# De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness
source: https://ift.tt/BSTuEFY tags: #literature #living-well #favorites uid: 202302202113 —
Despite being moment-to-moment less fun than playing the game, going to the tournament was ultimately more fun. Playing the videogame is very fun, but it’s monolithic. It’s just play, there’s no environmental novelty full of multisensory stimuli to hook your memory into. It blurs from one moment to the next, and like bad American Chinese food, you find yourself paradoxically unsatiated when you’re done. There’s something more fun about complex fun, even if the individual moments might score lower on the hedonometer.
But fun is just one area where we can see this phenomenon. There is a clear experiential divide between rich multisensory life and what I’ll call “atomized” life. And atomized life is worth avoiding.
This is similar in spirit to “Being able to remember what you did is what gives meaning to life” 202210031413. I haven’t finished reading this article yet, but it sure seems like “atomized life” is the kind of life that’s very difficult to remember.
Life and fitness used to be deeply intertwined. You could not live without fitness. Now they are separate: fitness is a cute thing rich people do in their Lululemon after work or while jiggling their mouse to keep the Slack bubble green. You don’t do it to stay alive, you do it to get laid or not resent yourself or maybe if you’re particularly enlightened to “feel good.”
Fitness has been atomized: it is no longer part of a cohesive whole life. It’s a separate thing you have to try to “find time for.” When someone says they “don’t have time” to work out, they’re both stating their priorities (obviously, everyone has time)
Then we got Peloton. No socialization. No scenery. No exploration. No sunlight. Exercise, sure, and Emma is cute, but that’s it. The richness of biking is gone.
And, look, I love my Peloton, but it’s Type 1 exercise. Instead of exercise being a multifaceted activity that incorporates other essential life elements like seeing friends, getting fresh air, and looking away from a screen for a few moments, it reduces it to its simplest element and suggests that’s just as good. Maybe even better because you get a “harder workout.” The most important part of exercise, after all, is INTENSITY.
Where else do we see over-atomization? Food comes to mind. A meal should be about more than just food. Relaxation, spending time with your friends and family, fun, maybe joy. If you looked at an Italian neighborhood dinner and said “wow what a waste, don’t they know they could just drink a Huel and get back to work?” then, well, oof.
Lol. This is kind of me, when it comes to food.
But atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:
- Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that.
- Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that.
- Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveniences.
Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything.
If you throw Exercise and Socialization and Food and Fun and Hobbies into some complicated hexascale with Work and Life, you suddenly feel overwhelmed and start eyeing the benzos because seriously how can you possibly oh shit did the dogs get fed today ugh when did you last finish a book can you believe she hasn’t called you back is it 5 o’clock yet?
But at the root of this overwhelm is the language we use around many activities. “I’m going to go workout” feels more responsible than “I’m going to go for a walk with a friend.” We separate “I’m working” and “I’m playing.” We want to make everything extremely efficient, so we opt for going for a run alone instead of trying to link up with people along the way. We need to “be productive” so we don’t work from a coffee shop with friends.
I fall under this category. At the moment, I’m not convinced enough to definitively say that this is a bad thing, but I’m intrigued by the discussion here.
The challenge is that these “Type 1,” or Atomized, versions of activities are the most immediately appealing. Booting up my computer to play a video game is way easier and sounds more immediately fun than texting some friends to play pickleball. Crushing takeout chips and queso sounds tastier and easier than cooking steak and rice. But I know I’ll feel better afterward with the latter, and that’s what we have to try to optimize for. Integrated living is more satisfying than atomic living. 202302202034
I think I intuitively understand this fact but sometimes forget it. I’m going to take special note of this so I don’t forget.
Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead?
The more creatively we can integrate the various parts of life that matter to us, the more satisfied we’ll be in our day to day. The more we atomize, the more lonely and overwhelmed we start to feel. De-atomization is the secret to happiness.
NOTE: This was a well-written article. There’s a certain genre of articles, including most of the ones in my #favorites , that just capture my attention. They’re written in an empathetic, humanistic way. They have a unique, compelling thesis. They genuinely feel like they’ve improved my life just by me reading them. They just capture my imagination. The ones that capture my attention like this (the latest one was “Why We Need More Boutique Search Engines” 202301292238) are the ones that truly reflect my values in life 202301292249.