Mind Matters: It’s Time To Redesign Our Lives

I want to talk about how we’re treating ourselves and the strained relationship that we have with the structures and technologies that permeate our daily lives.

I’m going to begin with a critical look at how we’ve collectively designed the days, weeks and months of our lives. I’ll follow with some claims on what I think the big issues are with our relationship to technology and continue that discussion with additional commentary on those claims. Finally — I’m going to end with why I think all of this is serious business in terms of our mental health and well being and what we can do about it.

The Design of A Day

As someone who works with technology startups on a daily basis, I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to sit down with inspiring entrepreneurs and share the privilege of thinking together about building experiences from the ground up. The white & black boards we use are anything but black and white. They represent a world of colour and possibly, one where the amazing insn’t just possible: its palpable.

If we were to gather the greatest design thinkers of our time and ask them to design an elegant, delightful, rich and beautiful UX for the structure of our daily lives in the same way that we apply that approach to the apps, platforms and digital playthings that we make: what would that brainstorming session look like?

What would our waking experience look life for each individual, family?

What would our meal experiences look like?

How would our relationship to technology change?

Would our commuting experiences be the same?

How would they like us to conclude our day, prepare for sleep and prepare for what tomorrow holds”.

It would be amazing to be in that room to think through these design challenges and you could quickly start to reveal the incredible web of factors, restraints and requirements that are at play that are shaping everything we do and in many cases: are forced to do on a daily basis.

The challenge would an overwhelming one indeed and even the best design thinkers working with their best product managers & planners would have a difficult time designing around the physical and virtual forces at play.

I wanted to begin with this hypothetical scenario because I believe it helps to anchor this virtual conversation we’re having, giving us a reference point to collectively come back to as I make some claims about my beliefs. And here they are:

4 Claims Regarding The Relationships We Have With Technology

Claim #1: The Monday to Friday work schedule is completely outdated, harmful, restrictive and damaging to our mental health.

Claim #2: The pace of life that we’ve evolved to has quietly stripped us of our capacities to reflect, sympathize, empathize and share this mysterious existence with one another.

Claim #3: The momentum that’s continuing to build towards our persistently wired state has effectively blurred the line between our personal & professional lives and silently diminished our free time.

Claim #4: We’re duplicating core problems across industries and multiplying our mistakes in the process at a huge cost to our mental health. That core problem is surrendering to an illusionary notion of “fairness” in society and ignoring one another more than we should.

Additional Commentary

Claim #4
In Education, I’ve always believed that we need to apply special education principles to mainstream teaching & learning practices (i.e. Individual Educational Programs)

Both academia and schools are starting to understand and work towards this principle, but it’s a long road ahead and “fairness” is going to be at the heart of that struggle, because inevitably, certain students will need more support in different ways than others and as a society, our constructs of fairness are relatively self serving. We need to challenge our notions of what’s fair and balance it more with our feeling of what’s right and wrong.

Claim #3
Human being are wired social and although I’m completely open to that fact that we’ve had to redefine what it means to be social today, I worry that we’ve missed something fundamental here, and that’s having any kind of agreed upon rules of engagement.

We may be more “connected”, but we’re also chronically distracted and seduced by the variety of options we have to dive and in and out of alternate realities despite the fact that one very live one is staring you in the face.

Claim #2
We hear it everyday. “time just flies” “where has the time gone” “there’s just no time” “I just don’t have any time” “I just need some time”. I find this so troubling and odd because I don’t see time as something elusive. I see time as a gift that we all collectively share.

For anyone who’s ever courageously quit a job they’ve hated, broke up with someone that was treating them poorly or just uprooted and travelled anywhere; you know that almost immediately you feel that time slows down and you feel like “yourself” again. You also just feel “life” again in such a beautiful way. Children are amazing at helping to remind us of the bounty of time and our power to control it rather than be its slave. The day that my first son was born lasted what felt like 3 days. Everything happened in slow motion that day and the connection I felt with my wife was just inexplicably wonderful. I could’ve held her hand for 30 hours strait if I needed to and I wouldn’t have been bored for a moment.

These moments of life and death set us strait and remind us of how magical and miraculous time really is and yet, we quickly lose our senses from those coming of age moment and go on wasting time and complaining about our lack of it.

Claim #1
Many of us dread going to work — and incredibly, studies have showed over and over again that most of us are “happiest” when we’re working. The work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows this quite convincingly in his work around the notion of “finding flow” in ones life. I truly believe that we love to work and that the act of “doing” is what we live for more than the act of “resting”. It’s motivation and enthusiasm that’s so hard to come by because we’ve somehow allowed our lives to be structured by random controls that are in no way related to the realities of our everyday lives.

Put another way: what if a day was just that. A day. Not a Monday that keeps looping endless like a broken record. What if we developed a set of 365 symbols that represented each day of the year. Each one unique. New. Inspiring. Fresh. Would that change anything? Csikszentmihalyi once said:

“Control of consciousness determines the quality of life.”

- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

Mind Matters: Rewind, Remind & Unwind

Why does any of this matter? Why bother talking and thinking about these claims?

The reason is: Our minds matter and they’re also what’s the matter.

Suicide accounts for 24% of all deaths among 15–24 year olds and 16% among 25–44 year olds.

Globally, there’s close to 1 million people who’s death is due to suicide every year and there’s many more who attempt suicide.

Major Depressive Disorder is The leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15 to 44.3 Affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year.

Work Stress is a cause of 10% of Strokes

I could go on, but I’ll spare us all. As a parent, these statistics scare me a great deal. As a human being; it sickens me that beyond the numbers, I get the feeling that these numbers are not bound to decline and that our propensity to medicate and sedate may be the only way we’ll be able to win the war of our minds without making fundamental changes in the way we’re living.

When we look at suicides, or more specifically: attempted suicide — it’s been proven again and again that the most effective way to stop someone who is about to take their life is by being present, listening and validating their existence. It’s not about telling them they’re going to “make more money” or “get promoted if they just keep working hard”. They just want to be seen. heard. acknowledged.

There are so many people who aren’t seen. heard or acknowledged. Many of them are our brothers, sisters, friend and cousins who are depressed, bipolar, socially anxious, cognitively delayed, schizophrenic or physically disabled. Our grandmothers and grandfathers with dementia, alzeimers and stroke survivors. Our parents who are overworked, underloved and recovering alchoholics. Our neighbors that are malnurished, abused and discouraged.

Although time is a treasured entity and we starve for it, we seem to have an endless supply of it when it comes to the devices that we literally hold dear.

One might think that based on this post, I’m someone who’s anti technology and it’s quite the opposite. I believe in the power of technology to improve and enrich our lives and in so many ways it has and I want to continue to be someone who helps to guide technology towards those ends. But with that being said, I believe its time for us to start a very serious dialogue about rethinking the way we’ve structured our lives in a hyperconnected world, how we ought to treat one another and develop a set of social standards for how we honor the physical presence of another human being when they’re standing in front of you at work, beside you in the elevator or in the homes we share.

Chuck Palahniuk’s character Tyler Durden once warned us all that:

“The things you own end up owning you.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

Let’s collectively agree that we’re not going to let that happen — and it starts by putting down our phones and making sure those that need to be seen are seen first: face to face — void of distraction. Then our friends. Our fathers. Our neighbors and through all of this time you’ll be spending, incredibly and predictably: you’ll find yourself again.

Thanks for reading.

Jason Goodman is the Director of Strategy at Design Cofounders, where he bridges design, psychology, and strategy to help impact positive growth in people and organizations.