I was going to title this post – ‘What billions of silent voices screaming at the same time look like’ – but it seemed too dramatic.
As I was about to release the pre-beta of my new app Hashies, the news came on the wire that Nelson Mandela had died. I wasn’t particularly shocked – more relieved actually. I do feel like I have lost a beloved grandfather – I think most of the world feels the same. But in the last few months, the situation around him and the media frenzy was grotesque to say the least. I wished nothing more than a peaceful passing on for Mr Mandela and when it came I felt only relief and gratitude for a beautiful brave life.
Hashies tracks what people are saying on a hashtag in near real time. Given the news, ‘#Mandela’ seemed the way to go. Before I heard the news – it was going to be ‘#JustinBeiber’ – glad it wasn’t!
Enough said, here is what it looked like.
And just to be sure – there is no one quite like Mr Mandela. And there is unlikely to ever be. RIP Madiba.
I took 30 days off all social media and most of the distracting internet. That really meant – no Twitter, no Facebook , no LinkedIn and most news sites were off. The only things in were Github and stackoverflow and a handful of other sites directly connected to my work.
Here are some insights from my time away:
The first 3 days were the hardest.
I had a habit – who knew! Checking my timeline and Facebook updates within 2 minutes of waking up is WTF!? This habit is really about my needs to learn and to feel part of a community, to be an audience for others and to have an audience for my ideas too.
Deleting Twitter and Facebook apps on my phone and my laptop were essential to breaking the habit!
Not checking Twitter and FB the first thing after I wake up gives me more time to cuddle my wife.
My internet of everything is actually pretty small. The internets is vast but actually I only visit 5 to 12 non-work related sites a day. Mostly news and startup blogs – a miniscule percentage.
I use my mobile mostly for Twitter, FB and email. With 2 switched off and the last on essential service only, I really didn’t need the expensive plan or expensive phone.
Having a great interaction on Twitter or FB does not mean I actually like the other person or they like me or we will every be friends. It is a mirage of a relationship and it was rewiring my brain. There is more to a person than their tweets or Facebook updates. Without knowing this person, my brain fills in the blanks based on their tweets. If I like their tweets, chances are I like them and vice versa. This emergent behavior is pretty concerning, I am making value judgements based on very little data.
I get a lot more done without all that Twitter and Facebook checking or updating – at least once I got my head away from thinking about going on them.
I didn’t miss how I was using Twitter and Facebook. I think there is a better way to use both that gives me and others far more value. The really interesting conversations I wanted to have need more than a tweet. They need some thought, perhaps a blog post (more than 140 characters) and some conversation. I think this is where the power of Twitter really is. What I really missed was TED. I think it’s awesome and I need to keep watching – just a little less.
Twitter and Facebook as I currently use them are not very useful to me. Moderately entertaining maybe, but not really useful. A useful network is more than people – it needs purpose. Twitter is a channel – a pretty meaningless one for most of the time until someone gives it substance and context – like an Arab Spring.
What Next?
There’s no denying that there are some interesting conversations to be had on Twitter and Facebook and over the last 4 years of using both I have had lots of conversations with lots of seemingly interesting people. But those conversations have overwhelmingly been shallow and throw away. If I consider the time I spent on Twitter as an investment, the returns are pretty low. So I’ve decided to significantly limit the time I spend on it even just having it running in the background.
Check in a couple of times a day
So I won’t be running Twitter whilst I work, it’s way too distracting. In fact I shall be using the cool OSX Mavericks feature of ‘Do Not Disturb’ to make sure all notifications are muted.
Since I work with a timer utility and my working day is divided into timed units, I’ll simply add a couple of 5 minute slots in the daily routine to see what interesting things are going on, reply to mentions or queue up longer post-replies on my blog. This goes for Facebook too and for the TED talks that I watch.
Less social distraction. Blog more about what I care about.
One of the things I really love about being on Twitter are the thoughts that the tweets I read inspire. What I really want to do is to reply deeply but the medium does not allow this. So I will blog a little more rather than tweet and post the blog as my response to those tweets. If the conversation is to continue it will need to do so on my blog site in a much easier to follow thread.
I would highly recommend taking a break from all things connected – you get more of your life back. Your real life – the one with people and feelings and stuff. You also get your time back – to think, make and do versus simply being titillated by cute cats and clever 140 character quips.
