Have you been to a casino lately? OK, how about IKEA? Well then, if not either of those, I’d be willing to bet that you spent time on a social media site recently.

What do the three of these have in common? And how does it relate to your day-to-day well-being in the world?

Let’s back up a little bit. Time flies when you’re having fun right? Just as it drags when you are stuck somewhere you don’t want to be. Your temporal awareness plays a major role in both your mood of the moment and your overall enjoyment of life.

So what does that have to do with casinos, IKEA, or your favorite feed? Well, they are all intentionally engineered to make you lose track of time.

Way back in the ’70s a fellow named Bill Friedman figured out how to keep people in casinos longer so that they would lose more of their money. He studied the psychology of gamblers and the design of the facilities and figured out that making people lose track of time was the most important thing.

The idea was to arrange casinos like mazes, so that no matter what you wanted to do you would have to meander through rows of games and machines, never reaching a real corner. If you’ve ever been inside an IKEA, you know where I’m going with this.

When you are inside a curvilinear maze, you simply wander without having to make any decisions. If you’re navigating on autopilot, your consciousness slips into a fog.

Some of you may remember the early days of social media, when there was an end to the feed. You could actually scroll to the bottom and then be faced with a decision of what to do next.

Today’s social media is engineered to trap you and impair your awareness. The bottomless feed is a maze designed to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of not only where you were, but when you were.

The opposite of a maze is a route. A story is a route through time. Social media is a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end. Each post is unrelated to the next and the path is strewn with distractions. Think about a book or a film that made a big impression upon you. Now try to recall the details of your last scrolling session.

You, being a dancer, understand what it means to be deliberate in your actions. When you practice mindfulness through movement, you have a slower and richer experience of time.

A good story sticks with you. You can enrich your experience of time by choosing narratives that have staying power. Telling a tale trumps scattering snapshots every time.

The moral of the story is that the more you avoid living on autopilot the more of life you will remember. When you take a sharp turn and jolt yourself out of the curvilinear maze, you open yourself up to surprise, the greatest time expander of all.

This exact moment while you’re reading this is the youngest you will ever be. The great philosopher Seneca could’ve been writing about social media when he said “Life is short and anxious for those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear the future.”

You have the opportunity to choose the opposite. Your life will be as long as it’s going to be. Forget counting the days in your life, remember to focus on the life in your days.

Merci et à bientôt!

M+

ML #641

Mark Metz
Monday Love Movement Calendar