Denoising my life
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Denoising my life: Part 1

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Back in 2021, I was Snap addict. And then, one day I decided to cut it - cold turkey. It was one of the best decisions of my life.

Now I know this does not seem like a significant decision in anyone's life if you look back, but it definitely was. See, Snap was very popular amongst my circle of friends and beyond. I was not only connected to my friends on campus, but friends back home. It was my only way to stay connected with their daily updates - and see what's happening in their life. Instagram was definitely a platform, but it wasn't something that used to be daily.

I had streaks with people who I talked everyday, once in a month, once in 6 months, and sometimes just acquaintances who somehow stayed in touch. The snap streaks might not be impressive (max of 753 at the end point, with an acquaintance mind you), but the sheer volume of people I should send my daily snaps was insane. At least 40-50 people got daily updates, and then close to 80 people got the event updates. It was a constant part of routine to send out daily snaps, and also snaps of any small/big events that I attended.

When I decided out of the blue one day that I was going to cut this out, and stop sending Snaps to everyone, I got an earful from my closest friends. The streaks that we developed before and during COVID were coming to abrupt stop, my girlfriend thought she got betrayed, and all kinds of questions on why the hell am I doing this.

I felt in the moment that it became a part of my identity, and a constant pressure in my head to remember to send out these things as part of my daily routine. Did it change a lot of things in my life when I cut it out? Not really. But it did took a lot of pressure off my head.

The point I'm trying to make is that I think I'm going to make a very similar decision with Music.

Setting up the Premise

I feel the premise is set up very nicely already. Music for me has become a part of life which follows me around everywhere. It would be a big thing to say that I'm addicted to music, but it is true. I have my music on me during these part of my life: shower, travel to office/anywhere, in office when I'm not in meetings, in gym, travel back from office, while sleeping to block off other noise (primarily snoring of my roommate). When I'm out on a walk, I need music. When I'm out hiking, I feel like it's better with constant music.

The fact that proves my points in a much more concrete way are my Spotify Wrapped for past 3-4 years. I have averaged around 33000 minutes per year of music. That's 23 days of music blasting only through my Spotify. I play some instrumental music over YT when I'm working, so that is being counted separately and pretty sure that number might be around 7000 minutes again. Why is this number is close to 15% of my waking hours in a year is a question that I sat down to answer.

The premise also pans out on the number of hours spent on reading or in silence. There is a constant stimulation from either through the visual medium (screen time through Insta/X, YouTube or office meetings), or through audio medium (through songs or podcasts.) This has led to a cut in my time to myself, like this one right now. I rarely pause and sit with my thoughts which are not work-related. Even with thoughts that are work-related, I constantly have a stimulus to take me away from thinking deeply. I could make the same case for reading time as well. Although in recent time, I HAVE increased a lot of short form reading in the sense of long(er) threads on X, blog posts, articles, and tutorials online. But the fact being that I'm not able to still make it through good one book in one month is something that is a big worry personally.

John Lennon Connection

John Lennon has no connection to this, except the song named Cold Turkey. Alright, there might a small connection. The song Cold Turkey, is from the album Plastic Ono's band shares soundscape with Brian Eno's Velvet Underground. I have always wanted to be a person with sheer willpower and laser-focused. As part of this effort, back in 12th grade, I used to listen to a collection of ambient sounds mixtape by Brian Eno. This was to drive my productivity higher. I don't think it helped a lot, since I constantly put it on, even in times when I was not focusing. After a certain point it did not help me at all.

Coming back, the question was whether I'm planning to go cold turkey on music? It seems very hard that I would be able to pull that off. Music has driven, as for others I'm guessing, a lot of emotions for me over the years. I am a person with a varied taste in music, where I span across genres, and years to find sounds that I like the most. Still I feel like my kind of music is something that is very upbeat, and motivating. I feel like a I find a lot of kick and energy from the music that I listen to. For reference here are my top songs for last 3 years from Spotify. Usually high up-beat, positive outlook kind of music, which instill a belief. While I have always had a love relationship with them, I believe I have developed a dependency on them as well. Which reminds me, most of them would go in the digital gallery section for me. Going cold turkey on music is not something that I am planning, because it is still a source of range of emotions for me that I can't let go.

Smoothing up the Noise

So what do I mean when I say denoising my life is majorly is for the times that I'm alone and performing other mundane activity. I feel like most of source of inspiration is during this time. The time when my brain is silent and spilling juices around. The time that I am able to mull over things that are originating in my mind as small thoughts. This involves letting my mind wander during the time of work, travel, shower and any other activities where the primary activity is not listening and enjoying the music. This will also, I believe, elevate the time when I'm actually listening to music. I would carve out time to listen to music, and bring back days that I mix it with any other things.

For work, since I am still not close to sitting down and focusing in directly, my replacement would be ONLY be a combination of brown noise and 40Hz frequency. There are couple of rules that I will follow with that:

  1. For all the time, if I'm not working, I will not listen to the combo. As soon as I'm focusing on something else, or picking up my phone, I would remove the headphones and pause the sounds. This is to train my brain to correlate this with focus time only.
  2. Over a period of time, I would like to use this as a gentle push towards my focus session. I don't want to replace one dependency with another. So as I get used to this, I will slowly try to fade out of it once I'm in that zone.
  3. I would also like to schedule sessions of Focus, where I put them on. Once out of these sessions, I would like to book some time to put them on again. This would also help me create boundaries between Flow mode and day-to-day tasks mode.

There are some links that I have always followed and which have worked for me from YT. Find them below here:

For everything else which includes travel, shower, walking and all the other mundane activities, I plan to spend the time in silence. Thinking through my own thought process, and disconnecting a bit. Observing a bit more, and pushing for being in the moment a little more. I'm sharing this as an experiment start point. There would definitely a follow up on this, which would discuss more about my findings and things that I did not anticipate.