So even within a couple of years, Merlin Mann at his blog, 43 folders, he decided

00:24:32.100 he actually wasn't happy with what he was doing. So much of this is so alluring. You think this is

00:24:36.760 going to solve my problem. And then you experiment with for a while and you're like, this hasn't

00:24:40.180 really changed my life all that much. And so he called it productivity porn. And he noted that

00:24:45.140 life hackers are very prone to maybe fixating on if I only had the right pen or the right app or the

00:24:51.480 right notebook. I would be able to deal with all the stuff that I'm confronting, all the work that

00:24:56.400 I have to do. And that they spend a lot of time browsing blogs about life hacking, about motivation,

00:25:02.780 about productivity, and are not implementing it or they're using it to distract themselves. Heidi

00:25:08.160 Wooderhouse is another hacker and she did a really nice talk entitled Productivity Hacking for

00:25:14.760 the Rest of Us. And she caught all this process fondling. And she said something like,

00:25:19.500 if you spend more than half an hour a day working on your tools or reading about how to be more

00:25:24.800 productive and how motivated, you're losing. So for the sake of the individual, there's certain

00:25:31.100 excesses people can fall into. And then at the larger scale, again, I have questions about,

00:25:37.980 we seem to be living in a world where everyone expects us to be more productive, more productive.

00:25:43.440 And if we succeed and we're more productive, that just kind of raises the bar for everyone else.

00:25:48.700 And to what extent then do the companies start expecting this of us? So if the individual wants

00:25:54.300 to go out and they want to do their job better, that's great. But that Pavlok wrist zapper that

00:26:01.340 zaps you if you're not being productive, if you've gotten distracted, if you go on Facebook,

00:26:05.720 that's for the individual to purchase. But what happens when corporations start using tactics like

00:26:11.220 that? And Amazon actually has, it's not a zapper, but it vibrates to supposedly help pickers in their

00:26:19.780 warehouse. They've patented that technology. China is a bit scary because they're embracing a lot of 1.00

00:26:25.560 these technologies. And there are helmets that they have train conductors wear that can tell them when

00:26:33.520 they're being distracted. And again, that's kind of a good thing if it's going to keep safe

00:26:37.540 people being transported on trains. But they also have these gadgets that you can stick in classrooms

00:26:42.400 that recognize the students' faces and recognize when they're paying attention.

00:26:46.900 And there we're definitely encroaching upon scary, dystopic sort of vision of society.

00:26:53.080 Right. So this might not be a big one if you're just imposing it upon yourself. You decide,

00:26:57.960 I'm going to zap myself so I can be more productive. Okay. But like once a corporation

00:27:01.500 starts deciding, we're going to start using these tactics to get more out of you, then that's crossing

00:27:07.960 a line. Yeah. And the line, it's a slippery slope. It's definitely a gray area. So you choose to do

00:27:13.320 it for yourself. There's a lot of health programs at companies. And that's great if you want to be

00:27:17.880 healthy and the individual chooses to do that. And then the company says, we'll give you a little

00:27:21.680 bit of money back if you join this program in your health insurance that you pay every month.

00:27:28.460 And that's another step. And then maybe this step becomes that it's required that you participate,

00:27:33.420 even if you're going to work here. And then we're definitely in the dystopic territory.

00:27:37.740 I mean, yeah, it is dystopic in China because they have that whole social credit system, which

00:27:41.000 does... Oh, so scary.

00:27:42.040 Which is doing what you're talking about. It's like in order to, I don't know, just buy things or like,

00:27:46.920 you know, you have to have a good social credit score. And if you don't, you're going to get

00:27:51.180 turned away from businesses or loans or whatever.

00:27:53.880 Right. You can't rent a car. You can't travel. So yeah, very scary.

00:27:57.760 So that's where it could go. Yeah, that's where, yeah, that's where like hacking motivation

00:28:02.240 could get dystopic. Well, let's talk about another one. You talk about this in the book,

00:28:07.420 I think is interesting. There's lots of little different subcultures and niches within life

00:28:11.460 hacking. And one that popped up shortly after life hacking became mainstream was this idea of

00:28:17.040 minimalism. What's the draw of life hackers to minimalism?

