in 20 minutes you can improve your closet. for $40 you can get a better pillow. no brainer. but where’s the line? when have you optimized enough?
i’ve spent more time selling, coding, and thinking from uncomfortable benches in noisy cafes than i will ever spend at my home office. endured apartments without heat, roommates without class, gyms without gear. all over the world, for years.
and no complaints, because i was focused on 1 thing. not one company. certainly not one project. but 1 thing: freedom. and it was only after i earned freedom that i began to wonder, what’s the best note-taking app?
except that graduation never happened. by the time i became free i was so ignorant of and disinterested in creature comfort optimizations that i became immune. i put on a lens that says “if product won’t make my life demonstrably better, it is for suckers.”
i don’t have a smart home. not a single sensor. no sleep mask or hand lotion. no morning ritual. i look at blue light until i fall asleep. no black out curtains. LEDs everywhere because that’s what the builder installed. have never tried AI or listened to Huberman, or any podcast for that matter. (asymmetry – i’ve been interviewed by dozens, but not listened)
for men, this is called being a bro. for everyone, it is called focusing on things that don’t change. for me, it is remembering i wasn’t made for this world. why strive to prolong my presence in it?
all of this despite my tendency to find efficiencies and build systems. i am not some unorganized, go with the flow type gal. i seek full control over my environment. its temperature, degree of background noise, people, proximity to coffee, all the way down to the thickness of my socks.
but through years of focusing on the main thing first, i learned (by accident) how to disable my weaknesses. drop me anywhere, i will make things. earn your freedom, then go shopping for light bulbs.
All modernity risks making us soft. That said, obviously we don’t reject things like the internet or electricity or cars or whatever, even if in the strictest sense we got through tens of thousands of years of evolution without that stuff. That is, we don’t “need” any of it. I think there’s a three prong test to any tool/tech/process/device/etc to see if its worth adopting:
1) Is this a distraction? (Should you be doing something better with the time and energy you are putting into this?)
2) Is the juice worth the squeeze? (To your point, is this going to make your life measurably better given the investment/switching costs/etc?)
3) Does this make you fragile? (If you had to live without it later, how would you handle?)
“What’s the best note-taking app?” probably fails all three, especially the first one. I’d go so far as, for most things, asking “what’s the best (blank)?” it’s probably a bit of mental masturbation 9x out of 10. Answer: the most readily available reliable option (like, say pen and paper) is probably fine.
For things like sleep hygiene, I get the idea that sleep masks and black out curtains or whatever might seem indulgent but I would say if you are regulating the temperature and noise levels in your house already– and the thickness of your socks– this concern is excessive. Sleep masks (and I personally also use ear plugs) are cheap and portable. You can get them anywhere and they create a demonstrable improvement in sleep (at least for me and my sleep data backs it up. I sleep better than most similarly situated friends of mine without these protocols.) That said, I used to have a ChiliPad mattress cooler which was AMAZING but it made it difficult for me to sleep in hotels. So when it crapped out I didn’t buy a new one (I was risking #2 and especially #3) and I’m glad I didn’t.
Indeed, your point about working in noisy cafes actually probably speaks to this. My guess is you were wearing earphones to block out that noise or put on alpha brain waves or whatever, as you should. The alternative is to be some sort of a spartan martyr enduring the noise for its own sake, which ironically would probably violate test #1. (Esp when bluetooth ear buds cost like $20 on Amazon now, if you can live without $200 Airpods which… again… obviously we can– though I admit I own both ;-))
We aren’t a society of “need” and haven’t been one for nearly 100 years so our entire lives are a choice of which modernity to accept. If you are trying to create your life at any meaningful level– having the right tools is required obviously (try living without the internet today for more than a month and you’ll find it difficult to do much meaningful work unless you are a hermetic carpenter). But as long as we aren’t optimizing for its own sake (test #2), ever keeping us from our work (test #1– hello, War of Art), and we can easily learn to live without it if we had to (test #3)… it’s probably not much of a concern.