How to Take Your Nights Back

Finding joy in the void

Empty, dissatisfied, and suspicious something was being stolen from me.

That’s how I’d describe an increasing number of my nights beginning around 2013. Over time, the feeling deepened and spilled into the rest of my life. I couldn’t shake the idea that life was passing me by in those years.

I’d like to suggest that the digital “innovations” of the last decade and a half have played an outsized role in worsening something humans have always struggled against — easy, pleasurable things that make their lives worse and less meaningful. I think they were at the heart of my malise.

Don’t get me wrong, people have “underutilized” free time since time immemorial. Ancient Romans headed to the neighborhood taberna to get drunk; gossip mags and mindless T.V. arrived decades ago. The philosopher Seneca found it necessary to offer strategies for not wasting our lives in 60 A.D., so it’s not like I’m breaking new ground here.

But as I see it, the problematic innovation of our era is the ubiquity, inexhaustibility, and algorithmically-tailored nature of new entertainment. They’re designed to be unputdownable, to hack our reward system and get us to indulge endlessly.

They’re exciting and enticing so we bear our throats and put ourselves at the mercy of geek overlords. An evening of algorithm time leaves us feeling like shit, seems to speed up time, and saps life’s vitality. The hours before bed disappear in a flash, leaving behind only regret.

Either you disagree with me about the undesirability of this new reality, you agree but are happy to cast yourself into your algorithmically tailored pleasure pit, or you admit life becomes shallow and shorn of meaning when we don’t restrict usage.

If the latter, read on.

Open A Void After Dinner

At least five days a week, I like to create a “void,” beginning at 6 p.m.: No T.V., computers, or most other electronic devices. Phones are off or in airplane mode. No podcasts. No screens except monochrome E-ink reading devices without internet connections.

What do we do in this void? Aristotle had a great term which was translated into Latin as horror vacui —nature abhors a vacuum. Humans do too. With hours till bed, time seems to stretch. The yawning chasm will scream at us. Our brains rebel.

Let me look at Instagram! I want a movie! Give me dopamine!

This vacuum will be filled by what doesn’t serve us if we don’t fill it wisely, so fill it we must.

But with what? There are many possibilities, but may I suggest:

• Read one of Seneca’s short letters, an essay by Montaigne, or any book you like.

• Meditate or follow a spiritual practice.

• Journal like a philosopher.

• Clean.

• High-quality socializing! Many digital addictions are our compensations for isolated lives.

• Exercise

• Work on personal development projects

• Meal prep

• Go look for some awe

• Draw, paint, or practice a craft.

• Read a book to a loved one or have a good conversation — perhaps about the book!

In short, do the normal things people did before our world was submerged in a pleasure trap, a dopamine prison keeping us perpetually entertained and never satisfied. Do things that ground you.

If you’re exhausted from your day and can’t bring yourself to do anything but doom scroll, sit and do nothing. Maybe close your eyes. If you let the void be for a time, your mind will offer up alternatives to fill it. Maybe pen the first sentence of that short story. Call — but do not text — your sister (an exception to the device rule — don’t abuse it!), take a walk, or write an old-fashioned letter.

If you’re a dopamine slave it will take time to normalize lower-stimulus activities and find deep satisfaction in them like our ancestors did — like we did before 2012 or so. The lack of interruption from devices helps sink us into flow states, and over time we find pleasure amid the focused stillness.

Until then the mind screams and weedles and justifies a return to the intense stimuli we’ve given it on drip feed. Through slower, less intense pursuits we find calm, self-worth, and satisfaction. It’s a pleasure with more depth, if less intensity.

And when we do plug in the TV and watch a movie, it’s way more intense and pleasurable because we’ve abstained for so long. Many pleasures are muted because we overindulge.

The Free Life:

My working hours are usually spoken for. Evenings are all I have. After years of this practice, my surrender of them — by thoughtlessly casting myself to the algorithmic pleasure gods and hoping for good things — seems like a personal failing I can’t abide.

I’ve been experimenting with different versions of the void since 2013, and will continue to tailor the rules. But what’s clear to me is that I can never go back to the chains. Better free and bored than enslaved to pleasure and stimulus.

Luckily, I find boredom isn’t actually a problem in the void. All I need to do is create a structured vacuum and good things happen. Contentment and pleasure follow naturally from uninterrupted focus on something worthwhile.

As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus suggests, “first say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do."

Via negativa suggests it’s often easier to know what a thing isn’t than what it is. I know there’s no reality in which I can be who I want to be while unconstrained algorithmic entertainment hacks my brain. I will not be the plaything of value extraction industries.

So void it is. I hope you’ll join me there.

There’s also the question of how to be who we want to be outside the void, during daylight hours when we must use the electronic devices that lead us astray. I explore that topic here:

How to Stop Making Mistakes You Really Want to Make

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