I’m getting off the internet for the next 30 days. Specifically I’m off Twitter, Facebook. I’ll stop watching the news, reading and writing blogs, watching TED etc. I will also keep email to a minimum – as in zero.
Why? I seem to be spending a lot of time online. Tweeting, reading, learning and just generally whiling away time. And I need to get that under control.
But this is not simply about time – it is also about dependence. This is also about freedom – unintended dependence is a horrible thing and I really can’t be having it. I need to know that I can decide when and why I go online.
It is also about understanding what needs being on the internet are being met and whether there are other ways to meet them.
Caveats. I work with tech and I also trade Forex. Both of these require connectivity and so I shall still be using the tools that I use in both of these endeavors. I will also use online search etc.
What I hope to learn: Why I go online and what needs of mine are being met. How can I be more effective at meeting them.
After almost a year of having my road bike – that I fondly call Monsieur Defy – I have started exploring the great rides around where we live.
I had done 2 earlier rides, a 3km down and up the mountain road to my village and an 8km down and up the other side of the mountain (towards Restabal).
I feel so proud of myself – my determination and my fitness – which I wasn’t too sure I had! So many times I wanted to stop and walk my bike and I didn’t – progress!
Here are the pics.
I don’t mean to preach – but please if you aren’t currently doing any regular exercise, consider starting. It doesn’t need to be major – just something that keeps you sweaty and out of breath for 20 minutes every other day. Life is more beautiful when you are fitter.
Do you ride a road bike, what was your first ride. I’d love to hear about it – tweet or comment below. Happy trails.
Even as you sit in judgement of my colour, my clothing, the way I walk, how I talk, of my tattoos and my piercings. I wonder.
Even as you deny my humanness and create for me a false history of menace and incivility from your dim view of something I said or didn’t say. I wonder.
I wonder why your world is so small when your mind is capable of endless curiosity
Even as you condemn me for loving someone just like me, or for not loving someone just like you. I wonder.
Even as you deny my freedoms when recognising them makes you no less free. I wonder.
Even as you commit crimes against my person, my name and against truth. I wonder.
I wonder what crime was committed against you to turn your heart so cold when it seeks only to dance in the beautiful warmth of fellowship.
I wonder who judged you the way you judge me. Who didn’t love you the way I want you to love me?
I wonder all these things and and I am sad.
I wrote this in a moment of deep empathy for all of those who are the victims of the judgement of others – from Oprah to emos. From muslims to orthodox jews.
Earlier today, I watched a Ted talk by Alain de Botton and one of the points he was making was that Western civilization has become more individualistic and this might have something to do with how we view the attribution and responsibility for ‘success’ and ‘failure’. Combining what Alain was exploring, in part, with my own long running musings yielded something profound for me. That is what I want to share with you.
FYI: This is not about religion. It is about the beliefs that we each operate on when we are on the edge – about to fall or to fly. When I mention Christians or Muslims I simply do so to describe the fundamental belief – not the structures of their religion. So chillax with the fatwas and threats of Hellish damnation.
Life is hard, it has always been and probably always will be. Hardships can be big and all-encompassing – something we face collectively like a meteor striking the Earth or a global epidemic. More typically, there are the personal hardships that we face as individuals or in small groups – friends, families etc.
Hardship could come from natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis that bring hardship swiftly and on a mass scale. There are the hardships that we do to ourselves – wars, genocide, persecution of the different. They might be hardships as a result of the way we collectively choose to live – economic poverty, hunger, unemployment and so on. They also include personal hardships like depression , low self esteem and so on.
One of life’s primary sources of hardship is uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen and that scares us.
Whilst hardship is perpetual, it is also ever-changing. In the middle ages in the western world, ‘hard’ was plague and sanitation, peonage and deeply laborious work.
As we make advancements in medicine and technology, ‘hard’ again is redefined – at least for some of the world. We hear things like ‘first world problems’ – my phone battery only lasts a few hours, I have full fat milk in my latte when I asked for soya!
Hardships are relative in time and between people. Some things that were hard – like infant mortality in 1800s are much less a problem in the 2000s. Yet where you might consider a chipped nail to be ‘devastating’, another person’s ‘devastating’ is losing both their legs.
