Quirkyalone: It’s a mindset

Find Your Life Purpose in Five Easy Steps

Apr 23, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Personal Growth, Solitude

1. Meet a friend at a café. Bring post-it notes.

2. Give your friend and yourself five post-it notes each. Tell your friend to write down the five most important things in his or her life, right now, at this moment. Do it yourself. You could write anything: a person, a feeling, a place, a way of being in the world, or a value.

3. After you have both written down your five things, lay them out on the table.

4. Now, you must give one of them up. Choose the first thing you would give away if you had to. What could you live without? Then, choose the second thing you would live without. Continue discarding things one by one.

5. The final post-it note is the one thing you don’t think you could live without. This is your life purpose, or you could also say, the most important thing in your life.

Where did this exercise come from? A new friend introduced it to me. My friend has been enormously successful as a doctor, academic, and biotech CEO, but the purpose of his life wasn’t completely self-evident to him until he went through a period of dedicated inquiry. He offered to do this exercise with me (he supplied the post-its) and explained that you can do the exercise repeatedly. The answers might change over time. He says the challenge is to live your life to truly serve that final post-it note (or rather, what you wrote in it) and to constantly ask yourself whether what you are doing is aligned with that which is most important to you. He’s on something of a mission to help other people drill down into their life purposes. He often encourages other CEOs (who think he’s crazy) to go through the post-it exercise. Their default most-important-thing is often to make money (to provide for their families), but a more specific answer is more of a guide.

I won’t tell you my life purpose because it seems more interesting to let that by mysterious, but I will say, It’s been an illuminating exercise that continues to resonate. I’ve been thinking about the last post-it I left on the table a few times a week, asking myself whether the things I am actually doing, day-to-day, express what I wrote. Keeping a central theme in mind makes life feel more sacred and less random.

The next morning, I couldn’t resist sharing this exercise with my roommate. And then with friends. So I wanted to share it with a larger audience, including you.

Order a latte and whip out some post-it notes. Bon courage.

Zeitgeist Alert: The End of Aloneness?

Feb 08, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Solitude, technology

Apparently I am not alone in asking if we are experiencing the end of aloneness. A few days after publishing this blog post, “Are our phones robbing us of solitude?”, I heard KQED’s Forum, our local public radio civic affairs program, take on this very question.

The guest was William Deresiewicz, an English professor who taught at Yale between 1998 and 2008 and recently published a beautiful essay called “The End of Solitude” in the Chronicle of Higher Education. I can’t remember ever being so riveted by a program. I was getting ready for work, but found myself unable to leave, obsessively dialing to join the conversation.

Deresiewicz raised provocative questions: What do we lose when we deprive ourselves of solitude? What happens to college students if they never disconnect enough to sink into aloneness? Or the girl who receives 3,000 daily text messages, which means, on average, she is never alone for longer than 10 minutes? What if they have no desire for solitude at all? How is solitude related to friendship? He shared an enigmatic Emerson quotation: “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society.”

Check out the radio show here. Listen for me at the end. My question: Is this an addiction to constant connectivity, and if so, what do we do to rehabilitate ourselves?

Nancy in Boston forwarded me this similarly themed piece from the Boston Globe, “The End of Alone.”

Lately I find myself taking “power solitude,” like “power naps.” I’m training for longer periods without checking emails or texts. Though I still feel addicted, I’m comforted to know that others are wondering what we are overly connected. I know I’m not alone.

Are our phones robbing us of solitude?

Jan 25, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Solitude, technology

Profound thought while walking across the street on a beautiful, sunny afternoon in San Francisco, checking my email on my iPhone: Are we ever really alone anymore?

Taking long walks alone is something that I cherished in my pre-cell phone days, and something I lauded in Quirkyalone as a source of creative inspiration. Long walks alone are when we allow thoughts to form, to see where thoughts lead us. Before I even uttered “quirkyalone,”  I had the image of a woman walking alone, a mix of pride, melancholy, and contentment.

Now my walks alone are punctuated by my thumb punching “check email” on my phone, when suddenly, though no one is physically present, they may as well be. Mobile technology can be so seductive and addictive, the ability to constantly check messages and feel the presence of the world swarming around us in a million little missives. But at the end of the day, we don’t feel nearly as much alone. And I think in many ways that can also harm our ability to be together.

Granted, there are, gasp, people who don’t own cell phones. But we are going mobile, where everything will be checkable. In this era of “ambient knowledge” (everything my 362 Facebook friends “know” about me that I don’t remember sharing)  and camera phones (where every moment is sharable), cutting the cord from the Internets–and being alone–takes ever more willpower.  Of course, I am the one who hits “check email” directly after a movie, when I could be luxuriating in the closing music over the credits. There’s no question that I’m addicted to the “new,” to the sense that someone cares enough to reach out and touch me, whether through email, text, voice, tagged note!

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An Unexpectedly (Quirky)alone New Year’s in Rio de Janeiro

Jan 13, 2009 - Written by Sasha Cagen  |  Filed under: Featured, Solitude, Travel

My friend Jenny just reminded me that I have a New Year’s problem, which tends to emerge in a particularly virulent way when I travel. The problem is mad indecision. I feel the full force of the road not taken. In San Francisco, I can accept an uneventful New Year’s Eve with close friends, but on the road, I can’t get it through my head that New Year’s Eve doesn’t have to fulfill a vision. Three years ago I couldn’t decide between staying in New York with my friends Jenny and Adam or spending the New Year with my father and stepmother on Cape Cod, which in retrospect, seems insane that there was even a question. I was suffering from insomnia at the time and was afraid of being exhausted and out all night in the frigid New York  cold. I chose safety—the Cape Cod with family option—and cursed myself when I found myself on a couch with my father watching Seinfeld at 11:30. I didn’t sleep anyway, so annoyed with myself for choosing the Most Geriatric New Year’s Ever.

This year I spent New Year’s week in Rio de Janeiro, which is an experience I will never forget. Jenny asked me “What was the high and low of your trip?” All I could think of was New Year’s Eve, a focal point of anxiety for days leading up to the trip, and a story to tell. I was in Brazil for a spontaneous weeklong (second) trip. The flight was purchased in mid-December. No, I don’t have a boyfriend there, which is what everyone assumes. I had just been in Brazil in September. The stars had aligned with a bizarrely cheap ticket and a place to stay for New Year’s, the high point of Braizlian partying for the year, second only to Carnaval. I have this Brazil fascination, which I haven’t completely understood yet.

What I want to tell you about is New Year’s. It’s a first-world problem to have too many choices, but the pain from being unable to decide is real.  I am not as brave as I come off. In fact, I am still shaken by the telling of this story. But I did experience about five minutes of quirkyalone bliss in the midst of this adventure. Because of that . . and because it strikes me now that New Year’s 2009 was also the the tenth anniversary of this birth of this concept (I first uttered the word “quirkyalone” on New Year’s Day 1999) I want to share this tale.

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