The importance of the ‘irrelevant’ up-skill.
By Jacob Mills
It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could be wasting my life while doing a PhD. You know, I’d gotten pretty good at sudoku. I developed my methods. Go through the 1s, then the 2s, the 3s …, repeat. Go around the squares and up-and-down the lines. Look for the pairs or triplets of possibilities that ‘locked-up’ certain blanks so I could focus on the others. I’d even stopped marking the corners with the possibilities for an extra challenge, preferring to try to remember the possible combinations. I could solve the expert sudokus. I was training my brain, wasn’t I? These were the non-refundable hours in the spaces between my PhD.
But my productivity ever declined, despite my ‘brain-training’ puzzles. I was saturated with too few things. PhD and sudoku on a mundane tumble cycle.
I need something else; I’m unbalanced. My brain just refuses to sit and write. So I check Instagram, do a sudoku, check the weather, Twitter, Instagram again, another sudoku (‘hey, under 4 minutes, that’s a new PB!’) – 10-minutes later I’m doing it again. And none of these things are fulfilling. And fulfilment is what we need. Is my PhD fulfilling? Absolutely. But I should give myself credit, I’m more complex than that, I need more than just my work. I need diversity of meaningful stuff in my life. That’s why I procrastinate, I’m saturated and bored with this one pursuit and my brain will not let me do it any longer. But I don’t want to break for too long, the guilt gets me back to work! But what if I procrastinate productively, get some other things done that my life demands or needs?
Let’s be real, our studies and jobs are far from everything in life. So what happens to our studies or jobs when we procrastinate productively? When we pursue other projects that give our lives meaning? Acceleration. Creativity. Focus.
Don’t get me wrong, it has to be planned. ‘Two hours of this then I can do an hour of that’. Voila. But it’s all about what that is. When that expands me then this is easy. When it’s sudoku and Facecrack, no. Why am I spending so much time doing ‘oh, nothing much’? I might be doing a PhD, but I could be doing so much more with my life at the same time.
Last spring I picked up a guitar and got an app to learn from. Scales, arpeggios, chords. It’s hard, another language. But I’m using my hands and challenging my brain in far more complex ways than a puzzle, it’s also a story for my friends and something to laugh at. I’m certain that there’s something biological about using our hands. Wood-working, fencing, hiking, tracking animals and now guitar focus and recharge me – a kind of meditation. How did I forget this? We’re tool users. We’re artists. Jump in the way-back machine and you’ll see that we filled our time with stories, tool-making, music and art. It’s human identity, art and physical labour. Primacy. The Anthropocene isn’t just the sixth mass extinction of life, it’s the ‘extinction of experience’.
Modern life has us trapped – Palaeocene brains in an Anthropocene world. We’re not biologically adapted to high-rises and crappy bosses. Deep down we’re still primal. We still stress like we’re in a jungle being chased, but instead of a marsupial lion it’s our boss chasing us around the water cooler like a repeating gif for months on end. We’re more punitive when we’re hungry and our hormones still say ‘Yes!’ even if our pre-frontal cortex says ‘No!’. But most of us live in cities, somewhere between the penthouse and the pavement. But are we even happy in the penthouse? I need to fill the blanks between my PhD with primacy, what do you need to do in those spaces? Or, do you need to create them first?
Follow along below