00:28:21.240 Again, we live in a world in which we have so much choice. We have plenty of possessions. Most

00:28:27.780 people in America are not struggling because they don't have enough possessions or they don't have

00:28:33.360 enough food. Obesity is more of a problem in America than malnutrition. Malnutrition is still

00:28:38.840 a problem, but obesity has actually outpaced it. And we have plenty of reality TVs about hoarders.

00:28:44.440 And so we are really facing this conundrum of maybe a hundred years ago, we thought as the

00:28:50.180 middle class was growing, if people only had more food, maybe more meat to eat, if we only had more 0.96

00:28:56.200 positions, if everyone had a home and then they could fill that home with stuff, they would be

00:29:00.380 happy and content. Well, we've arrived at that moment and people aren't necessarily happy and

00:29:04.900 content. And so we asked the question, well, what now? And one of those knee-jerk reactions is to say,

00:29:10.980 well, what happens if I get rid of everything? And that makes sense. I think there's a reason that

00:29:15.920 Marie Kondo and her con Marie method is so popular and was popular in Japan and now even has a Netflix

00:29:22.040 show here in the United States. And I think minimalism had a lot of reasons. And it addressed

00:29:28.140 a number of problems of people working super long hours to buy houses, to fill them with stuff.

00:29:34.060 And we don't need all of that stuff to be happy. And I think that's one of the insights we can learn.

00:29:38.760 But again, people can go a bit too far and the minimalism itself can become fetishized.

00:29:46.100 No, yeah. And so what I thought was interesting about minimalism, so yeah, it's useful, right?

00:29:50.160 You don't need a lot of stuff to be happy. I think we can all agree on that. That's something that

00:29:53.780 people, human beings have been talking about for thousands of years. But yeah, there's a point where

00:29:58.480 the whole point of your life becomes minimalism. And then you, so you talk about all these blogs that

00:30:03.520 popped up where people would write like, Oh, I just have these 10 things. And they would just

00:30:08.500 under thing challenge. Yeah. The hundred thing challenge. Here's the hundred things I own.

00:30:12.160 And it allows you to, you know, be into location independent. But I think it's interesting to

00:30:17.360 sort of, so there, there's this, there's this paradox with minimalism, if you go too far with it,

00:30:23.300 where you, you, you say you reject stuff, but at the same time, the stuff you, you keep,

00:30:29.180 you hold on to like becomes super important. Like, so stuff becomes really important to you.

00:30:34.080 And like you sort of, like you said, fetishize it. Totally. And I think in response, again,

00:30:39.520 this was an interesting fad that happened about 10 years ago, people went super gung-ho and then

00:30:44.980 they realized, huh, this isn't making me completely happy. A life hacker that I spoke to used a pseudonym,

00:30:51.080 Rita Holt. She had been into minimalism a hundred percent. She got rid of all of her stuff. She quit her 1.00

00:30:56.980 job. She was traveling around writing blog posts and writing eBooks. And then I went back to look

00:31:03.600 at one of the sources as I was writing the book and all of her websites were gone.

00:31:07.660 And so then I said, what happened? And she said, she had just realized that it was this kind of

00:31:12.260 empty life and everyone was kind of competing to be who could be most minimalist. And it wasn't really

00:31:18.520 clear that anyone was living that much more of a satisfied life, or maybe these people were just

00:31:22.420 outliers. And she scrapped it all. So this was definitely a phenomenon of having this huge bloom

00:31:28.440 of hype and fad, and then it kind of dissipated, but it never goes away forever. So even after the

00:31:34.360 whole minimalism phase, Greg McEwen, who is a Silicon Valley kind of coach, he wrote a book called

00:31:40.780 Essentialism, The Discipline to Pursuit of Less. And he never mentions minimalism because I think it

00:31:45.800 had become sufficiently tarred for reasons that I mentioned and others. But then he just sort of

00:31:51.420 shifted the term he was using and said, let's focus on what is essential. So that was an

00:31:57.020 interesting turn. It's the same thing with Marie Kondo. She says, don't fixate on how much stuff

00:32:02.300 you have and getting rid of stuff instead of focus on what's really important. And so I think the move

