Screw Transcendental Meditation; Here's a Better Idea!

“Well, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
Yeah, today has been a sad ol’ lonesome day
I’m just sittin’ here thinking
With my mind a million miles away”

        Bob Dylan. Lonesome day blues. Love and Theft.

“The conflicts, the craziness and the sound of pretenses

Falling all around...all around

Why are you so petrified of silence?

Here can you handle this?

[Silence]

Did you think about your bills, your ex, your deadlines?

Or when you think you're gonna die?

Or did you long for the next distraction?”

        Alanis Morissette. All I Really Want. Jagged Little Pill.

"Don't look for happiness. Happiness is like an orgasm. If you think about it too much, it goes away."

        Tim Minchin.

I have a confession to make. I just don't get transcendental meditation. I don't understand how you're supposed to put everything out of your mind and stop thinking altogether. I’ve tried and tried but my brain just refuses to shut down for even a minute to allow that to ever happen. I’m sure it’s as blissful as they claim but the reality is that such a nirvana is not accessible to the rank and file given our hectic daily lives and personal as well as professional entanglements. So, I’ve come to a convenient conclusion: Screw Transcendental Meditation! It's great if you are smart enough and strong enough mentally to pull off that trick but, for most of us, it just ain't gonna happen. My version of the exercise is much simpler, more natural, and, I find, more therapeutic. I call it “Consequential Meditation”.

The first step is to just put on your headphones and listen to some music. I don't mean listening to music while you read the news on your iPhone or flip through your social media feed. I don’t mean listening to music while driving. That’s just multitasking and we all know about the evils of multitasking. I mean actually putting down whatever you're doing and just listening to your favorite music for a while. For me, the location almost doesn't matter. I can be sitting at a bar with the big screen TVs blasting sports and news. I can be sitting uncomfortably in the middle seat at 30,000 feet. I can be at the local coffee shop with a cup of joe in front of me. I can be on the train going to work in the morning. The headphones are the game changer for me. The ability to tune out the outside world makes it possible to let my thoughts run free. Good luck trying transcendental meditation in any of those environments.

Here's the second and even more critical distinction between my approach and transcendental meditation. I don't try to clear my mind. Instead, this is where I do my “debrief” of the day's events: Why did he say that in the meeting? What did she mean by that sentence in her email? What if we ask John to help with Project A instead of the lower priority Project B? What if we do an image based backup instead of a file based one? What if we change the code to avoid grabbing a multiprocessor lock? I don’t mean to imply that I sit there and methodically work through technical or personal problems. Instead, thoughts naturally pop into my head based on recent events and I just follow them to their logical conclusions.

To be clear, most of my ideas are bad ones. I spend a few minutes on a given topic before realizing that my solution will never work, that he couldn't have possibly meant that with his remark in the meeting, etc. The point is that allowing this process to take place helps clear my mind of its clutter. It gives me a chance to test various hypotheses and discard them - be they about projects at work or business plans or personal relationships. In other words, my version of transcendental meditation boils down to slowing down long enough to give my brain a few minutes every day to work through its issues.

That’s awesome, Ben! What you’ve just described is called “thinking”… Don’t we do that all the time? As a matter of fact, no. We don’t. Most of us, myself included, are so harried and so hurried in our daily lives that we never give ourselves a chance to do so. Non-stop auditory and visual stimuli pretty much assault our senses on a non-stop basis. Any wonder our poor brains are so tired trying to make sense of it all? If only we would give ourselves the opportunity to sit down for a few minutes a day and think! Transcendental meditation be damned. I'd settle for just plain old meditation any day of the week.

How many of you get, say, one or two hours a day with no screen in front of you, not surrounded by a dozen people in a meeting room or a hundred people in an open seating arrangement at work? When is the last time you sat down for an hour and did nothing? Didn't reach for the smartphone, didn't check Facebook or Twitter, didn't check your email, didn't check your watch to see how much time had elapsed, didn't fidget and squirm? Rewind the clock fifty or sixty years and compare for yourself. If the difference is not obvious to you, then I propose you rewind the clock a hundred years - to a time when televisions, radios, and computers didn’t exist. Yes, they worked hard but they also spent long stretches of time alone or with family - and with no distractions. Time to think, time to reflect, time to introspect, and yes - even time to generate ideas... as opposed to constantly consuming them.

