I’m 40!
While the general tendency is to consider 40 to be slightly on the older side rather than younger, I still feel that my most rewarding, fulfilling and happier years are ahead of me, not behind me.
My life flashes in front of my eyes - a humble childhood in a small-town, directionless 20s marred by distraction and experimentation fueled by my urge to grow out of the shadows of my small-towner background, coming-of-age 30s that involved course-corrections, maturity and self-actualization. And now as I stand at the cusp of my 40s, I feel like a late-bloomer, who is only beginning to tap into his potential that never got a chance to fully emerge due to my modest upbringing, the lack of nurturing environments, and a total absence of mentors showing me the way. Despite all these factors that could have held me back, I’m proud that I’ve done really well for myself.
What I want to focus on next is the pursuit of a scholarly life of knowledge. With the basic needs of existence such as career, finances, family, childraising, housing, etc., taken care of, now is the time to truly transcend into the deep intellectual life that I’ve always found so romantically alluring. Having just turned 40, the timing is perfect to completely shun the shallow and to whole-heartedly embrace the deep life.
Toward The Life Of The Imagination
The deep life is hard. It is intellectually draining, exerts immense load on your cognitive reserves, and leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. While it’s hard and requires you to embrace some amount of asceticism, it could be the most fulfilling way to meaningfully occupy yourself for the rest of your life and could also be rewarding on all fronts - professionally, financially and socially. It could even be spiritually fulfilling without having to turn to faith and religion for that. The deep life will bring you joy, a heightened sense of self-worth, self-assurance, peace and comfort being in your own skin.
So here’s a thorough and thoughtful reflection on what that life looks like. This is an exercise in thinking through what are some things to keep in mind, what to practice, what routines and rituals I need to engage in, and what activities I need to discontinue which do not serve the purpose.
What does the deep life look like, and what are some measures to take?
You carry an acute sense of awareness of what constitutes deep and what is shallow.
A day of deep life will comprise of very little wallowing in the trivia of the shallow.
You strictly schedule shallow activities to a certain day of the week, thereby leaving large parts of the day for deep work. (This is now taken care of and is on my Google Calendar as a weekly reminder).
A large chunk of your time everyday is dedicated to reading, writing and/or thinking. To enhance the enjoyment of reading and writing, they could be done in novel places like cafes, parks, gardens, libraries or in a wooded area. Thinking could be done while taking a leisurely solitary stroll.
Consolidate your digital presence and quit social media. Great strides have already been made here. I’m absent/inactive on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Discord, Whatsapp groups, and recently quit my last remaining big distraction - Reddit.
Taking a cue from the philosopher Schopenhauer, short of completely withdrawing from society, minimize your interactions with society beyond your immediate circle.
Deliberate Practice
To reach your full intellectual potential, your mind needs to be stretched to its limits everyday, only through which your cognitive boundaries will expand over time. This means you engage in focused studies of difficult, unfamiliar topics everyday, where you take the time to not just read through the material, but truly lean back and ponder over what you read, and ensuring you understand the subject matter at a nuanced level. You could even write your own report on the subject.
At any given point in time you should be pursuing something cognitively difficult that exerts your brain and takes you to your next level of knowledge and mastery.
At this stage, the pursuits most important to me are furthering myself in the craft of software development, and gaining mastery over the German language. While software studies can keep me busy over the next decade and beyond, if I dedicatedly follow through on a regiment of deliberate practice, then 3 years from now I would have gained sufficient command over German to then switch gears and move on to something else, like studying Physics or Music.
Starting this week, I will begin a ritual of deliberate practice, splitting my time between software studies and German. For software, I’ll be starting to dive deep into the underlying architecture and source code of Clickhouse - an analytical database. And for German, I’ll dissect conversational videos that I’ve gathered in my Youtube video library. Here’s a tentative schedule.
Monday/Wednesday 9:30 AM-10:30 AM Software / 5 PM-6 PM German
Tuesday/Thursday 9:30 AM-11:30 AM Software / 5 PM-6 PM German
Friday 10:30-12:30 PM Software / 4:30 PM-6:30 PM German
I’ll be trying to document how well I’m committing to the schedule in my Journals. There will ofcourse be hiccups and interruptions along the journey, because life always gets in the way. But this is not the schedule for the next week, or the next month. This is a schedule for the next 5 years, and so a hiccup here, a hurdle there shouldn’t matter if I relentlessly stretch out my efforts over the next decade. The deep life is a way of life, and not a passing fad.
References and Further Readings
https://calnewport.com/the-deep-life-some-notes/
https://calnewport.com/focus-week-rediscover-depth/
Deep Work - Cal Newport
The Intellectual Life - Sertillanges
The Intellectual Life - Hamerton (Free ebook)