00:32:07.060 from minimalism to essentialism was a similar sort of focus, but still it is very much preoccupied with

00:32:13.240 stuff, the both of them. And what intrigues me is, we might talk about this, but so much of life

00:32:19.400 hacking is inspired by the Zen aesthetic and various mindfulness practices. And Siddhartha's

00:32:25.320 own story was when he was born into extraordinarily wealth. His parents provided him a palace, dancing

00:32:31.920 girls, parties, food. He decided that was not for him. He went out, traveled the world, learned from

00:32:38.040 various masters, became very aesthetic, almost starved himself to death, and then decided, huh,

00:32:43.980 neither of those were good. I'm going to pursue the middle path, moderation. So though I've said that

00:32:50.020 self-help recurs, you know, has happened throughout human history, and it speaks to the fears and hopes

00:32:59.060 and wishes of the people of their moment, a lot of the insights persist decade after decade, century

00:33:05.180 after century, millennia after millennia. And I think we can see Siddhartha's story actually in the

00:33:11.200 movement from productivity hackers to minimalists to essentialists.

00:33:16.940 I mean, did you notice that when you talked to a lot of these life hackers, like they were all in

00:33:21.280 at the very beginning and just like became fanatics about it, and then eventually they just took a more

00:33:26.020 moderate approach to it?

00:33:27.620 Most of them have. Like no one, few people are fixating on a hundred things anymore, particularly

00:33:32.860 when they get kids. Rita Holt scratched it all and lives a much more moderated life. So it was a fad. 1.00

00:33:39.820 And again, it's not that it's not helpful to think critically about, am I beholden to the objects?

00:33:44.540 And am I worried about getting more stuff to fill my house with? But as you said in your own blog

00:33:49.560 post many years ago about this, it can become yet another preoccupation with stuff. And the whole

00:33:55.340 point is to get beyond stuff.

00:33:57.240 Right. Yeah. I mean, that's what I know. I've talked about like my grandfather,

00:34:00.980 part of the greatest generation, and he tended to hoard stuff. And that was probably because like,

00:34:05.840 he grew up in the Great, you know, the Great Depressions where it's like stuff was like

00:34:09.080 something you could use. Right. But what I thought was interesting about him, he was never really

00:34:13.440 overly preoccupied with stuff. Like he didn't think too much about it, but like, you know,

00:34:18.300 you have sort of like these MacBook minimalists that you call in the book, I thought was a good

00:34:21.840 phrase, just super like, this is my pen. This is the greatest pen in the world. Here's why it's the

00:34:26.460 greatest pen. And I use my Moleskine notebook and it's so wonderful and it feels so good. And it's

00:34:30.360 like, man, you really love stuff for a person who says they don't need stuff.

00:34:34.860 Right. So we need to get beyond stuff. And then there's chapters on relationships and even

00:34:38.960 meaning or spirituality hacking.

00:34:41.660 Well, we'll talk about in the bit. I mean, one thing I want to get into, there's so many things

00:34:44.860 we can talk about, but one I want to talk about is this quantified self movement that has popped

00:34:49.620 up amongst life hackers where they track their health or not even just their physical health,

00:34:55.780 maybe their psychological health. And they do that with the purpose of hopefully finding

00:35:00.240 insights to optimize their life. When did that whole quantified self movement start?

00:35:06.680 This was in the late aughts, the late 2000s. And a couple of people were behind it, but I think one

00:35:12.060 of the most notable people was Kevin Kelly. He used to be editor in chief at Wired magazine. He worked

00:35:18.880 on some of the whole earth catalogs in the decades before. And he's really been behind a lot of this.

