Men who stare at walls

It's called default mode thinking. Or the default mode network [1].

And I agree, not letting your mind do this from time to time results in higher stress and less ability to focus.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

'boredom' is how I'd call it but it has a negative connotation. Being bored is useful, it lets your mind wander and it's where real creativity can happen.

I read "Non-Things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld" recently and since reading that I make an effort to not pick up my phone as much. I'd recommend reading the book, if you're looking for something to do instead of doomscrolling.

I used to be addicted to cannabis and one quote that snapped me out of it, and made me move on with life, was Randy Marsh in South Park saying something along the lines of "Weed makes it fun to do nothing and be bored".

That's the same with smartphones and those scrolling apps, they make it fun to do nothing and be bored.

John Cleese had an amazing talk on this - https://youtu.be/nvKeu46jgwo?si=vIRHSJWXff8Kyf2l on being creative

You reminded me of a post I had read on a math-related website. I think it was a math association where different authors could post articles, but it was one about a series of advice columns by people pursuing PhDs or graduate studies in math.

Anyway, the article I'm thinking of was about a guy who had advice along the lines of "keeping up your hygiene" or "maintaining your cleanliness habits" and his anecdote was about being stuck for a while in making progress on a problem, but he would have a habit of taking a daily shower. There was a detail he shared about getting an insight and then being able to write some ideas on the window with the condensation.

I wonder if I can find it again.

When I go on vacation on cruise ships I never pay for internet and my phone is only used for tracking time and photos. Why be on vacation just to doom scroll?

I feel like this is my time to shine

Reminds me of the Beatles lyric:

> I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in

> And stops my mind from wandering

> Where it will go

While I don’t want to downplay the toxicity of smartphones, couldn’t the same be said for books and newspapers?

I remember an Asimov short story about a guy who wished that he never waits on queues or for a taxi or for something to happen. He had his wish granted and deeply regretted it for it stall from him the moments of contemplation where his best ideas were coming from.

I believe boredom might be the word you're looking for.

diffuse attention is the technical name. it's contrasted to focal attention

Quite true

The best thing about getting older / presbyopia is it's harder for me to use my phone as much as I once did. Also, I won't get an unlimited data plan for the same reason.

> Gone forever

I mean, just shut your phone off. You're likely just missing text messages anyway.

As someone who's maintained a meditation practice since 2013, this is definitely meditation.

And by "maintain a practice", I mean it's more like something I return to with frequency and less a daily compulsion.

Focusing on the breathe or ambient sounds is "easy", and is precisely the reason meditation is seemingly difficult. The mind craves more than simplicity; for some this occurs after a few seconds, for others after a few minutes...it all depends on the day. Learning to observe when the mind wanders is one part of the practice. Labelling the quality of thought that caused the wandering (planning, worrying, visualizing, replaying, etc)and returning to the simpler act of focus on breathe or sounds is another part of the practice.

This article is very much the author discovering some variation of meditation; if they feel the need to "invent" something and share it in a blog post...then here's hoping it promotes more people to give it a shot and maybe it'll lead to at least one person developing a new practice for themselves.

staring at a wall is basically the zen practice of shikantaza [1], except you’re not staring, it’s more of an eyes half closed yet alert gaze. you don’t do anything, not even counting the breath. you just sit, that’s the entire practice. in my experience, the more you intellectualize it, the more difficult it becomes!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shikantaza

Reminds me of the “Wallfacers” in Cixin Liu’s “The Dark Forest.” I believe the term was derived from that meditative practice you refer to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trāṭaka

> Is this not a form of meditation?

It could be, but it depends on what you're cultivating. If you're spaced out, day dreaming, then you're practicing distraction. Meditation is practicing the opposite of distraction, to become aware of the mind's true state.

it almost is but meditation, is done with more intent.

In Zen Buddhism for example you are always striving to increase awareness, by constantly monitoring your internal monologue, pulling yourself back from day dreaming, expanding from focus on the breath to all near by sensation and phenomena.

True meditation, in the zen sense, is an order of magnitude more difficult to do consistently, and takes intense willpower.