All the time that we used to spend daydreaming and thinking, I claim, has been replaced by time on the computer. The only problem with this new world is that we have turned on the hose and are drinking directly from it. We are constantly bombarding our brains with information, never giving it time to parse all that data or, heavens, maybe even come up with a few ideas of its own. Within a couple of generations, we have gone from a species that had lots of free time on its hands to daydream and think for hours on end to a species that is not only busy every waking moment but is busy doing multiple things, context switching between them every minute of the day, and gets bored the minute we take away the stimuli.

This is not mere nostalgia for a slower pace of life. I love the new world in which we have instant access to information. I just happen to think we’ve gone too far and become digitally addicted. If you don’t think we have a major problem on our hands, just wait until Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality become commonplace. Not only have we lost all semblance of control over our own thought processes, we are also busy teaching the same bad habits to our children, many of whom, I'm sad to report, are fluent on their iPhones and iPads long before they even begin to speak!

“Next time your kid's watching television, just come up behind them when they don't know you're there, and just turn it off without any warning. Just go--pfft. Watch what happens. They go-- [Screams] Do you think that's a good sign? You think it's a sign that it's healthy for them? That when it's taken away they go-- [Mutters] because you've created such a high bar of stimulus that nothing competes. A beautiful day is shit to a child now. A gorgeous, panoramic day with hawks catching fucking mice and flying away and bears with fucking fish in their teeth. And the kid's like, [screaming] ‘I want to watch the television! This is nothing!’"

Louis C.K. Hilarious.

What our children don’t know, what we seem to have forgotten, is that this bombardment of information every second of every day robs us of the ability to think. Every minute spent staring at a screen is a minute spent not thinking, or at best, being told what to think.

Update: This just in from our intrepid reporter, Dinesh Nambisan, on Twitter... According to a study published in Science, "Guys prefer electric shocks to boredom." That's it. We're doomed. We're biologically wired to want more stimuli. We'll never learn to sit down and think again. We're doomed. Oh well, so much for that theory. I guess it's back to square one. See what I mean about following my thoughts to their "logical" conclusion?

Through the (Rose Colored) Looking Glass: Adventures in Trumplandia

"An episode at Congress Hall in January 1798 symbolized the acrimonious mood. Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont, a die-hard Republican, began to mock the aristocratic sympathies of Roger Griswold, a Federalist from Connecticut. When Griswold then taunted Lyon for alleged cowardice during the Revolution, Lyon spat right in his face. Griswold got a hickory cane and proceeded to thrash Lyon, who retaliated by taking up fire tongs and attacking Griswold. The two members of Congress ended up fighting on the floor like common ruffians."

      Ron Chernow. Alexander Hamilton.

“And it's true we are immune

When fact is fiction and TV reality

And today the millions cry

We eat and drink while tomorrow they die”

U2. Sunday Bloody Sunday. War.

“Az maast ke bar maast. [That which befalls us is caused by us.]”

Persian proverb.

“Who could have predicted that giving the White House to a game-show host with a disastrous business history and a glaring personality disorder would turn out so badly?”

Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker.

I admit to having mostly ignored politics for the past forty years or so as I buried myself in work. I’m sure many others out there have a similar story. I had just escaped a dictatorship turned theocracy and felt elated to be living in a democracy. Little did I know how fragile that democracy was. Little did I know that I would end up living in a kakistocracy (government by the worst) tumbling towards fascism, dreading the headlines every time I scan the news.

Little did I know that every morning I’d wake up feeling like I’d fallen through the looking glass just like Alice and landed in Trumplandia, a world where nothing makes sense, where we can't even seem to agree on what is fact and what is fiction, what is decent and what is not, what is right and what is wrong.