As we advance ways to make life easier, we seem to create new ways for life to be hard.
Even when we can explain what we previously could not, the wonder remains and is even more wondrous. The joy and wonder of life also operates across the grandest scales – like the endlessness of Space – to the smallest – like an ant being able to lift several times its own body weight. From the chaotic formation of new islands from volcanic activity in the Pacific to how, in an instant, smelling your favorite food from your childhood can transform sadness into delight.
The wonders of our natural world, of Space and the diversity all around us are truly breathtaking. How do we explain them? Our advances in knowledge and technology help us not only to seek answers to old questions, they help us discover new things to be wondrous and curious about. Yet more remains inexplicable.
Our timeless need
So in the middle of this mash-up of hardship and wonder is Homo sapiens – the human. However you believe we got here is irrelevant at this point. We are here.
The human is a sentient being. We are capable of perceiving and feeling things around us. We are generally well adapted to converting those perceptions into emotions and reacting accordingly.
Our ability to feel may also be the single biggest contributor to our timeless need.
Life’s hardships and wonder can generate such powerful emotions in each of us. We act on those emotions – we kiss, we kill , we flee , we fight and we sometimes do nothing. Each action generating more to be perceived and more emotions generated in us and in others. These emotions can be so powerful they could be life changing or life ending.
They can be so overwhelming that the person feels they cannot contain it, it is too much and it is greater than them. For example, imagine your entire family being wiped out by volcanic eruption, suddenly and violently. How do you cope with that? Or watching your loved ones systematically cataloged and slaughtered by other people who believe you not to be human. Even imagining it is almost impossible.
I remember seeing each of my children being born and the feeling is a little overwhelming.
I can explain how a child is conceived, how they grow in the womb of the mother and how gestation works. I understand the chemical reactions that occur to help that baby emerge into the world. Yet none of that prepared me for the feeling of being overpowered by love and humility as this little life was placed in my arms.
What would happen if, at that moment, that life was denied – how can any new parent even comprehend that?
There are things that are bigger than our ability to emotionally process them. Our timeless need is that, whether through hardship or wondrous joy, life provides things that we are powerless to comprehend but need to make some sense of, lest the emotion destroys us.
And this is where God comes in.
Explaining God
Before I go any further and to help us both understand what I am talking about, it is useful for me to define what the word ‘God’ means for me:
God is that non-human power that transcends everything around me and who sees all, knows all that ever was and ever will be. This power is also invested with justice against all that I consider unjust but am powerless to bring to account
And what are the properties of God?
God is all good because there is inexplicable goodness in life.
God is just and all-powerful because there is such senseless injustice in the world that we are emotionally overwhelmed by and yet are individually powerless to make ‘right’.
God is all-knowing because life is uncertain and implicitly we know there are things we cannot yet know – we just don’t know what we don’t know.
God is kind because there is unbelievable cruelty in life and it happens to us and the people we love.
God is fair because there is such inequality in life. There are natural variations in people’s circumstances that result in hardships. There the inequalities that result in the way we choose to live – hunger and poverty in the midst of such financial wealth. The ethnic and social caste systems that seek to institutionalize these variations.
In some religions, God is entirely the positive and to explain the negative, another deity is required – like Satan in Christianity. In others, both hardships and wonders are the faces of the same power.
My friends who actively practice their religion – Christians, Muslims, Buddhists etc simultaneously amaze and inspire me with their faith.
They tell me their belief provides a framework to put all of the emotions they cannot deal with in context. The wonder of life is God’s doing and the hardships – wherever they come from – are a test to help them grow as people and closer to God.
God is both the giver (birth). Infertility is a test and in any case it is God’s will. God is the taker (death) – so even as you grieve it might help to think there is a higher ,albeit unknown, purpose to why you have lost your loved one.
My Buddhist friends tell me that to be closer to God we should disassociate from those perceptions – a sort of emotional protection. Having the discipline to detach what you perceive from the emotion that you generate from it is the road to Godliness. Developing that discipline is the lifelong practice that we must commit to.