00:35:24.740 He helped with the well, which was our early digerati bulletin board system pre-internet. He

00:35:30.540 worked with Stuart Brand, putting together one of the early hacker conferences. He now runs the blog

00:35:36.820 cool tools, which is kind of a reincarnation of the whole earth catalog. And the whole idea with the

00:35:42.660 quantified self, their little motto is self-knowledge through numbers. And in some of his early pieces,

00:35:49.520 he said that if we can quantify our lives, like how many steps we take, how many hours we sleep,

00:35:56.160 all kinds of things, not only will we be able to figure out how to sleep better or how to be more

00:36:01.160 productive, but what is human? Is human nature fixed, sacred, and infinitely expandable? And I'm

00:36:06.880 quoting him there. So he can be quite utopic or farsighted in terms of what he thinks this might bring

00:36:13.340 about. And now we're also moving into people who believe that one day computer artificial

00:36:20.720 intelligences are going to be sufficiently advanced that we might be able to become cyborgs or maybe

00:36:25.680 upload our own minds into computers. And things get a little bit kooky there, but this is one of those

00:36:31.580 places where I think it's useful to distinguish between the geeks and the gurus. Because I met lots

00:36:37.960 of people who, for instance, suffer from migraines, really bad migraines. And they do keep very careful

00:36:43.320 track of the potential triggers, like were they exposed much late during the day or did they eat

00:36:48.760 a particular food? And so I can totally appreciate that. I have various health trivial concerns that I

00:36:54.360 would like to see improved, and I try to approach them in that way. But when people start quantifying

00:37:00.340 everything without any particular cause, and then they accumulate so much data that they then start

00:37:06.560 seeing ghosts in that data. They're just looking for something to find. And so I think that speaks

00:37:10.800 to some of the dangers that when we just start experimenting with everything, trying to optimize

00:37:15.660 various things in a very individualistic way, there are excesses and possible dangers.

00:37:22.080 And health is one where life hacking can get dangerous because people often go beyond just

00:37:28.160 nominal hacking, where you're just like, okay, I'm getting enough sleep, I'm exercising enough,

00:37:33.320 I'm eating a balanced diet, where this is where you start taking supplements, or you start doing

00:37:39.720 crazy things that there's really not a lot of research about, or it might even put your health

00:37:46.760 in peril. Yeah. Serge Fugo is someone who was just in the news a month or two ago. And he has a post,

00:37:54.420 and he got a lot of coverage saying that he spent $250,000 on his biohacking. And his blog posts

00:38:00.260 are extraordinary. They're really long, they have all these figures and his lipid levels and all

00:38:04.340 these weird memes. And he's taken hundreds of supplements. And just from a common sense point

00:38:09.180 of view, you'd have to wonder, if you think these supplements are actually efficacious,

00:38:13.100 what about their interactions? Like how can you take a hundred supplements and then figure out

00:38:18.920 how you're improving, why you're improving, if you have a side effect, what is the side effect being

00:38:23.440 caused by? So I guess you could say in some sense, these people are maybe doing us a favor. They're

00:38:30.200 acting as guinea pigs for the rest of society. But I, but I like, for instance, I don't know how

00:38:36.260 much Fugo's findings are going to be useful to science. And he's certainly spending a lot of money

00:38:43.100 doing all this. And he hasn't suffered yet, but there was a fellow named Aaron Trawick, who was

00:38:47.820 really into biohacking and he was injecting himself at conferences with gene therapy concoctions.

00:38:54.140 And he did eventually die. It doesn't appear he died because of his gene therapy injections,

00:38:59.940 but he died in a total immersion tank. It was probably on some drugs and maybe he drowned himself.

00:39:05.880 But that still was like the idea that you have to take MDM and go into an immersion tank and float

00:39:11.780 there and maybe drown. I think that is scary. And again, I don't think from a self-help point

00:39:18.300 of view, we should be listening to those people as gurus. That's dangerous stuff. And if they want

00:39:23.040 to do it, that's fine. But I don't think people should look to them as that's the path I should

00:39:26.520 be pursuing. And what's interesting too, you note throughout the book with, I mean, a lot of these

00:39:31.200 life hacker types, they're typically computer, they're like computer programmers. They're very

00:39:35.780 analytical. But with a lot of them, there's also this strain of magical thinking. Like you talk about

00:39:41.240 the people who want to live forever and upload their brain to a computer. There's that Ray,

00:39:46.580 how do you say his last name? Kurtzweil. Right. He works for Google. He's a futurist. He's the guy

00:39:52.160 that coined the term singularity when the computers will take over. But he's like taking hundreds of

00:39:57.520 supplements a day in the hopes that he can live long enough to have his brain uploaded to a computer.

