Top 10 Revelations From The Dark Room
“Beware, for if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
7 days and 7 nights
in the pitch-black darkness.
No light.
No food.
No others.
Nothing.
Just you and every part of you.
90% of your problems can be solved simply by giving yourself time to think about them.
Sometimes the most productive thing you can do is nothing. Let you mind clear the backlog. Your mind is a scenario-crunching, solution-generating machine, turn off the external noise and let it run.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” ― Blaise Pascal
Turn your phone off. When was the last time you turned your phone off? Not on airplane mode - actually OFF. Years probably, it was for me. Turn your phone off. Do it every day for 15 minutes, seated in silence after a cold shower. Got work to do? Do it with that phone turned off for 5 hours one morning. Watch what happens.
Your inner voice is your most powerful ally. Spend time getting to know yourself, listening to your thoughts and that inner voice. Learn to trust it and you will become the most confident and capable version of yourself. To do that you have to spend time alone. Communication is the key to an effective team.
Deprivation cultivates appreciation. If I tortured you for hours on end by bombarding you with nightmares while you slept, and DMT-fuelled delusion while you were awake, suddenly you’d be grateful for a simple peaceful breath, a simple exhale. Remember that next time you complain about something. Be grateful simply for your sanity. Without your sanity you have nothing. "A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one." - Confucius.
If you never stop to pause, you’ll never be able to appreciate anything in your life.
Bliss is simply moments of peace that have been paused and acknowledged.
Deliberately organise, engineer and schedule these moments of peace/bliss in your day.
Engineer levels of bliss through construction to add value and meaning to your life. Play with the variables of input on an engineered moment: food, drink, location, people, context and time. The more of your senses used in any given moment the better: touch, taste, smell, sight, sound, meaning. You’re aiming for the most amount of quality from the least amount of input. From a simple breath in silence a few times a day, to something bigger once a day (sunset), to the first taste of wine with friends in front of a beautiful view after a hard week of work. Engineer them for all levels. Pause to appreciate and you’ll remember them forever.
It’s hard to create ‘a life of happiness’, as happiness is by definition a constantly evolving concept. Instead, design a life of peace. Moments of peace are the stepping stones on the path to happiness.
Think of happiness as a flower blooming in a garden. It’s beautiful when it happens but it’s short-lived and impossible to control. BUT you can control how many seeds you plant, how often you water and tend to this garden. The seeds are the amount of ‘peace’ in your life, and the gardening effort is the effort you put into creating and protecting those moments. The more peace you cultivate the more often a greater number of flowers/happiness will bloom. Remove stressful people/places/jobs/moments and replace with peaceful ones. The more ruthless you are the more drastic the results will be.
As humans, our most elemental identity is that we are sovereign. We decide in every moment of our lives what we do at that moment. There is always a choice. In every aspect of our lives remembering that we have this choice is sometimes the hardest thing to remember, but it’s always there. If you don’t choose what’s best for you, someone else will choose for you, and most likely it will be what’s best for them, not you.
In problem-solving. If you don’t like the game you’re playing, change the pitch you’re on. If you don’t like the players, change teams. If you don’t like the rules, change the sport. If you don’t like what sports there are, create your own. If you’re not happy creating your own then question the principles in which you believe you need to play a sport in the first place. Zoom out and reframe, zoom out and reframe, zoom out and reframe again. Keeping going until it benefits you.
Surrender can be as equally an effective strategy as unwavering determination. Know yourself, know the landscape and pick your battles accordingly. To surrender is still a choice and therefore you are still sovereign even if you do surrender. The goal is not to win every game, because in reality and over time we play a much bigger ‘meta-game’, so it’s about winning ‘the most amount of games possible’, not every game.
Efficiently leveraged moments of kindness. What’s the smallest amount of effort you can input to make someone’s day? Surprise and delight. What will people not expect you to do? Do that. Make a game of it, make it fun. Seek out the opportunities. A bumper tip to a waitress or barista? When was the last time you even remembered your waitress’s name, looked her in the eye? Call your fucking mum. If a stranger strikes up a conversation, entertain it, they might be needing it more than you know. Who could you give a compliment to, or send a message to via phone or note, loved one/friend/stranger that would love one/need one/be shocked by one? If you see their face light up in surprise, you’ve made their day. If you know you’ve made their day… guess who else’s day you’ve just made…
Monday 15th March 2020. The day the reality of Covid-19 hit the Western world. The markets plummeted as a result. February 15th 2020, we were only 4 weeks away and blissfully unaware of a tsunami of fear and death that would stop the world and kill 6 million people. What’s to say another tsunami of equal magnitude is not 4 weeks ahead of us now? If you knew ahead of time, what would you be doing differently right now? What would you be saying and to whom? Now ask yourself, do you really need to wait for a potentially cataclysmic event to encourage you to act like this? ‘Memento mori’, sometimes we need a reminder of death to put into perspective what’s truly important to us in life. So perhaps organise an extra trip home, cancel time with people that could be better spent with others, hug your parents a little harder when you see them, hug your child a little longer as you say goodnight, go out of your way to tell them how much you love them, every single day. Tomorrow is promised to no one.
Don’t trust the advice of a dark room survivor, they probably can’t even count to ten anymore.