Hinduism diversifies things a little – there is one God that is manifested in several other deities that address particular aspects of powerlessness. Vishnu is the protector and the preserver who is our source of sustenance to endure. Shiva is the God of annihilation , the destroyer and the enforcer of justice and more than 330 million other deities serve as a means of making sense of the various permutations of collective and personal powerlessness. Hinduism really extends the specialisation of deity along the same lines of Greek and Roman classic beliefs.
Regardless of how many Gods we have – the purpose is pretty much the same, make sense of what is beyond our personal comprehension.
Yet what happens when we do not have a belief in God that we operate on?
This is what really triggered it for me in Alain de Botton’s TED talk. Botton asserts that in Western societies, we have removed God from the core of our beliefs and focused more on individual and collective responsibility. We rely on Science to offer the answers more than ascribing the unknown to God.
We seek evidence and not simply invest in faith. The outcomes of personal success or failure are attributed to the individual more than the plan of a God.
This is new or at least it has been so long since it was the norm that is might as well be new. Not even communism had this effect. In communism the collective had the answers, personal ambition and therefore personal success or failure were much less relevant. In theory anyway.
Yet the timeless needs still remain. The hardships are still there, so are the joys and the wonders. In the absence of God, who are we supposed to pin our powerlessness on?
Where we cannot rationally take responsibility for something – like the death of a parent from a terminal disease, we simply absorb it.
We put it in a box and bury it. Some might become philosophical about it – another mechanism to try to make sense of powerlessness – but ultimately the emotion is locked away. Ask anyone who has lost a beloved parent to go back to that box and explore its contents – especially without a framework of God – and observe how raw and powerful the emotion is, triggered by the memory of their loss.
Sometimes absorbing it causes huge emotional problems – breakdowns, deep depression – that lead to ever more self-destructive behavior.
What of the things that we can somehow see our responsibility in? Like being the survivor of a terrible fatal accident or accidentally causing the death of child?
Where a God framework might serve to blunt that emotion by saying “you are human, you can fail, it’s God’s will”, a godless person has no such shelter. The full perception is there. Most people can rationalize it and remove some of the potency of the sense of responsibility and emotions associated with. Others cannot and they get depressed, might seek self harm maybe even suicide. Could this help explain the rising incidents of depression in Western societies?
My friend – a Catholic priest – tells me that when he is in the confessional, it is fundamentally about helping the other person forgive themselves so they can move beyond the powerlessness.
Fundamentally, I believe Man created the concept of God. We invested the antidotes for all we are powerless against into that concept – kindness, forgiveness , justice, certainty, strength, immortality and eternal well-being.
What might happen if we took these virtues back and invested them in ourselves? What might happen if we were each kinder to ourselves, were more forgiving of ourselves and others or that we were able to eradicate the causes of avoidable powerlessness?
Why I wrote this
I wrote this because we are complex beings living in a complex world. We are making it more complex by our actions. I wrote this because I want us to make things simpler for ourselves so we can focus more of our abilities on addressing the complexities around us.
I wrote this because being in the uncharted territory of Godlessness is not the same as being lost and I want us to seize this opportunity to be kinder and more humane to each other. To evolve to become closer and more connected as human beings. I believe we can do it – we don’t need God, we need the virtues of God.
I wrote this because I want us to begin to focus more on tackling the causes of powerlessness and not simply fight the often explosive consequences of it – like religious radicalism that ends up in massacre and mayhem or mass revolts that trigger further repression.
I wrote this because whilst religion provides mechanisms of human connections to each other – fellowship and a sense of community – and a powerful sense of personal connection to God, it also invites other behaviors that promote new hardships. Judgement and condemnation of others and the easy abuse of position by the administrators of that religion. I want the good bits and frankly, none of the other stuff.
I wrote this because the institutionalization of God – religion – has long caused and continues to cause more conflict than it resolves. We are fighting about whose hose is better even as the fire threatens to burn us all. I want the divisions to stop. I want us to see that we have fundamentally the same needs, challenged by the same forces and we are unbelievably more powerful together than as we fight these ineffective ideological battle.
Finally I wrote this because I want the next young Mike Sutton who is wandering the internet confused about feeling outside the mainstream and dissatisfied with religions he sampled and the beliefs he explored – including atheism – to have something to read that offers an understandable and reasonable account of a different, kinder, more empowering and more human perspective.
I had a funny experience last night. Not funny “hahaha”, more funny “wow that’s deep!”