Yes indeed! These are (or are related to) common meditation techniques. The proper way to understand the practice of meditation is "training your attention." There are many, many ways to do this, but the most direct form is to put your attention on some object and keep returning it to that object over and over again. This builds steadiness of attention (concentration) and has some nice side effects of clarifying the object of attention as well as keeping attention balanced relative to other objects (equanimity). Ideally, the object of attention is non-conceptual. Thoughts and emotions are the main objects that are constantly distorting and interrupting our attention, and ultimately the crux of the "training" is in finding harmonious ways to use/manage/embody them.

Unfortunately, it's very hard to understand how training attention in this manner can provoke dramatic improvements in attitude, happiness, and even conventional life goals. This is where a lot of the work in modern Buddhism is being done, and I personally believe we need to integrate these techniques into our everyday systems and ways of living. Otherwise, it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss them since good, objective evidence of their efficacy is hard to come by.

Perhaps a useful framing for readers on here is in reprogramming your self. We often accept that we cannot change or even that we want to change. By training our attention, we can focus it on the way the mind itself functions, and this eventually gives us the power to rewrite or rework core parts of our selves. The body contains the source code to our perception of reality, and when we can truly let go we find that we are free to be the person we want, and it is in fact our destiny.

After reading your comment, I was reminded of my first and last visit to a zen meditation center where we had to meditate by staring at a wall sitting on some sort special cushion designed for this sort of meditation.

I think your parallel is spot on!

The Three Body Problem has the Wallfacer project, named after a form of Buddhist meditation.

Literally regular Zen practice, in fact where I used to go we always called it “sitting and staring at the wall”, to remove any woo associations or any idea that you’re doing something grand.

I remember sitting in an intro session and the teacher asked everyone for what they expected - one of the guys there was a dude bro who was obviously there because his girlfriend dragged him. He said all the fancy things about reaching higher consciousness, like he thought the whole thing was stupid but he was playing along. Then after sitting for 15 minutes he was more into it than his GF. He clearly had an experience and excitedly struggled to find the words to describe it. I honestly think the less you expect out of sitting, the more likely you are to get something, weirdly.

It sounds exactly like meditation, but a boiled down, modern technique that doesn't use the word.

A creation myth of Zen meditation and Shaolin Kung Fu claims that Bodhidharma meditated for 9 years facing the temple wall, and eventually caused the wall to crack.

I don’t practice meditation so I couldn’t tell you. I do find that when I do it, there are two regimes.

In the first regime the time goes somewhat quickly and it isn’t as difficult. I call this the zoning out regime. There usually hits a sudden point where zoning out is no longer quite as easy. This is probably the meditative regime where I have to be more mindful about keeping my mind blank.

I set a timer just to train my will, but I don’t prioritize spending a ton of time in that second regime. Just anecdotally, once I’m past the zoning out regime my focus is usually back.

Yep. You don’t have to have to have your eyes closed to meditate. You can keep them open to focus on the flame of a candle or something else… in this case, a wall!

Look up "wall-gazing meditation".

I've never liked the way meditation makes me feel, but I really like doing "guided relaxation". To an extent that I think they have to be different somehow, even though a lot of people would probably say they're the same thing.

I feel like staring at walls is similar.

Yep, I think it's basically meditation with the branding stripped off

It's maybe more along the lines of some of the mindfulness protocols, which are a form of meditation.

There's one where you are at rest and slowly shift the focus of your gaze from near to middle distance to far away, and back.

It's supposed to be a grounding exercise to bring your mind back to a state of rest and just observing.

I'd consider them to be pretty dramatically different; meditation can be associated with deliberate focus and a kind of religious devotion, while just staring at a wall can be the absence of focusing or any kind of defined practice

I was taught to aim for "mind blanking" when meditating, so does seem like it!

I predict this thread will now spiral into a dozen different definitions of meditation.

is meditation just not a form of staring at a wall? i've never been able to keep a staring at a wall habit, but my understanding that staring at a wall often features opening your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing, it sounds like meditation would serve the same purpose.

Definitely.

Interesting twist- notice dark shapes in your color spectrum for a while, then switch to light. Trippy.

zazen is often practiced eyes open facing a wall

Yes. I swear every day I see a "new" fad targeted at fixing one's attention and every time they're doing so much mental gymnastics to not use the word "meditation."

One of the top comments on the video is "Bro accidentally discovered meditation"

this is known as trataka meditation in the yogic tradition. trataka falls under the umbrella of kriya (purification) techniques which is why it helps with focus and intention

That immediately came to mind (no pun intended but still welcomed).

