Rohit Nalluri

Temporal Vertigo

Walking back to my desk after a lunch break, my colleague and I spotted two gardeners with chainsaws neatly trimming hedges into long, exact rectangles. My colleague, a fit, 50-something front-end developer, said, ‘Ah, that’s my dream job’.

I think most of us with a desk job can relate. One of the problems with the kind of neuron-heavy jobs we do is that the results of our hard work are not immediate. And by the time the results arrive, we have more often than not moved on to a different goal or a different project. There is no time for reflection, satisfaction, contentment.

Contrast that with a physically demanding job like landscaping, for example.

You work all day in the hot sun to trim the hedges, de-weed the undergrowth, chop off any offending branches from trees, and bring harmony to a messy garden. At the end of the day, you have the results of your hard work right in front of you, a distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’, and the contentment that follows is something you can carry home with you. However briefly, you have converted chaos into order, and reversed the natural entropy of the universe (which is, in this writer’s view, the loftiest of human purpose). When you go to sleep at night, it is with the satisfying feeling of having finished something from start to finish. You dream of the neat, straight cut of the hedges, the smell of freshly mown grass, and the artistry of shaping trees. Your muscles ache with the mingled pain of satisfaction and regrowth, and you know you will be stronger in the morning.

Desk jobs, and especially IT jobs, are the complete opposite. At the end of the day, even if you’ve had a really productive day at work, it is rarely the case that you started and ended a project on the same day. At best, you have moved the needle, and made incremental progress. You may come home excited about the way the project is evolving, but you will rarely come home with contentment of a job well done. You have medium term to long term goals, but nothing short and immediate. Essentially, the return on investment horizon on mental/desk jobs is many times longer than landscaping or physical-demanding jobs. You come home with deadlines, todos, backlogs, ideas, plans – unfinished businesses buzzing in your brain like bees. When you go to sleep at night, however compartmentalized you are, there is always a notification screen filled with pending tasks and reminders at the back of your mind. You dream of Jira boards, meetings, challenges and risks. You are, despite yourself, trained to think constantly about what’s next, a little about what has been and definitely not about what is. ‘What is’ does not matter to any organization whose sole goal is to improve its bottomline.

Day dreaming about such things while staring at the gardeners going about their work, I wondered if the modern white collar job contributes to the increasing rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness.

If you are depressed, you are stuck in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future.

While the quote above is a gross oversimplification of these complex conditions, it does hint at the reasons for the prevalence of depression and anxiety in the general population. Our modern lifestyles have no anchor to the present moment. Our work, our phones, our social media apps, and the news that we consume either encourage or force our minds into the past or the future, while our bodies try to remain rooted in the present, confusedly swimming in what I call temporal vertigo. Worse than that, dopamine-apps not just manipulate our presence, but captures the mind and places it in a hard-to-explain ‘gray zone’, a weird upside-down world of listlessness, boredom, and rabid, incessant dopamine-seeking. Dangerously, that state is not a diversion into the past or future – that is a soul-crushing vacuum.

If you have ever felt these symptoms, or have experienced the very real sensation of walking a little bit behind or ahead of your own body, then might I make a few suggestions that you can try to root yourself in the here and now at the end of your day.

Meditation

I am big on meditation, and recommend it to anyone who’d listen. It is unfortunate that there is a lot of mysticism and mumbo-jumbo attached to meditation, but stripped of all that, meditation is simply the act of observing your mind.

Here’s a simple meditation practice you can try right now (feel free to bookmark this article and return later—there’s no pressure to finish it all at once):

• Find a quiet spot where you can sit or lie undisturbed for 12 minutes.
• If you’re prone to anxiety, set a 12-minute timer on your phone. Start the countdown. Knowing that the phone will let you know when the time is up is hugely comforting.
• Settle into a comfortable position—either sitting or lying on your back. Sitting is preferable to avoid dozing off, but if you choose to lie down and end up napping, enjoy the rest!
• Once settled, focus on your breath. Simply breathe in and out.
• When a thought arises, acknowledge it. Gently tap your right knee, say “thought,” and let it go. Return to your breath.
• If an emotion surfaces, observe it. Tap your left knee, say “emotion,” and release it. Return to your breath.
• Whenever your mind wanders, smile at the monkeyness of your mind and return to your breath. Feel the air flowing through your nose, filling your lungs and belly.
• Your breath is your anchor. Return to it whenever your mind strays.
• Remember, you’re in control of your mind.
• For these 12 minutes, nothing is more important than your breath. Everything else can wait.
• Make this a daily practice.
• If you want a visual anchor to go along with the physical anchor of your breath, imagine you are sitting on the banks of a river. The uninterrupted flow of water is the flow of your thoughts, but you are the passive observer on the bank. If the water catches you and you float down the river, recognize it, and swim back to the banks and settle down. Return to the banks of the river. Return to your breath.