The problem with America is not that we don't know how to run a country, it's that most of us just took our eye off the ball. We’ve been too busy working, raising children, making ends meet, running on our little hamster wheels to pay attention to politics. Well, guess what. Az maast ke bar maast. Or, as Jimmy Buffett would say, “It’s our own damn fault.” We created this mess. I present, as evidence, what has to be the saddest chart of the 2016 elections:

We are all angry about the three million votes that were “stolen” through gerrymandering, we complain about the electoral process failing us, we worry about voter fraud. Guess what. There are over 200 million registered voters in the US but 90 million of us didn’t even bother to vote! We created Trump by ignoring our civic duties. We have noone to blame but ourselves. It’s our own damn fault.

If I may be allowed to don my rose colored glasses on for a minute, I’d argue that if there is one good thing that came out of this election, it is that many millions of people are now, finally, engaged. They realize how fragile our democracy is and why it’s important for all of us to engage on a regular basis going forward in order to avoid a repeat of what happened in this election. But voting is not enough. The only way we can fix America is if we engage - not just once every four years, but every day.

Here's another piece of good news. Over the past few weeks, I've caught myself several dozen times questioning the authenticity of a “news” story I was reading online. I keep reminding myself that journalists are people, just like the rest of us, each with his or her own set of beliefs, prejudices, and hidden agendas. I find myself analyzing every sentence, asking whether what I’m reading is the author’s opinion or fact, whether enough evidence was presented to back the story. I often find myself googling the topic to find other sources to verify the veracity of the story. I hope and know others are doing the same. That's the only way to combat the “alternative facts” problem.

Those were the good news. Here's the bad news. Our country is so broken that we are at the edge of anarchy. We’re supposed to be busy leading the world and we can’t even agree on what the rules are. We're supposed to be solving world hunger and we can't even tie our shoelaces as a country. What Mr. Trump is doing (treating the presidency as if he is still a reality TV host) is beyond the pale and inexcusable. Here’s a man who has the time to obsess over his office decor but doesn’t bother to read the Executive Orders he signs, the same orders that impact the lives of millions of people. Here’s a man who throws tantrums on Twitter and still childishly brags about his Apprentice ratings, despite having been handed the biggest prize (and the biggest responsibility) on earth.

But let’s face it. Trump is not the problem. He is just a symptom of the disease. Our country, our democracy, was broken long before he came along. The real problem is that our elected representatives stopped representing us long ago - the minute they started being influenced by lobbyists. The only thing Trump has done is open our eyes to the ridiculous extremes that can lead to.

I do have to thank Mr. Trump for one thing. He has shown us what is possible in the political arena. Here we were sweating bullets over minor anomalies in our representatives’ backgrounds, trying to pick apart nuances of their strategies, all the while assuming that moral fiber and common sense were requirements for holding public office. Well, we know better now. Our government is broken. And the sooner we all get involved in fixing it, the better. It is, after all, supposed to be government of the people by the people.

#resist

#iamanimmigrant

Flying Petri Dishes and Other Perils of Holiday Travel

“If travel is searching

And home has been found

I'm not stopping.”

Bjork. Hunter.

“Nurse Edna: Children, no fighting. Share the snowballs.”

Jane Alexander. The Cider House Rules.

"Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.

Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?

Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born … a Festivus for the rest of us!"

Jerry Stiller and Michael Richards. Seinfeld.

It’s that time of year again, when people travel home for the holidays to spend quality time with their extended families. My wife and I visited our in-laws in New York for the week of Christmas and New Year’s. It was cold and rainy most of the time, hovering around freezing temperatures at night and in the low forties during the day. The locals kept informing us how wonderful the weather was compared to last year but, frankly, it was still too cold for my old bones and reminded me why we moved to sunny California. Two dozen years in Boston and Seattle were my penance, I guess. If I don't see another cold day or another snowflake for the rest of my life, that will be fine by me.

We enjoyed our time there, going to Broadway shows, eating excellent food in fancy restaurants, walking down Fifth Avenue with the crowds, and spending quality time with relatives. A great time was had by all. Being a curmudgeon, though, means I have to dwell on the miserable experiences intertwined with the fun.