> ... but my understanding is that meditation techniques often feature closing your eyes and focusing on breathing, body parts or some other irrelevant thing

It's more like the opposite. If you think about your breathing, you'll be "controlling" it (which funnily enough is not the case when you don't think about it). Meditation is the opposite: you have to be in a state where you can think about your breathing and yet you're not controlling it.

I can tell that, from doing it since a long time and from talking to people about it, even many people who practice meditation cannot reach that state (thinking about breathing without controlling it).

And you also really don't focus on body parts: you "disconnect" them all until you don't even feel them anymore.

And you also shouldn't focus on irrelevant things: you have to focus on absolutely nothing.

There are many different techniques to "pass on through to the other side": some visualize thoughts ("words" or the "internal monologue") as if it was a sea. The more thoughts, the more hectic the sea (and you want it all calm: no words, no internal monologue). Some imagine a lotus flower opening and when the last leaf opens, you can be in. Some imagine diving.

I meditate on and off since a long time. There are benefits, for example I definitely can lower the intensity of headaches (or at least how I perceive the pain). What I tell my friends is that Buddhist monks are actually on serious trips beating any psychedelic drug that does exist.

same experience here. I had similar hitting the wall problem in early afternoon. After stopping caffeine it's exactly as you describe

I sometimes went to bed early just to think! I was excited about it and looking forward to it. I don't do that anymore, but going for a walk without smartphone, no music, no audiobook reminds me of that time.

A lot of "doing nothing" advice gets framed as clearing the mind, yet sometimes the valuable part is finally letting the mind choose its own direction

> When I was a kid, I would often sit on my bed and stare at the wall. My Dad would walk by my room and ask if everything was ok. I would always say "yeah", since I was literally just thinking.

Me too. And all I wanted was a Pepsi.

Much like the gym, meditation seems to me like an artificial alternative to an actually healthy lifestyle. Perhaps it is necessary to have such explicit and focused "exercising" to really get what you need nowadays, there may be merit to that.

But why not just go for a nice walk with no headphones?

One thing I do point out to folks is that meditation comes in many shapes, there is no one size fits all. For some it is silent sitting Zazen style, for others it is walking mediation, or a sort of physical almost martial arts type thing. There is a thousand different style in between that. Do what works for you. If that is staring at walls, neat!

The hard part is that the training looks like nothing from the outside, so it's easy to dismiss (in a way)

I am a pretty peaceful person, but working with agents frequently (daily) makes me furious. I wonder if the context switching you mentioned leads to more fatigue, which makes me much more irritable.

> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.

May be true.

But doing "rewarding" work encourages your body to emit more dopamine. Some people call it "the flow", others "hyperfocus", but it is a constant stream of dopamine that keeps you doing what you currently do. And you can interfere with the emittance and absorbtion by using caffeine.

> It’s just the caffeine

Fair enough if the use of “dopamine” is imprecise, but excessive screen time / doomscrolling / shitposting is definitely enough to wire you awake on its own, without caffeine.

> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.

That's for IV dopamine, used in extreme circumstances. Natural dopamine lasts shorter than that!

Nice find. I'm going to print this and put it on my wall.

I live in an old warehouse converted into apartments. The walls are made of yellow brick and they're nice to look at because of the variation in texture/wear/color

Honestly, looking at this photo even for one second only triggers intrusive thoughts about how badly it needs to be corrected for distortion...

But maybe that's exactly the lesson.

It depends on who you ask.

Some Zen teachers think that it is impossible to meditate while walking as it keeps the mind moving rather than still. These are the folks that go against any kind of seasoning in food for the same reason. I always thought that was a very restrictive way to box in and needlessly constrain what meditation can be. If it works for you, great but don't sell it as the only path. That is the thing with a lot of folks, to try and overly define 'the only way', the smarter ones know there is a thousand paths to the top of the mountain.

Thích Nhất Hạnh used to swear by walking meditation, others would scoff at that. Each to their own.

'There is a thousand paths to the top of the mountain, the view is the same for all at the peak'

There’s a lot of research on restorative environments (usually nature/outside)being good for focus. I definitely try to spend as much time outside as I can, but for some reason the wall works better for that 5-10 minutes. Being outside is much more enjoyable though haha

It's funny you said "shower-thinking" because showers are one of the few places where it's not practical to use a device and you really are alone with your thoughts. A normal day to day activity that is the same sort of "stare at walls" state that the OP describes.