Couple of things to note:

• If someone or something disturbs you during these 12 minutes, there is no need to be annoyed, angry or upset. Any such response is contrary to your passiveness in these 12 minutes. Instead, incorporate the disturbance into your practice → observe, release, and return to your anchor. And do it all with a smile.
• Be prepared to be more emotional than usual in the first few days of your practice: Meditation will slowly reset the operating system of your mind. We’ve lived long, deep lives filled with various experiences that have created involuntary and reactionary responses to various situations. Not all of them are still applicable, so there is some unlearning to do. Meditation will do that. So fair warning that the first few days will make the waters of your mind dirtier than usual, but this will clear up within a week of practice.

Journaling

The act of journaling goes beyond mere note-taking; it’s a way to engage in self-expression, self-reflection, and self-awareness.

Journaling is equivalently helpful in rooting the mind in the present, instead of flitting between the past and future. Journaling works almost the same way as meditation does, and the purpose remains the same – to observe the mind and to live an examined life. If meditation is not your cup of tea, then write. You can use paper or anything digital, you can write with a pen, pencil, stylus, finger or keyboard. Simply show up and write.

I personally use Notion as my ‘second brain’, and have setup a simple ‘Journal’ template that has a few prompts already so that I don’t have to think of what to write everyday. This is usually enough for me to cover all the feelings and thoughts that I have for the day.

Journaling helps by exporting the ‘storage’ of all these thoughts onto a piece of paper or app so your mind can be empty. Your mind is way more important than the piece of paper, so do yourself a favor and do a data dump everyday.

This is the fastest way to exit the wormholes of past and future and slip back into the present.

I have also found that journaling helps me think about topics better, to have a more structured understanding of my opinions. It helps cement my existing knowledge, makes me a better writer, and a clearer thinker.

Hobby

The biggest differentiator for me has been getting involved in a hobby that I enjoy. I took up 3D printing about 9 years ago, and have reaped countless hours of enjoyment and satisfaction from it. A hobby that is also a skill can pay itself back in many ways, but the thing I most enjoy about 3D printing is that it is partly mental, partly physical. Designing an object from scratch is a mental task that I enjoy and which allows me to enter a ‘flow’ state, while building and maintaining the printer, cleaning, sanding, painting, and otherwise finishing the ‘print’ are physical tasks that let me work with my hands. Another critical aspect, and one more in tune with the purpose of this article, is that 3D printing allows me to think of an idea, design it, and print it, all in a single day, so that I can go to sleep satisfied by at least this aspect of my life.

If you think in terms of timeline of return on investment, 3D printing has a sharp learning curve (at least for me) and it took me a long time before I stopped being frustrated by it and start enjoying it. Looking back, I am honestly surprised that I stuck to it.

While choosing a hobby should not be a calculated decision, maybe looking at the investment horizon for each hobby isn’t such a bad idea. For example, I would love to get into Astrophotography, but it is a costly hobby, both in terms of money and lots of long, lonely nights waiting for the clouds to clear. I would love to do it someday, but now is not the best time for me.

Our purpose here is to escape the temporal traps and bring our awareness back to the present. Here is where life is, here is where all things that are going to happen are happening. How exciting! And one way to do that is to embrace a hobby that you already enjoy, or pick something up. It can be anything of course, but here’s a quick guide based on our purpose:

Pick a hobby that:

1. is physical, that lets you work with your hands and feet. Pottery comes to mind, so does running, dancing, gymnastics, rock climbing, and tennis.
2. has a short investment timeline, that is, where the results can be seen immediately or within a few days at most. The quicker you are able to reap the benefits, the more inclined you will be to stick to the hobby.
3. lets you network, make friends, meet new people. Being social in the real world is the greatest antidote to loneliness and has been shown to boost happiness

As we navigate our professional lives, it will be interesting to consider how different careers shape our relationship with time and satisfaction. Some jobs offer immediate gratification, while others demand patience and long-term vision. In writing this post, it has become clearer that the ideal lies not in choosing one extreme over the other, but in finding a balance that resonates with our individual needs and values.

When I feel imbalanced by the temporal vertigo, I close my eyes and visualize a vibrant dashboard. It’s filled with LED meters representing different aspects of my life—job, career, hobbies, and relationships. The taller and greener the meter, the better that area is faring; the shorter and redder, the worse. The key is to remain neutral: neither discouraged by the red meters nor overly elated by the green ones. Crucially, I strive not to let poor performance in one area spill over into others, as this can quickly spiral. Mindfulness practices (like meditation or journaling) can not only help us remain nonchalant, but also help in discovering our own unique rhythm in the ebb and flow of modern work life.

This balance between different aspects of our lives is not just about managing time, but about managing our energy and attention. By cultivating mindfulness and engaging in activities that ground us in the present, we can navigate the challenges of modern work life with greater ease and fulfillment. Ultimately, the goal is to create a harmonious blend of professional growth, personal satisfaction, and overall well-being.