The most agonizing two days of the trip, of course, were the ones when we had to travel by air. Each flight, there and back, was delayed by about three hours due to bad weather, turning a supposed six hour cross country trip into a day long nightmare. Even worse, I came to realize that the very vessel that took us to New York was really nothing but a flying petri dish full of germs this time of year. It’s well known that more people catch a cold in the winter months, the same time of year that we choose to travel to visit family. The recycled air in an airplane basically guarantees that a single person with a cold passes it to as many as two or three hundred other people - all trapped together against their will for hours on end. Those people then go on to pass it to their friends and family in not just one but two cities in quick succession.

So it should be no surprise that we carried a plethora of germs with us to New York. Our niece was so excited to see us that she woke up at 11:00 PM, when we finally arrived, to give us hugs and kisses. A lovely gesture that, in hindsight, may not have been a good idea. By the end of the trip, four out of five of us had fallen sick with flu symptoms. My daughter called from Seattle to report that both she and her husband were also sick with the flu after returning from a trip to Minnesota to spend the holidays with his family. Both of them missed work days as a result.

I think I'm starting to see a pattern here. Cold weather, millions of travelers on planes and jammed together indoors, flu season, contagious disease theory, … remind me again why we think it's a good idea to visit relatives for the holidays when they live in a cold climate reachable only by GermMobiles we call airplanes? Not only that, the cold weather at the destination means we spend most of our time cooped up in closed spaces, giving us plenty of opportunities to make each other sick. Wouldn't it make more sense to spend the winter holidays with your immediate family, avoiding the miserable experience we call modern air travel, and then get together with the extended family some time in the summer when weather conditions are better? Seems like a win-win to me.

I proposed the same thing in another blog last year:

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed our time with our new in-laws, but the experience left me wondering: Why do we always have to enjoy time with family in terrible weather? Why not opt for “virtual holidays” in the middle of summer instead? We have virtualized everything else in our world. Why not the holidays? Why not have a virtual Christmas in July and be done with it? We can all enjoy spending time with friends and family - and we don't have to freeze our asses to do so.

So here’s my idea… Introducing Virtual Christmas – it’s just like Christmas, only warmer. It's the festivus for the rest of us!

Let’s face it – the Europeans have a much better vacationing system than we do, everyone pretty much taking off for the month of August. We could have a similar month long summer vacation, perhaps starting with the Fourth of July festivities. I claim this results in better productivity in the office by having everyone engaged at the same time (how often do you have to postpone decisions because some random person is on vacation?), but also improves extended family bonds over time by promoting longer family-oriented vacations. Of course, this goes against our 24x7 lifestyles - some services may not be available for the month of July as businesses close for the holidays.

I was half joking at the time but I still think this is a good idea: just think about the billions of dollars we would save in cold medications and missed work days.

The alternative, of course, would be to get the airlines to offer face masks and hand sanitizers at the gate instead of, or in addition to, headphones. But I suspect that's too obvious and/or would require congressional oversight.

Frozen Popsicle Man Takes to the Road: A Curmudgeonly Travel Narrative

“Wednesday, November 28, 1520, we debouched from the strait, engulfing ourselves in the Pacific Sea. We were three months and twenty days without getting any kind of fresh food. We ate biscuit, which was no longer biscuit, but powder of biscuits swarming with worms, for they had eaten the good. It stank strongly of the urine of rats. We drank yellow water that has been putrid for many days. We also ate some ox hides that covered the top of the mainyard to prevent the yard from chafing the shrouds, and which had become exceedingly hard because of the sun, rain, and wind. We left them in the sea for four or five days, and then placed them for a few moments on top of the embers, and so ate them; and often we ate sawdust from boards. Rats were sold for one-half ducado apiece, and even then we could not get them. The gums of both the lower and the upper teeth of some of our men swelled, so they could not eat under any circumstances therefore died. Nineteen men died from that sickness.”

Antonio Pigafetta. First Voyage Around the World (1519-1522): An Account of Magellan's Expedition.

“Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses.

Jake: Hit it.”

           Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. Blues Brothers.

“Lester Siegel: You don’t have a better bad idea than this?

Tony Mendez: This is the best bad idea we have, sir. So far.”

