Practical interventions to make life less absurd

Bad habits can be difficult to brea, but here are some subtle interventions that can help you to reclaim your life from absurdity.

Modern life, when viewed with any kind of distance, is pretty absurd. Most people wake up at the same time five days a week to sit in front of screens to earn enough money to pay for a life spent sat in front of a bunch of different screens (mobile, tablet, laptop, flat, cinema etc.). If you're really lucky what you're doing might occasionally feel meaningful, but most of the time we are all just cogs in the vast machinery of modern civilization: keeping it all ticking over until capitalism's insatiable appetite consumes the world.

What makes it worse is that hardly any of our behaviour is chosen, they are just habits we've fallen into. For instance, Smartphones promise convenience and productivity, but the side effect is to make us rats in a Skinner box, prodding for rewards as we wander mindlessly down the street. Presumably no one bought a smartphone because they wanted to be a zombie, but that is what we've got with all the phantom vibrations, gnawing addiction, and vanity metrics.

Once you've fallen into bad habits it can be difficult to break them, but here are some subtle interventions that can help you to reclaim your life from abject absurdity.

Pay as you go
Modern corporations ensnare us with subcriptions, regular monthly payments that act as behavioural cues to mindless consumption. If you give you a gigabyte, you'll want to consume a gigabyte even if you really don't need to. Cancel all your contracts, avoid information addiction, and pay as you go. Turn off mobile data and check the internet only when you need to, not just because there is a small gap of boredom between work and leisure.

Draw the line
Talking of work and leisure, the line between the two is becoming increasingly non-existent. Workers are answering emails over dinner and facebooking friends while at work - it is absurdly stressful and completely unnecessary. Draw the line between work and leisure, don't let one blend into the other. Better still, stop working altogether.

Meditate
All you need to do in order to meditate is to focus on the moment - whether embodied in the ebb and flow of breathing or a mantra or anything at all to stop thinking of the chatter of the monkey-mind as yourself. This is all temporary. Our lives are brief sparks of light within an eternity of blankness. Reflecting on these kind of grandiose truths makes all other worries wither away.

Stop Quantifying
Numbers appear to represent scientific truth, but in my experience they tend to obscure other more difficult truths. The easy banalities of the numerical is as nothing compared to the pain and beauty of the qualitative.

Stop Driving
The car is a womb in which we avoid the world around us. The effect has been to create shopping malls and out of town supermarkets, destroying local communities in the name of convenience. Walk. Take public transport. Talk to people. Engage with the world. It is an investment, one which makes the entire world a better place rather than just your cushioned cocoon.

Do one thing at a time
There are only so many hours in the day, but virtually unlimited entertainment so it is no surprise that we start mindlessly checking our phones while watching a film and scratching our balls or reading the newspaper whilst simultaneously listening to a podcast and brushing our teeth. Unfortunately, multitasking has been shown not to work: diminishing our enjoyment of each individual activity and producing a scattered consciousness. Focus!

This article originally appeared in Issue 10 of New Escapologist magazine.