00:40:04.180 But like that's kind of, that's sort of magical to think that that's possible, right?

00:40:08.920 It is. And this is a difficult thing to reconcile. I haven't gotten my head fully around it. But in

00:40:14.980 some ways, these people are very, very rational the way they approach things. But they're also not

00:40:19.440 immune to magical thinking, as you put it. An interesting side about Kurtzweil, I don't think

00:40:24.400 he's taken a hundred supplements. I think he's honed it down a little bit. But at some point,

00:40:28.660 he was taking so many supplements that he actually hired an assistant to keep track of his supplements.

00:40:33.960 And again, we get back into that thing of like, these are very wealthy people that can afford to do

00:40:40.420 this sort of thing. Serge Foucault is a very wealthy person to be able to spend $250,000 on

00:40:44.700 biohacking. And I can't help but wonder like, boy, if you had spent some of that money, maybe getting

00:40:51.280 vitamin A supplements for people in India or something like that, you could have saved hundreds of lives.

00:40:56.880 But like you said, like you talked to a lot of these guys, particularly with the health thing,

00:40:59.760 with the quantified self stuff. And they'd say, well, I just do this thing and it just works. I don't know

00:41:03.760 why, but like it works. And like, well, you know, you could always say, well, it could be placebo,

00:41:08.000 right? Like that could be the thing why, like you think it works, so it works.

00:41:11.480 Yeah. I was reading recently that there's a couple of psychologists that are pushing this idea of RQ

00:41:18.180 as a complement to IQ. And the research does show that intelligence does not necessarily correlate

00:41:24.620 with rationality. And they have a particular test where they test against magical thinking.

00:41:30.680 But in a more common sense, when we talk about life hackers and their rationality,

00:41:34.540 that's more of a cognitive style. They tend to be more analytical, but it doesn't mean that they

00:41:39.360 necessarily have the understanding of the sort of cognitive mistakes and biases we can make,

00:41:46.340 even when we think we're being analytical.

00:41:48.800 Well, I think I've read studies about that similar, where it's typically like really intelligent people

00:41:54.360 that fall for cults.

00:41:56.200 Yes.

00:41:56.440 Because they're able to think their way, like, oh, this makes sense. They're able to be more

00:42:00.360 analytical about like why it's a good idea to join the cult. And they're able to, when people say,

00:42:05.520 you're in a cult, they're like, well, no, I'm not. Here are the reasons why and blah, blah, blah,

00:42:09.120 blah. I can see something similar going on possibly with life hackers. Like, well, it works for this,

00:42:15.020 this reason, because I'm seeing the data and I see a pattern there. And they're like, well,

00:42:18.080 no, that could be placebo. Like, no, really, here's the data. And it's like, well,

00:42:21.020 it might not be the case.

00:42:23.160 Yeah. People can be very good at rationalizing it, justifying what they do. And the more

00:42:27.320 intelligent they are, the better at it they seem to be.

00:42:30.600 So you mentioned this earlier. There's also this strain within life hacking about hacking meaning,

00:42:35.320 right? And life hackers tend to be drawn to Asian philosophy. And that's where the whole 0.97

00:42:41.280 minimalism thing came out of, but also stoicism. What do you think is the appeal there for life

00:42:48.040 hackers to stoicism and Buddhism and other Asian philosophies besides Buddhism?

00:42:53.860 Well, interestingly, they're the two ones that I'm most interested in. I've been a practicing

00:42:58.080 Buddhist for over a decade, and I've been reading Seneca and other authors in stoicism for many,

00:43:05.560 many years across different translations. And what is nice is that they don't invoke a lot of

00:43:12.780 magical thinking. There's no gods that you're necessarily calling upon to help you change your

00:43:17.680 life. They are very suitable for the individual because it's like, this is your life. Things

00:43:22.820 are going to happen in your life that you don't necessarily like, and somehow you need to cope.

00:43:27.400 And there they give recommendations for coping. They recommend a moderate approach to life.