               Alan Arkin and Ben Affleck. Argo.

A few days ago, on a whim, I decided to take a brief vacation. You see, the retired life is so hard that I need a break from it. Seriously, though, here’s what actually happened.

Over the past few days, I went on a few too many chilly rainy rides up the mountain. You don't have an appreciation for what that means if you haven't “enjoyed” going downhill for twenty minutes non-stop at speeds of up to forty miles an hour while getting pelted in the face with thousands of cold liquid missiles coming at you diagonally. As you hurtle towards your death down the slippery road, you also get to “enjoy” feeling that your toes are frozen solid, that your nose is dripping, and that you haven't actually felt your fingers for the past hour. The fact that you just spent an hour climbing the mountain and are sweating profusely just means you are even more wet, cold, and miserable. At this point, you are basically a frozen Popsicle.

Of course, none of your extremities come even close to your rear end when it comes to pain. Try sitting on a road bike for three to four hours a day and you'll know what I mean. If that's not masochistic enough for you, try having a flat tire in the middle of the aforementioned rain storm while riding in some Godforsaken nowhere woods. As you stand there soaking wet and try to fix the flat with numb fingers, you have plenty of time to daydream about sunnier days. Ah, how I love biking! It's good for you, I keep telling myself.

Anyway, I looked at my iPhone Weather app and saw that the Bay Area was up for at least another week of cold and rainy weather. Being the resourceful guy that I am, I jumped on Expedia after checking the weather reports for half a dozen places “close enough” to the Bay Area for a quick two or three day trip. I settled for Palm Springs. Warm and sunny with temperatures in the high seventies, close to Joshua Tree National Park and the Salton Sea. I can go for quick day hikes and maybe even drag my camera along for some desert photography. Quick one hour flight to LAX, hop in a car for a couple of hours and we’re there. Brilliant. I even patted myself on the back for the quick thinking before asking my wife if she wanted to join me. She declined. She is a wise woman, as will soon become obvious. I also pinged a few friends to see if they wanted to join me. But, they were all either working or had other obligations. Never mind. I'll go it alone. How bad can it be?

At this point in the story, I should mention that I absolutely refuse to sit in real restaurants and wait for food when I'm traveling alone. I just feel so self conscious sitting there alone for anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour. I wouldn't know what to do with myself. It just feels too weird. So, when I travel alone, by and large, I eat on the run. Anything to get the excruciating ordeal out of the way as quickly as possible. Fast food, burritos, fish and chips at a pub, slice of pizza at the airport, anything that does not require sitting down alone at a table in a restaurant. For some reason, sitting at a bar is permissible but an actual table is not. I don’t understand the logic either. Needless to say, this aversion (it’s involuntary, I can't help it) also makes many magical destinations much less enjoyable when I'm forced to travel solo.

I booked nice midday flights so I would get a chance to bike in the morning before jumping on the plane. I find that helps with the guilt of knowing that I wouldn't get nearly as much exercise for the next few days. No, thank you. I'm not taking my bike to Palm Springs. It's not worth the hassle. It's just a quick one hour flight.

So, I got up at the usual time, did a quick hour or so of biking and took a shower, ready to go to the airport. That oughta make up for all the junk food I’ll be eating. Just as I was getting ready to leave, I received a text message from the airline that the flight had been cancelled due to “weather problems in San Francisco”. Hmmm… the weather out the window actually looked pretty good. Just a little rain and wind. Nothing special. I even went on a quick rant about Californians who didn't know how to run an airport. “If this kind of weather results in flight cancellations, then they’d have to shut down the entire airport for six months out of the year in Canada and Denmark.” Later, I came to find from other passengers that the plane had had engine problems, too. The airline just chose to blame weather publicly. Not our fault, bad weather.

Anyway, at least I got the notification in time and didn't spend several hours along with thousands of other travelers walking around the airport like zombies. Instead, I jumped online and booked myself on the next available flight out, still arriving in LA before 4:00 PM. Once again I patted myself on the back and congratulated myself for saving the day. Well, the next few hours were spent reading a succession of text messages informing me that this new flight, alas, was being delayed - in half hour increments. To make a long story short, the plane finally took off at 5:00 PM and deposited us in LA before six. Just in time for rush hour traffic. Joy!

