Transcript: But How Does This Affect Me?

Rob Long on life outside the 310 area code

A friend of mine once suggested to me that I should be more what people call, “present.” I wasn’t really here, he said, because it was clear that part of me was always thinking about something or letting my mind wander. Be here now, he said, and he gave me lots of little exercises to do to help settle my mind. We all have an irritating friend like that. 

So, I tried. Sort of. There was a meditation app for my phone, which I still occasionally use — though, to be honest, at this point it’s really just a nap alarm. And there were a couple of books about free-writing and something called “morning pages,” which he said means, essentially, that you wake up in the morning and write five or six pages of almost anything.

“For free?” I asked. As a writer, I don’t really like writing things for free, for any reason. But I tried it and as long as I didn’t remind myself as I’m writing that nothing I’m writing will turn into money, I was sort of okay with it.

The exercise that worked the best, though, was simply to be aware of what you’re thinking when you’re thinking it. So, during a stressful production day when I instinctively reach for a doughnut, I stop and ask myself what I’m really thinking about, which is, mostly, how much I love doughnuts but is also, often, some other non-pastry-related thing, in which the doughnut is simply a distraction, and a lot of the times this keeps me from eating the doughnut.

Well, not a lot of the times, but some of the times.

The problem with this system is that I’ve begun to identify one of the regular, instinctive, fleeting thoughts that runs through my brain. I’ll read the trades or talk to a colleague about a project he or she has got going, or see in the Wall Street Journal that another streaming video-on-demand service is kicking off, and there will be a brief instant — but a recognizable one — in which my primary thought is, does this piece of information benefit me in some way?

I read The Ankler and there’s a story about Sony, and I think, what’s up at Sony? Does this benefit me in some way?

They’re rebooting a TV show from the 1990s. Does this benefit me in some way?

The Ellison family just replaced the Redstone family over at Paramount. Does this benefit me in some way?

And of course it doesn’t. These are data points that have zero near-term impact on me, that may ripple out at some point and reach me, but by then the actual benefit (or harm) will be impossible to trace back.