Of bed gravity and international airports
I have been thinking about the landscape of things one can do as if it is an actual landscape with hills and valleys.
Things things like looking at Facebook and lying in bed sit at the bottom of deep valleys, because it is very hard to move away from them. In the sense that if you are doing them one moment, it is very unlikely that you will be doing something else a moment later. And it will eventually take some kind of mental energy to escape.
Other kinds of looking at my computer might be half way down a hill, because they are unstable and easily lead into the Valley of Facebook and similar places, though with some effort I could also roll sideways to somewhere else.
Standing outside my house is more like the top of a local hill, because it doesn’t lend itself to falling into any particular valley rapidly, and I have more of some kind of freedom to go in lots of different directions. And psychologically, I kind of feel more free. A train interchange is a bigger hill. An international airport feels to me like a giant hill, because your next step seems like it could be anywhere, though in practice you usually have a specific ticket.
I’m not sure this model makes sense in the details, or is helpful (note that this is my travel/mundane views blog, not my blog for insights and other substantive contributions - maybe I’ll put it there if it still seems useful in six months).
One implication is that if you are in a valley, the main priority is to get out of it, rather than to do some particular other virtuous activity. So if you are looking at Facebook, and it wouldn’t seem terrible to go outside, you should do that and then reassess how to get into the place you want, rather than trying to move directly from Facebook to editing an annoying document across whatever bare cliff faces the landscape in that direction happen to contain.
I think I also benefit from being able to generalize the good feelings of climbing out of a valley across superficially different activities. For instance, if I am feeling proud of my ability to stop lying in bed on command, I also expect stopping watching TV to add to my sense of power.