It’s amazing how many multi-car pileups Angelinos get into on a regular evening commute. By the time I got to the hotel in Palm Springs, it was 9:00 PM. An entire day wasted getting from the Bay Area to Palm Springs. I could have driven there faster. Three hours, my ass! We have made air travel, and travel in general, so inefficient and painful that it almost makes me give up on travel altogether. I'm sure I'll have a similar day long ordeal going back home. A “quick” trip shouldn't require two full days of travel. I used to actually enjoy travel but am finding it increasingly difficult to justify it given all the hassles involved. In hindsight, I should have booked the flight directly to Palm Springs but that severely limits the number of available flights and is not much better. Okay, maybe it’s not as bad as the days of Magellan and urine soaked biscuits but we seem to have massively regressed in the past few years when it comes to travel. As an aside, did you notice that that entry was dated 1520 and that the trip didn’t end until two years later? Yikes!

Now, lying in bed, I was too agitated to sleep. New bed, noisy air conditioner, combined with stress from the sheer stupidity and waste of the previous twelve or so hours. So I lay there thinking about the next month. In my infinite wisdom, I somehow committed to five more similar “quick” trips coming up between now and Christmas. Two for business, three for family. Great job, Ben. Right in the middle of the holiday season and the worst time of year to travel. By the time I fell asleep, feeling sorry for myself, it was 2:00 AM. And, of course, I was up bright and early at 5:00 AM like every day at home. I’d forgotten to shut off my biological alarm. Oh great. Now that's what I call a vacation.

So I rolled around the bed for a couple of hours before getting up to go to Joshua Tree National Park for a hike and some photography. I have to admit I wasn't up for it. I hiked a couple of the trails and took a few pictures. It was a beautiful place and I enjoyed it but, it seems, in my rush to book the trip, I hadn't bothered to think about the fact that flowers bloom in the spring, November is not the best time of year to go there for photography.

By 3:00 PM, I was back at the hotel, in a new much quieter room overlooking the golf course and a man made lagoon. I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting at the poolside bar enjoying a beer and the sunshine and writing this text. Let's face it. This is why I came here. To get out of the rain and cold and to get a few more days of sunshine and warm weather and relatively clean mountain air before settling in for the cold winter. The hiking and photography were just excuses to fool myself into thinking I wasn't slacking.

Did I mention that three of those trips next month are to Seattle, Toronto, and New York? Brrrr. The older I get, the more I need sunshine and warm weather. My old bones and joints prefer it to freezing rain and forty mile an hour winds. I've paid my dues for years in cold and inhospitable climes. To those of you still living in those kinds of places, I have to ask: “Why?!?” I guess I'm getting old. I'm actually starting to understand people who move to Arizona and Florida. Now, there's a scary thought.

I was determined to get a good night of sleep so I went to bed early the second day and managed to fall asleep by midnight, only to be awakened at 3:30 AM by the shrill sound of the fire alarm in my room. Why is it that fire alarm batteries only die in the middle of the night? Somehow, that doesn't seem right, statistically speaking. It took quite a while for someone to come and replace the batteries. By then, my ears were ringing so hard that any thought of sleep had to be abandoned. Just call me “Sleepless in Palm Springs”.

The Salton Sea? I enjoyed the solitude but there isn't a whole lot to see other than water and dead fish. I was told I could drive another hour to a wildlife refuge if I wanted to see birds but I was too tired from lack of sleep to do another two hours of driving. I have no reason to believe the return trip tomorrow will be any less painful than the one coming out here. The sunshine has been great but let’s just say I'm ready to go back to being Frozen Popsicle Man on my bicycle until the next adventure.

Please Change My Password When I Go on Vacation

“The regulations read, ‘The supervisor and compositor shall be flogged thirty times for an error per chapter; the printer shall be flogged thirty times for bad impression, either too dark or too light, of one character per chapter.’ This helps explain both the reputation for accuracy earned by the earliest Korean imprints and the difficulty that Koreans found in recruiting printers.”