00:43:33.500 The Stoics, for example, have all these interesting practices where you try to

00:43:37.760 be grateful for whatever it is that you have, to practice a living heart so that you won't fear when

00:43:45.480 difficult things appear in your life. You'll be like, well, I've been through this or worse,

00:43:49.340 so I can deal with it. So I think there's a lot of wisdom there that I try to take advantage of,

00:43:54.700 and that's available for other people. But again, given that this is life hacker and given that people

00:44:00.940 can get a bit excessive and optimize the wrong things, there are dangers.

00:44:06.700 What do you think those dangers are?

00:44:07.700 It is a very individualistic sort of approach. So one of the folks I talk about in the book,

00:44:14.860 he decided that he was completely dissatisfied with the life hacking world. So he had gone through

00:44:20.020 this whole progression of being really productive, and then that didn't work, and then being a

00:44:23.760 minimalist, and that didn't work. And then, so he said, I'm going to do an ancient wisdom

00:44:29.220 experiment. I'm going to do these experiments where I follow the practices and teachings of these

00:44:34.480 various traditions that have been around for at least 500 years. And he dabbled with a good dozen

00:44:41.040 spiritual and philosophical traditions. And for instance, when it came to Buddhism,

00:44:46.840 he just would sit quietly and meditate. And that is a big, important practice of some aspects of

00:44:52.500 Buddhism, especially say Zen and mindfulness, but he did it alone. And I think the thing that he failed

00:44:58.240 to recognize, and also when people do this in Stoicism, is that these were very much community and

00:45:03.820 mentorship-type practices and cultures, right? We had Socrates, Plato, Aristotle. In Buddhism, 0.73

00:45:12.360 and particularly in Zen, there's a tradition, a lineage, that goes back 1,500 years of transmission,

00:45:19.760 and there's the Sangha that supports you. So I think one of the dangers with the, sometimes what

00:45:24.860 is called McMindfulness, is that, again, it's very individualistic. It's very rational. You think

00:45:30.640 you can figure it out. You think that you are rational, hence you might not see some of your

00:45:34.360 biases and limitations. And then again, there's the social angle. So one of the criticisms of

00:45:42.160 McMindfulness is that maybe the reason that this has been picked up at Google under the banner of

00:45:47.340 Wisdom 2.0 is that because it's good for business. So Ming Tan, he's the guy that set up the search

00:45:53.620 inside yourself. And his book is very good, but he was a Googler that started offering meditation classes,

00:45:58.140 and they really took off. And then they started having this Wisdom 2.0 conference out on the West

00:46:02.540 Coast. And he actually said that, and this isn't the only thing he has said, but still, I think it's

00:46:08.500 somewhat representative. He said, Wisdom 2.0 is going to allow your employees to increase their

00:46:15.260 emotional intelligence. And employees with higher EI are going to make you shitloads of money.

00:46:21.120 So again, we've gone far from some genuine insights of wisdom to something that's been

00:46:29.480 picked up by corporations to somehow make more money. I don't think Buddha would be down with

00:46:33.900 that. No, I don't think he would. No. Well, I mean, so what's your takeaway after

00:46:38.360 doing this book? I mean, it sounds like you're ambivalent about life hacking. Would that be a fair

00:46:44.700 judgment? Yeah. And I think it teaches us. So these distinctions we're making between geek and

00:46:50.880 guru and nominal and optimal and some ethical sort of distinctions we might think about, like,

00:46:55.920 is a particular hack, is it universal? Does it work if everyone does it or only if you do it?

00:47:01.240 And I think there are some hacks out there that are like, I have a hack for cutting in line. And we

00:47:05.480 said, well, if everyone tried to cut in line like that, that wouldn't be a better world. So we can ask,

00:47:09.500 is it universal? Is it beneficial? And then, interestingly enough, one of the important

00:47:14.700 distinctions I pull from all of this is a Buddhist philosophical notion called near enemies.

00:47:20.280 And the idea is that virtues often have an apparent enemy or opposite. So compassion and animosity,

00:47:28.440 those are obvious near enemies. But there's also near enemies, they appear to be virtues, but they're not.

00:47:34.580 So it's very easy for people maybe to confuse pity with compassion.

