What the reaching costs

I've argued the mechanism. This chapter is the bill, and most of it is paid in small coins.

A day made of small escapes. That's the first cost and the largest. Thirty times a day something happens in you and thirty times you leave. A life lived that way is a life in which you're never quite in the room for the flat bits, and the flat bits are most of any day. You can't be present for the queue and absent from it at the same time.

The remedies' own bills. Each of the four has a book of its own in this series, and I won't repeat them, but the headings are familiar. Food eaten without hunger, and what that does over years. Alcohol as a nightly routine, and what the NHS says about drinking to relieve stress. The phone as the answer to every gap, and what that does to attention. Purchases made from a mood, and the boxes that arrive on a better day. None of these is the point of this book, and all of them are downstream of the move it's about.

Time, which nobody counts. Thirty reaches at five minutes each is two and a half hours a day, and that's a conservative figure for the phone. The flicker would have taken ten minutes to pass on its own, but the remedy doesn't take ten minutes. It takes as long as it takes, and the phone in particular takes as long as you'll give it. An afternoon of small reaches is an afternoon with a large hole in it, and the hole is where the thing you meant to do went.

Sleep, if the evening remedy is a screen or a drink. Money, if it's a purchase or a drink. The second feeling, thirty times a day, which is thirty small verdicts on yourself and adds up to a low opinion by bedtime that you'd never have formed from any one of them.

The lesson. Every reach teaches that discomfort can't be borne, and the person who's learned that lesson thirty thousand times is a person with a very low threshold for what counts as unbearable, and doesn't know it, because the remedy is always there before the threshold is reached.

Never knowing your own weather. You've had feelings all your life and you've never watched one. You don't know how long your boredom lasts or what your flatness does at minute eight, because there was always a biscuit. That's a strange thing not to know about yourself, and it's the thing that makes every flicker frightening.

The narrowed range. Kashdan's avoiders had fewer good days as well as fewer bad ones. Reaching at every flicker means never getting to the far side of any of them, and the far side is where a fair amount of the good stuff is.

And the two or three feelings a day that were information, covered along with the weather, and the conversation not had and the decision not made, for another month.