Daniel J. Boorstin. The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself.

“I live the life I love

And I just love the life I live.”

Muddy Waters. I Love The Life I Live, I Live The Life I Love.

"Once [Sir Isaac Newton] inserted a bodkin—a long needle of the sort used for sewing leather—into his eye socket and rubbed it around 'betwixt my eye and the bone, near to the backside of my eye as I could', just to see what would happen.”

Bill Bryson. A Short History of Nearly Everything.

I've now been officially “semi-retired” for six weeks. In my case, that means I no longer have a day job. I am trying to avoid brain rot by staying engaged with the industry: advising a few startups and sitting on the Board of Directors of one. But I've otherwise given up the day to day office hours, the daily commute, and more importantly, the responsibilities of a full-time job.

Six weeks in, I have to tell you I'm happier than I've ever been in my life. I feel more refreshed and relaxed, I spend 3-4 hours a day biking, have dropped fifteen pounds in weight, my chronic back pain is under control, I'm in a better mood all the time, I sleep a full eight hours a night, I spend more time with family and friends, I am more patient and reasonable with people, I am just basically a happier human being. Highly recommended.

I don't mean to gloat. I know that would be mean since most people out there reading this still need to hold a day job and collect a paycheck. My main point is that, after thirty five years of working like a madman, I feel I'm just now realizing what life is supposed to be like. And it feels glorious.

I realize now that I have obsessed over work to the exclusion of all else for the past thirty five years. Okay, I knew this all along but I never stopped to think what it really meant. It has left scars not only on my life but also on the lives of those around me.  It is only now that I recognize the obsession with work, the twenty hour days, the lack of sleep and relaxation, all of it - was taking a huge physical and psychological toll on me. I loved working and work seemed to love me back. So all else be damned. It's a virtuous cycle (or a vicious one, depending on your point of view). The more you work, the more successful you are. The more successful you are, the harder you have to work.

So, what's my point? Barring the ability for most common folk to quit their jobs and start exercising like madmen, what am I proposing?

Take vacations. No. I mean really take vacations. Insist on taking real vacations. Ones where you unplug. Ones where you cannot connect with work except for emergencies. Ideally for four weeks or more per year. It should be a law enforced by congress that we should lose all access to our work related email and chat accounts when we go on vacation. I wish employers would just change the employee’s password for the duration of their vacation. If they need you, they will call. We have your number. Don't call us, we’ll call you.

I say this as I remember the last vacation I had with my family while still working. Last year, my daughter and son-in-law gave us (my wife and I) the gift of a vacation in Mexico. They spent five days with us in Puerto Vallarta. It was a lovely trip and we all had a great time but it was two days into the trip that I realized something. I had spent more time on my laptop and on the phone, working, than I had with my family. Every five minutes I had to check my email. Check a dozen Hipchat channels to see if there are any disasters in progress at work. Dial in a couple of meetings every day. Check Twitter to see if there are any major DDoS attacks in progress or any customer issues that need immediate attention. You get the idea.

Of course, the bigger problem is that even when we are not looking at the screen, our brains are working on the most recent set of problems we just heard about in an email chain or on a call. And we call this a vacation? No wonder we return to work more exhausted than when we left.

Business trips are even worse. On my most recent business trip to London last year, I found myself awake every night until 6 AM conversing with folks back in California, falling asleep at 7 AM for a couple of hours, before jumping up to go in for the day with the London office. Of course, you are also likely to catch a nasty bug on the flight out. Or, more likely, on the flight back when your immune system is weak from jet lag and sleepless nights. The flights used to be the only time when you could unplug. No more. I've spent entire fourteen hour flights arguing with colleagues - in real time. Thanks to In-flight wifi.

Of course, I realize that I'm describing my own personal problems. My obsession with work. But I suspect it resonates with a few of you out there. What I realize now is that my brain was on overdrive. Non-stop. Twenty Four Seven. And that can take a toll on you over time. Physically, mentally, and socially. The least we can do is shut it down - I mean really shut it down - once in a while. Hence the proposal for the vacation thingy.