00:47:38.240 So compassion, yes, that's a virtue. We want to be compassionate. But when we go out in our real

00:47:43.500 lives and we start interacting with people and we're pitying them, it's not quite the same thing

00:47:47.840 as compassion. So one of the insights I take away is I really think life hacking exemplifies this notion

00:47:53.420 of near enemies. When we look at efficiency, our first impulse when we're overwhelmed with work is

00:48:00.000 to try to be more efficient, but that's not the same thing as being effective. When we think about

00:48:04.860 our relationships with other people, we think we could be connected or we could go on 100 dates or

00:48:09.480 we could have sex with dozens of women in a particular month or year, but that isn't actually 0.70

00:48:14.660 giving us connection. And similarly, wisdom 2.0 isn't necessarily actual real wisdom.

00:48:22.080 So life hack, but do so thoughtfully maybe would be.

00:48:26.900 And the metaphor I ended up choosing was kind of like horse blinkers or blinders. And so we live in

00:48:32.760 this world of distractions and choices, and it makes sense for us to want to put on the ear-canceling

00:48:38.420 headphones and maybe get a cubicle for our head and have these blinkers on. And that helps us look

00:48:44.100 out into that distant vision of those goals that we want to achieve with our life. But in wearing these

00:48:49.300 blinkers, we are blocking out a lot of stuff on the periphery. We're blocking out other people

00:48:54.400 that we shouldn't be ignoring. Maybe we're trampling some people underfoot. And I actually

00:48:59.340 toyed with the idea of calling this book Blinkered, but I thought that was too negative. But as I was

00:49:03.520 writing the conclusion, I was still making use of this metaphor. At last year's South by Southwest,

00:49:08.980 Panasonic actually demoed, they call it wear space, a literal set of blinkers with noise-suppressing

00:49:15.660 headphones that you stick on your head. And I really recommend people Google it and have a look

00:49:20.560 at the pictures. It's really remarkable. And Panasonic, it was just a demo, but there was a

00:49:25.520 crowdsourcing in Japan, and supposedly they're manufacturing them now. Supposedly, this really

00:49:30.760 is the solution to the 21st century, that you put this weird thing that blocks your periphery and

00:49:35.840 cancels out and drowns out all the sound around you. And that concerns me. Yes, it is going to give

00:49:42.480 you some benefits, but at least you have to take that off some of the time and look at the people

00:49:46.620 around you. Well, Joseph, is there some place people can go to learn more about the book and

00:49:50.560 your work? They can just Google me, Joseph Regal. I have a website that I update sometimes. I am on

00:49:55.780 Twitter, though I don't pay a lot of attention, J.M. Regal, to social media. It's one of my own life

00:50:01.400 hacks is not to get too caught up in social media. And my email is on my webpage, so people can email me

00:50:07.300 as well. All right, Joseph Regal, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

00:50:10.820 My guest today was Joseph Regal. He's the author of the book, Hacking Life,

00:50:14.660 Systemized Living and Its Discontents. It's available on amazon.com. You can find out more

00:50:18.340 information about his work at his website, regal.org. Also check out our show notes at

00:50:22.460 aom.is slash hacking life, where you can find links to resources, where you can delve deeper

00:50:26.940 into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website

00:50:38.000 at artofmanliness.com, where you can find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles

00:50:42.140 we've written over the years, including some life hack articles. And if you like to enjoy ad-free

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00:51:06.860 that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you

00:51:10.680 think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. And until

00:51:14.040 next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast, but put what

00:51:18.180 you've heard into action.

00:51:33.260 a friend of 2018, it helps out a lot. And when we built up and we wanted to share it all

00:51:38.300 different ways?'

00:51:39.140 Thank you.

00:51:40.960 Thank you.

00:51:42.440 Thank you.

00:51:42.940 Thank you.

00:51:43.820 Thank you.

00:51:44.880 Thank you.

00:51:46.440 Thank you.

00:51:47.640 Thank you.

00:51:48.380 Thank you.

00:51:50.340 Thank you.

00:51:51.920 Thank you.

00:51:54.100 Okay.

00:51:56.620 Thank you.

00:51:57.340 Thank you.

00:51:58.500 Thank you.

00:52:00.740 Thank you.

The Art of Manliness - September 02, 2019

#539： Life Hacking, A Reexamination

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