While your point is very helpful ("stare through a window instead"), you're adding a second-order improvement while the article is suggesting a solution to a first-order problem (dread, overwhelm, depression, burn-out).

(Also, even on the second-order of "what about your eyes", I would guess that staring at a wall several feet away is already an improvement over staring at a screen in your hand.)

To play along as we crowdsource a combined solution to more than this narrow problem, I'll add my own 2nd-order suggestion as well (for fitness and health), and suggest staring at the horizon while walking outdoors for a few minutes

This can be fixed by relaxing your eyes and staring through the wall. This is equivalent to looking into the distance.

That is insane.

An ADHD brain may work better without stimulating caffeine, YMMV.

Apparently movement plus focus on the distance has a calming, clearing effect on the mind.

Do you have a similar experience when walking or running (deliberately)?

It may be the opposite of that, trying to inhibit the default mode network.

DMN starts when you are doing something trivial and start thinking about something completely unrelated.

It's kinda like falling asleep, except more coherent.

More on the topic of the post, devices require a tight focus on details on a small object. That's the poison. Tight focus means stress for humans. You need time where you're not focusing on things (in all senses of the word, ideally) to recover and lower stress.

The idea as far as I understand it is that it’s the point exactly to sit with and process whatever comes up in your mind when you don’t distract yourself. The more often you do it, the more present you become, and the more ability you develop to discriminate between what really is there and what is your imagination/unprocessed memories of the past. The object you focus on merely serves as a still reference point from which you look at what else is showing up (feelings, thoughts, memories).

There will always be anxiety, otherwise you would have processed it already and not hurried away into other activities. It sure feels life-threatening, but as long as you don’t give in to the illusion and remind yourself that it is not, there is no rational reason to jump away. Breathing is a typical way to remind yourself that you are safe in the present environment. And the gift you receive is more and more clarity and a relaxed base state from which to face what’s next.

I think so, given that the first picture in the article is George Clooney in Men who stare at Goats

If that trend really wants to measure the quality of video etc. as well, it would definitely be way more. But that assumption seems very flawed to me, e.g. watching a full 4K movie would amount to way more data than scrolling through memes, even though the latter is way more of an attention-stealing activity.

In a lot of these there could logically be someone sitting across from them making them laugh, but the woman with the cherry tomato in her fingers is just smiling for the love of the salad.

Totally agree with the absorption thing. I've always found myself at a great calm, ever since I was a kid, from sitting en transit and looking out the window. A train ride is great for this reason. I think about things. I actively think about things. These things are often not daydreams, hard problems, rumination. I know what those feel like, and they are definitely different from depressive rumination or furiously working through tasks.

Again, I want to emphasize, that in none of these are you explicitly practicing the act of leashing in your mind.

All in all, I think the popular conception of meditation, Youtube-ized since the 2010s, has more nuance. Maybe people see this distinction and think it's obvious. To me, as someone who unironically feel like I'm net negative from self-help content than net-positive, this matters to me, personally.

If you want to get mystical, there are plenty of stories of deep Eastern masters practicing their craft every day. They certainly are thinking about their act - they are not trying their best to "get rid of all their thoughts". These are different activities, each with their own merits, both much different states than the common state of the modern man today.

That being said, meditation and the surrounding ideas have helped me overall, if not just because the specific influencers that I do hold as valuable had a good attitude when approaching it. But nowadays I'd imagine it's been silently incorporated into the very underlying forces they were trying to avoid (I have to meditate because it makes me a more improved human being compared to my peers!)

> You can't just turn around and start working on some new idea if you are out on a path somewhere.

Eh? I'm retired now so I don't need to work but when I did I often went for a walk when a problem seemed insoluble. After a while I might feel that I have the solution to that and I'd start working on another problem as I continued my walk. You don't need to be in front of a screen with your fingers on a keyboard to do some work.

Is having a park or woods nearby a symbol of wealth? Do you live in the middle of the Sahara desert?

Whenever people describe the living conditions of your average person all I can think is what a colossal failure our system is, to imprison so many millions in such an utterly shit existence.

Like yes it's cool to have air conditioning and basically any food anywhere at any time, and many have transportation that can take us across the country at a moment's notice. There are marvels now that our ancestors would die of shock trying to comprehend. That said, it seems still that we've made a remarkably awful place for the vast majority of people to live and work in, more the latter than the former, while a handful of people basically live in a never-ending theme park.