Here is what happened.
I had put my sons to bed and a few hours later, I went to sleep also. Then, at about 3am I was woken up by my older son, Ruben , falling out of bed. I went in and lifted him back in, made sure he wasn’t hurt, gave him a cuddle and tucked him in.
Fifteen minutes later, as I was drifting back to sleep, Ruben calls out and I go in because he needs his nose blowing (he’s got pretty bad hayfever). I blow his nose, give him a cuddle and head back to bed.
Before long, I’m about to totally start snoring when I hear a sound, I wake up and notice Ruben’s light come on and then off. By this point, sleep deprivation has kicked in and I’m properly irritated. I call out in my deep, stern “this is your father speaking’ voice and ask him what he is doing. (damn it, it’s nearly 4am I need to get to sleep!). Ruben replies ‘Nothing’ and goes quiet.
Then something really weird happens.
As I lay in bed – totally irritated and getting so totally wound up by having my sleep disturbed repeatedly, I heard this voice inside my body. I mean inside my entire body, not just my head. This voice (which I still don’t recognise) spoke loudly and matter-of-factly (but not angrily). It said “Listen, I know you’re angry but I’m telling you there is no room in here for your anger. There is only space here for love”.
What!?
The voice went on, and I could hear it as loud and as clear as though I was the only person in the audience at a stadium performance. It said again “there is no room here for your anger, there is only room for love. So, forget your anger and just let love in”. What struck me was how resolved and reassured it sounded. Like an OccupyNewYork style activist who had occupied my heart and was refusing to let anger share the space.
At this point, I am physically super-tense and the voice coaxed me : ‘You’re tense, look at what anger is doing to you – shake it out and let it go on its way, there is no room here for anger”. So that is what I did. At 4am in the morning, I did a shimmy shimmy electric boogaloo breakdance move in bed to shake out the tension in my body. I instantly felt the tension ease off. And that is when I thought I was having a heart attack.
But not really – what was happening was that my heart muscle had been so tensed up and then very suddenly relaxed and the resulting sensation felt like your hand feels when it has been clenched in a fist for a while and you suddenly relax it. It wasn’t painful – just weird.
A deep sense of calm came over me and the voice had gone. Slowly I get up from my bed and walk quietly into Ruben’s room , he is still awake (but barely) and I cuddle him, speaking gentle and soothing words to help him fall back to sleep. I stroke his hair and kiss his forehead, then I went back to bed and got some sleep.
When I woke at 8am, I thought it was all a dream and to be honest I have no explanation about what happened beyond what I share here.
I do know that as this voice was speaking, I was filled with a deep sense of love for my son and my family and an intuitive acceptance that it was speaking an undeniable truth (well as undeniable as you can get at four in the morning) – I don’t have space in my heart for anything but love. Not anger, not irritation and certainly not hate. I could reason with it, that anger is part of life, as is grief and as is love, but this voice wouldn’t engage me in whether those where valid, inappropriate, right or wrong. It simply insisted that I had no space in my heart for anything but love.
I am deeply grateful to this voice, from wherever it came. Its message was fully and gratefully received.
As ever on this blog and especially on this post, I want to share what you think? Have you had a similar weird but beautiful experience.
I do not have space in my heart for anger. Do you?
Even when you vilify me for the air that I breathe.
I cherish you despite the cruel words with which you punish me.
You cherish my destruction even when I detest that smallest of inconveniences to you.
Even when the only thing that would satisfy you would be my death.
My cruel killing at the hands of the most vicious destroyer.
What do you think the above is about. Is it overwhelmingly negative or inherently positive? What is its sentiment?
Here is what one of the ‘leading sentiment analysis’ tools determined it was about:
I had need to explore where Sentiment Analysis is today because I might have a future need to harness its ‘power’. Well I was fairly disappointed.
Scientists (in this case computer ones) will have you believe that sentiment analysis is so advanced and mature as to be reliable. Bullshit.
They call it ‘Sentiment Analysis’ and this projects an illusion of precision, reliability and worse still they sell it as something you should base decisions on.
It is no more than word counting and weighting.
Fortunately it is simply a case of mislabelling. This is not ‘Sentiment Analysis’ it is Content Analysis. No more than looking in a basket of citrus fruits and counting lemons vs oranges vs limes. The trouble is when they sell it as a indication that the farmer has kidney stones!
