Good afternoon!
Here is your Weekly Boost, a roundup of things I’m exploring, creating, or simply enjoying to help you get that extra edge this week.
An inspiring movie
I really enjoyed Bleed For This (on Netflix or Amazon). I’m a sucker for inspirational movies, especially when they’re based on true events. Bleed For This is about the incredible comeback story of boxer Vinny Pazienza. I found the final scene to be very powerful, as simple as it was.
iPhone “Red Mode”
I use the iPhone’s built-in Night Shift feature to reduce blue light exposure, but it doesn’t completely block blue light (even I shift the setting to “More Warm”, which I recommend).
To completely block blue light, you can create your own red mode, which I use at nighttime.
Once you set it up, you can apply a shortcut to easily switch it on or off. Here are the steps:
Go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters > switch on Color Filters > Select “Color Tint” > slide Intensity and Hue all the way to the right.
Then go back to Accessibility again > scroll to the bottom and click Accessibility Shortcut > select “Color Filters.”
Now when you triple-click the side button you will toggle red mode on or off.
The nature of happiness
The following is from a conversation on the Waking Up app between Sam Harris (@SamHarrisOrg) and happiness researcher Laurie Santos (@lauriesantos).
Sam made these observations about the nature of happiness (bold and italics are mine):
To bring this back to mindfulness as a kind of a universal solvent here, it’s the discovery that you actually can’t become happy, you can only be happy.
And the experience of becoming happy—it’s not to say the circumstances in life don’t matter, I mean obviously they do—but they matter much less than you think, and that’s psychologically interesting.
In the extreme case, even much of what we spoke about that’s good for 99% of people, or even necessary for 99% of people, like social connections, if you actually know how to use your attention as optimally as possible, you can go into a cave for ten years and be supremely happy. I mean there are thousand of years of contemplative experience attesting to that. Now these people are athletes of meditation, in the end.
But either you’re connecting with your life moment-to-moment in a way that is truly rewarding, or you’re not. And you’re telling yourself a story about what needs to be true in the present such that you will naturally grant the present moment sufficient attention so as to be captivated by it.
Whatever your criteria are, they prove to be illusory for two reasons. One, is it’s possible to connect fully with the present now for no good reason. You can actually hack the system such that you can find satisfaction before anything especially good happens.
And two, if you’re fundamentally unable to use your attention that wisely, you won’t even enjoy the high moments all that much anyway because they’ll degrade so quickly and after thirty seconds you’ll be asking yourself, “Okay, what am I going to do next?”
It is almost the core illusion of human life, this deferral of wellbeing to such a time as it’s deemed truly warranted by whatever expectations you have imbibed from culture, or your upbringing, or your lousy genes, or whatever it is that’s conspired to make us as future-oriented as we are.
I highly recommend Waking Up as a guide for practicing meditation. At first I thought the meditations were too esoteric and I gave up on my first attempt with the introductory lessons. Once I made it past that hump it started to click and now it’s part of my daily routine.
If you’re already using the app, check out the Moment feature, which sends you a juicy 1-minute lesson each day.
What was your favorite movie that you watched this year? 🎥
I hope you enjoyed this week’s Boost. Take care!
- Matt
Favorite movie I watched in 2020 was the 2001 film “Enemy at the Gates” about the battle for Stalingrad during WWII.