> Seems like it would be better and easier to just take a walk instead.

Unfortunately for many, and few managers will admit it even though it's true - there is a performative aspect to physical presence at work. Being away from your desk, idle on slack, etc to go take that walk is a problem in many work environments.

Probably one reason why SWEs are disproportionately interested in FIRE.

Going for a run helped formulate so many of my best ideas and solved so many tricky problems I was facing. It was always one of three places: on a run, in the shower, or right before falling asleep.

Getting outside/walking can be good but there's still a lot of activity hitting your senses. People, cars, animals, sounds, or all of the above. If you can find a quiet park bench to sit and sort of defocus it might work. But more than just taking a break, when you "stare at a wall" you are engaging in deliberate sensory deprivation, which might be a better reset for your analytical mind. All that said, if taking a walk works for you, great!

Yup. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system because of the mild exercise. It also levels out your hormones such as insulin and cortisol.

They’re not describing any kind of burnout; just fatigue from working or being overstimulated. Taking a break a the exact remedy for this condition, but many people take breaks in a way that’s not actually restorative (phone scrolling, etc.)

What are you talking about? Dude is literally describing a break, just not a type of break that feeds the attention economy. Are you opposed to that?

Zen meditation for an hour staring at a wall is a marathon that at the end results in a semi-psychedelic state for me.

Exercising and sitting b meditating are two related but seriously different things. Which is why there are many other types of meditation to practice (walking, working, silent, etc) but zen mostly considers sitting and looking at a wall the OG

Thanks for saying this. I live in a small, bleak, brown town just recovering from winter, and even despite this, getting out into nature and staring at the water flow past in the local river gives so much benefit.

Reading this article is a great reminder that we all need to disconnect and ground ourselves again. My brain (and likely most of ours) just can't handle 100% up-time all day and needs that break.

Tangent - I used to go cycling a lot, and required a lot less wall/river-staring then. Of the people I knew who I cycled with, 95% of us were coping with some kind of mental health issue in some way and had found our fix on the bike. I miss it.

Exactly! Bomb the interviews.

I would also push back on the idea that this sort of behavior could be unique to "introvert and neurodiverse thinkers". Must there not be social and/or "neurotypical" people with idiosyncrasies?

I went from a single monitor setup to triple monitor a decade ago, and then back down to single monitor.

It helps me focus to have just one active “feed”. And I put my phone away when I work to eliminate that screen as potential distraction.

Where I still kinda “fail” is during natural downtime. Like if I’m waiting somewhere, e.g the Dr office, I’ll pull out my phone and browse mindlessly.

I understand your point, but a slightly more positive reading might be that the quantity of information consumed, while perhaps unable to be precisely quantified, can be related to the type of content being perceived.

Staring at wall produces little information in and of itself, perhaps through reflection, but staring at a TV produces a load of information, most of which is useless like names of characters, their favorite dresses, what food is being eaten where, etc. You can learn a lot by just passively observing even "dumb" TV especially if it contains foreign content or skills like cooking or sports. Again, not saying all of it is relevant to your life, but that's a different issue.

Obviously the blank wall compresses better

I’d venture that there’s less to process staring at a wall. Unless you’ve got exciting walls in your parts.

I don't think "Sitting in an office you sit in every day" or "Sitting in your living room" are the same amount of bandwidth/storage as "Travelling around the moon". I'm sure we have compression algorithms for this stuff and it's somewhat related to novelty.

I'm aware of an association between perception of time to number of photons received in the eyes.

These relate to both how much time the events appear to take subjectively as well as how well remembered they are or how long they feel retrospectively. As in there is an actual physiological explanation for "time flies when you're having fun".

There probably is something to also be said for attention too. Increased awareness and attention will undoubtedly use up more 'bandwidth' or 'storage' too.

They made instructions for mindfulness direct and unambiguous which is great.

Yeah, you're only here for a short while, so why not make the worst of it?

Instead of dismissing it, perhaps just give it a try for 15 minutes. Couldn't possibly be worse than watching a mindnumbing 15minute youtube video / tv / reel-type content.

But then it would not have been a "Pune" or "play on words"

I think it's supposed to be a riff on "men who state at goats".