Sentiments deal with the emotional message the content is trying to communicate. Businesses deal with the emotive state of their customers and any indication of how a customer feels might provide competitve advantage and an opportunity to profit (in goodwill or stone cold cash).
I say that Sentiment Analysis is promising because I believe that machines can learn to determine the emotional meaning of any content, but if this is the current approach then I fear that we are a long ways off.
Currently the best way I know to understand sentiment is to have a conversation, to listen and be reasonably educated enough to understand what your co-communicators’ needs are. To look beyond the words used (they may be the wrong ones). I wish that more businesses recognised this and invested accordingly instead of wasting time, energy and money on something that promises so much and delivers so little.
BTW – using the same engine, this article scored -.107 and could be about renewable energy, hardware, technology or investing. Ouch!
They have replaced almost all my shoes, as you can see the Converse All Star HiTops are still hanging in there – but not for too long.
Vibram Five Fingers are, without a doubt, the most comfortable footwear I have ever worn – by a long way. I don’t intend to wear any other type of footwear (aside fromflip flops on the beach).
I’ve worn them to work, conferences, a wedding (but not yet to a funeral). I have a pair that are extra thermal for the winter months too. Some days I have them onand forget about them until bed time!
It’s a gift that was given to me and it is changing my life and my relationships.
It has given me a language that I didn’t even know I didn’t have.
For me, this gift is everything a gift should be. Simple yet revolutionary, beautifully articulate yet infinitely understandable, defined but not a recipe, immediately practical yet intensely personal.
I would like to make a few requests of you (these aren’t pre-requisites, you may still receive this gift without complying).
Can you commit to read this book in January?– its message was revolutionary for me and I regretted not reading it earlier so that I could have benefited sooner. I would like you to benefit from it as soon as possible. What better time than the start of a new year!
Would you consider paying this gift forward? – find a way of paying my gift forward. I trust you will find a way to gift someone something you value – your time, your care, a book. Love does not like being cooped up – it wants to radiate through the universe. Help it.
Would you gift the book if you have no further use for it? – if for some reason the message did not resonate with you, that’s cool, but I would wish that this book would not gather dust on your bookshelf when it might be busy changing someone else’s life for the price of postage.
Please consider not selling this gift? If you really don’t want it and are unable/unwilling to pass it on, please send it back to me.
That’s it. Beyond these fairly reasonable requests, you can do what you choose with either the book or its message. I hope it is as revolutionary for you as it has been for me and presents as many new options as it removes.
Why Am I Doing This?
The short and simple reason is Love. Corny I know – but that’s it. Deal with it.
The slightly longer reason is that I care that you (and everyone else ) are happy and fulfilled and operates from empathy and compassion (and receives the same).
Lately I have not been operating from empathy and compassion – damn near forgot about them. Truth is I’ve been operating from anger and frustration for a while, this book helped me rediscover empathy and compassion as more fulfilling places to operate from and provided immediate improvements I could make to get there. It takes deliberate practice and self awareness but my relationships are significantly improved, I have more joy in my life and I feel more responsible for my own feelings.
Something this powerful should be shared, I believe it should be required reading for everyone and this is the simplest way I know to start.
If even one person who receives this gift experiences the changes I experienced, my investment would be more than repaid.
So, what are you waiting for?
How To Get This Gift.
I initially have 15 copies to gift. You can have either the paperback or the kindle edition.
My preference is to gift the paperback as they are easier to share than the kindle editions. But I leave that to your discretion (if you had the kindle edition and couldn’t share it. perhaps you might consider buying a kindle edition as your paying it forward or share)
IMPORTANT! To get this giftplease tweet:
@mhsutton Mike, I’d like to #receiveTheGift.
I will pick 15 random responses at 00:01 on January 01 2013 (GMT) and contact each recipient individually to sort out delivery.
For paperbacks: I’ll place the relevant order on Amazon (with Amazon or a marketplace vendor) and give them your preferred delivery address and you’ll get the gift in the post.
For kindle editions: I will gift your kindle email address the book from my own kindle address.
A year ago I got my first pair of 
It’s a gift that was given to me and it is changing my life and my relationships.