Culminating Presence

With a phone constantly in our hand or back pocket most of us don’t truly fill our time with things we truly want to be doing. Rather we are sucked into a passive trail of visual consumption without realizing our lack of authority over our attention.

Instead of going for that morning run I know I should do, I personally usually get stuck in a stream of youtube shorts. Or even a stream of interesting videos on Instagram. Before I know it I’m rushing to make my breakfast and finish my morning shower to run out the door.

Even if I do have time to finally sit down and do all the things I’ve been wishing for time to do, I get choice paralysis on what I want to work on or learn. The paradox of choice hits me quite hard in modern life. There’s too much to learn and read. Too many possible people to meet, too many products to buy, and too many places to go. We’ve been swept into the frenzy of media overload through instagram, facebook, youtube and all sorts of other platforms. For goodness sake even weather channels have their own video feeds now. All of which ditracts from your ability to be present in the real world.

How do we fix this paralysis? How do we declare war on our attention and regain focused minds?

Ahead is an exploration of what I think the main culprits to presence are and how to begin winning them over:

Table of Contents

• Maintaining Presences
• What is presence?
• Nature Emersion
• Human Emersion
• Eliminating Distractions
• Scheduling Distractions
• Scheduling Deep-work

Maintaining Presence

Being present enriches your state of consiousness. Presence is the gateway to intense feeling and forms of consciousness. Synchronicity of your body and sensory experience are all essential to presence. As humans, our own thoughts and books used to be the main distractions to our presence. Now, we have a constant infinite source of distractions flirting with our primal mechanisms. Therefore, finding presence again begins with limiting our distractions. Most likely in this order: internet, books, thoughts. By internet I mean all screens: TV, phone, smart watches, all of it. Within cities and our modern infastructure we seem to have a digital parasite that is hijacking our attentions. Whether driven by the intentions to make profit or just the human instinct to innovate, it is there regardless. To me the only true way in which to flick off the switch of distractions is to immerse myself in nature. To enter a primal state of flow, breathing fresh air, observing thousands of living things around you, and fully tappping into your human biology. That’s something we sadly don’t do anymore. And I think it’s the feeling of connectedness and belonging that the majority of us desire and are missing from our lives.

Why do I say this?

As humans we are a chaotic byproduct billions of years in the making. Our biology is practically founded upon two purposes: survival and reproduction. Every-layer of skin, fascia, all our blood vessels, bones, and nervus system are meant to be grounded in the world around us for the purpose of survival. To be conscious for longer, to let our evolution propogate. This means we have many health mechanisms that are directly tied to our physical connection with nature. We are meant to have our feet on the ground. We are meant to eat wild things that are to survive: whether plant or animal. Now we mostly have concrete or rubber dividing us from that underlying reality. Our bodies, this biological circuit of sensors is moving around in limbo, dormant. We don’t feel the way we are meant to. The depths of all human feeling is a vast space, and you can never fully reach it’s all incompassing depth. But you can throw yourself into its darkness for the sake of being a human being. To celebrate the capacity to sense, feel, urk, and rejoice in euphoria. Nature provides us with the pulses capable of lighting up our circuit board. For these very reasons, tuning our bodies in with nature might be the most fundamental aspect of human presence.

Here are some of my favorite nature immersion activites:

* Ideally done barefoot or grounded as much as possible

• Gardening & foradging (especially edible plants/fungi)
• Trail running & mountain biking
• Nature walks
• Outdoor breathwork
• Open water swimming
• Cold immersion (lakes in winter)
• Skiing
• Astronomy (indirectly related)

Adjacent to presence within nature, a very similar trigger for presence is our interactions with people. As long as you’re not overly anxious around the person, which sometimes comes with time, quality interaction with other humans requires one of the most intense forms of presence we experience. Whether it be doing an activity together, intimate conversations and disclosure, or the deepest of them all: sex. Presence is normally perceived to require solitude, but an elevated form of harmonic presence comes from quality interactions with other people.

All together the 3 great steps to presence are:

1. Eliminating distractions
2. Nature immersion
3. Quality human connection

Eliminating Distractions

I personally believe that modern technology has decimated our capacity for presence. Even though our access to external information has increased infinitely, our ability to collect internal and experiential information has decreased dramatically. Instead of thinking about the answers to questions, we simply look them up. We seem to know ourselves less when we adopt more and more of our thoughts from the words of others. In my opinion, true presence balances out the input and output flow of information within our minds.

The best place to start is by eliminating distracting technology.

“If you seek tranquility, do less. Or (more accurately) do what’s essential… Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better” - Meditations, book 4, passage 24

Here are some tips I’ve found helpful to avoid getting sucked into my screens.

• Have a no-phone/internet day 1x per week
  • If you must use a device, say for writing, turn off the devices internet
• Create a distraction free setting/phone screen mode (personal mode on apple now)
  • Have a filter that takes away social media from your homescreen (using IOS screen modes… not sure if there is an equivalent for android)
  • Even better, delete social media (including youtube) from your phone and only download it back when you have a specific thing you want to look into
    1. Set a timer when you go on, say 5 minutes if checking a social media account or 30 minutes for a long youtube video.
    2. Delete the app when you’re done
    3. Enjoy the detachment
• Tell people to text you on your phone instead of social media… communicating on social media is a gateway drug to mindless scrolling
• Have a tech box/phone-jail/electronic corner you can leave your devices in, seperating them from you
  • I keep my phone in a droor in the corner of my room. Next to it I stack my 2 computers and tablet underneath a coffee table when I’m not using it. This gives me a physical action/habit for distancing myself from the digital world.
• I’ve also been trying to desable reels and shorts from my social media which are basically media crack
  • For youtube, clicking the X to the right of the Shorts title will get rid of them for 30 days on the home screen. I did this on my desktop and it seems to have carried over to my iphone.
  • For instagram, it’s no longer possible to delete Reels. I simply follow strict time limits when I go on.

Scheduling Distraction

Popular productivity and study youtuber KharmaMedic intentionally sets aside 45m-1hour of his morning to get all of his distractions/youtube/social media out for the day. This is a form of batching distractions. I think this is a fantastic idea. Only looking at instagram and youtube for a specific block of time everyday. Getting it all out of the way might be the trick so that you’re not continuously being tied to a distraction machine throughout the day. Lex Fridman only goes on instagram whenever he posts something which may be once or twice a day. I still haven’t figured out the best way to implement this personally but doing so first thing in the morning wouldn’t be my approach. I would more likely put it at the end or middle of my study/work day: possibly nighttime when things have settled down. Ideally you have a time-limit that is a hard cut off. Say 20 or 30 minutes unless you use social media for work. I truly believe that healthily coexisting with social media and so much information requires an authoritarian regulation approach. Or else it consumes you in mundaine suffering.

Scheduling Deep-Work

On top of distractions, deep work is another form of engagement that can be mistaken for presence but in reality is a hormetic mental flow state. I wouldn’t necessarily consider it presence. The reason I say this is because for me it’s a stressor. And presence shouldn’t be a chronic stressor, it should be a reliever. Cal Newport’s “Deep Work” is an excellent resource for building deep work habits and ritual. For me my best quality deep work occurs in the early mornings, so that’s when i try to schedule it most. This allows me to further free up the prime periods of my day to interact with people and activities: Middle of the day and late afternoon.