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How to champion the Box of Daily Life.

When we feel the automation of life, we often look to travel as the key to happiness. Here’s a reminder of why it’s not.

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Religion & Spirituality

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Mindfulness

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Travel

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Meditation

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Science & Nature

At this very moment, you may be here:

But most likely, you’re probably here:

It’s just another day… and you’re just doing what you need to do.

You’re getting things done, and the day moves forward in this continuous sequence of checklists, actions, and respites.

But at various moments of your routine, you pause and take a good look at your surroundings.

The scenes of your everyday life. The blur of this all-too-familiar film.

And you can’t help but to wonder…

If there is more to it all.

For some reason — this country, this city, this neighborhood, this particular street — is the place you are living a majority of your life in.

And it is this thought that allows a daydream to seep in.

You start thinking of all the other places you could be in this world.

Or more accurately, all the places you’d rather  be in.

Somewhere more exciting. Somewhere new. Somewhere that can provide experiences that are foreign to you.

You dream of going to the beautiful beaches of Thailand:

Or to Paris, where you can eat French food, enjoy delicious wine, and walk around the illuminated streets that you’ve heard so much about:

Or to Peru, where you can finally go to Machu Picchu and see the architectural wonder that an inexplicably high percentage of your friends have in their Facebook profile pictures:

Or to Alaska, where you can witness the glory of the aurora borealis in all its splendor:

The world is your playground, and you are certain that these unexplored areas will become sources of adventure, wonderment, and ultimately, happiness.

Travel is the answer much of us look to when we feel the automation of life. The routine of waking up, getting ready, going to work, eating the same lunch, sitting in meetings, getting off work, going home, eating dinner, relaxing, going to sleep, and then doing it all over again can feel like a never-ending road that is housed within the confines of a mundane box.

This is The Box of Daily Experience , and it is the space we occupy on any given day of the week/month/year in which we live our lives. It is what we consider “normal” in the context of an everyday experience, and is the operating system we run ourselves on when we require a sequence of events to default to.

The boundaries of our box define our present-day situation, so when we dreamingly gaze toward the prospects of an exciting future, we look outside of it to experience emotions like wonderment, amazement, and inspiration. Our current box is okay and livable, but the world outside of its boundaries is where our hope really resides.

Since much of what we desire lives on the outside (i.e. in the future), we make it the mission of our Box of Daily Experience to make contact with the outer world as much as possible. This touch represents the achievement of our goals and validates our aspirations. We hope that this brief contact will change the architecture of our box, but ultimately, the result is fleeting.

For example, let’s say that a friend introduces you to the existence of an awesome new car. You are immediately intrigued by it, and as you read review after review of its astonishing performance, the car quickly becomes an object of intense excitement and desire for you.

The outer world has given you a tangible goal to work towards, and your box will do whatever it can to give you the resources you need to reach it.

So you churn and churn through the cycle of the daily experience.

Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years.

And one day, your hard work pays off. You receive that fat promotion you’ve been working towards, and now you can finally afford that beautiful car!

Excitement froths at the brim of your mind as you purchase it and drive it off the lot. This is what you’ve been working so hard for! Now that you have this car, the structure of your box has fundamentally changed, and your box as you know it will no longer be the same!

You start driving it to and from work, to and from your hang out sessions with friends, to and from everywhere.

While you’re still happy to have the new car, you notice that your excitement about owning it just isn’t as high as that day you drove it off the lot.

Then some months pass, with fewer and fewer people commenting on the novelty of your car.

And even more time passes. You get into your car, drive it to and from work, get stuck in traffic, park it in the same old spot, etc.

Your car is starting to look a little dirty, but you don’t care about washing it too much anymore because your car is just… a car now.

It’s been years since you’ve purchased it, and now it’s simply a vehicle that takes you from Point A to Point B with unremarkable regularity.

And then one day, your box is simply The Box of Daily Experience again, with the same mundane texture and familiar color it possessed in the past.

The interesting thing is that you can replace the object of desire (car) with any other noun (a new house, a new job, a new relationship, etc.), and the same pattern will emerge. Shifting and swapping the contents of your box may briefly alter the shape of it in the form of excitement, but in the end, these things will become just another part of <a href="https://moretothat.com/the-garden-you-can-touch/">normal life </a>.

So if moving around the contents of the box doesn’t work, you look to the supposed root of the problem:

You decide that the box known as your environment needs to be left behind because it is the source of perpetual discontentment to begin with. You need to rip open the box and jettison yourself into an unfamiliar territory that holds the key to true novelty and sustained wonderment.

And you determine that the best way to do this is through the avenue of travel.

So you save up some money, take some time off work, pack up your bags, and head off to a country you’ve never been to. You can now revel in the beauty of the unfamiliar and immerse yourself in a boundless expanse of culture, cuisine, and life that your box has never known.

The drawback to this is that for most of us, traveling happens in the form of vacations. A vacation is designed to be an exciting respite we take to keep us incentivized to return back to The Box of Daily Experience upon its conclusion. In a way, it’s absurdly paradoxical — churning the gears of the box is what provides us with the fiscal resources to break out of it, but the wonderful memories of our vacations are what brings us squarely back to the box once again.

As a result, if you’re traveling as a form of vacation, you know you will be back in your box very, very shortly. This tends to provoke the behavior of “experience maximization,” in which you’re running around in a flurry of fatiguing excitement to experience every moment possible in your travels.

And inevitably, you’re back in the box, counting down the days in which you can do it again.

It’s times like these when you begin to dream of getting out of The Box of Daily Experience for good. You realize that a vacation only serves as a dopamine hit of cultural experience, as the built-in time constraints don’t allow you to truly understand the tapestry of a foreign place.

And one day, you firmly decide that the answer does not reside in the box you live in now.

It’s elsewhere, in a faraway place that you once visited and enjoyed.

But this time, you’ll be gone for a really, really long time.

Surely, what you’re looking for must be there. Not here.

Once you arrive in your new environment, the excitement is palpable. Not only have you have immersed yourself in a completely new part of the world, but you also have the time to explore every crevice of it.

You are introduced to some new friends that live in this foreign land, and you guys make your way downtown to check out all that awesome food you’ve heard about.

Next thing you know, you have a new crew of people to hang out with! They are fun, entertaining, and exciting, which were some elements that were missing from the people back home. These new folks have a deep understanding of a culture you’re eager to learn more about, so every hang out session with them is an opportunity to do things you’ve never done before.

You can also see things you’ve never seen before too, and it’s fantastic.

If someone asks you how life is going, you can emphatically say that it’s simply amazing .

But remember, since you are going to be staying here for a while, having fun with interesting people and seeing new sights are not reliable roadmaps for financial sustainability. And plus, all of your friends are busy in the daytime with work, and being a lone wanderer in the early afternoon is only fun for so long.

So yup, it’s time to get yourself a job.

The nature of the work is pretty similar to what you were doing in the past — it’s not ideal, but it supports your dream of traveling and breaking out of the old box, so it’s good enough.

All right. Everything is set. You now have a resource-producing engine that can power your stay in your new home, and you can continue having great experiences in this land as time progresses.

But here’s the thing about time. No matter where you are, it moves in one direction.

And this linear movement of time is nature’s way of testing what we have labeled as meaningful. Only time can reveal whether a certain pursuit is driven by fleeting novelty, or if it is motivated by a strong sense of enduring purpose.

And when it comes to travel, the test of time reveals a pursuit driven by novelty very, very  quickly.

As the days in this foreign country turn into weeks, the experiences begin to occur with a familiar sense of regularity.

The food that you excitedly ate when you first arrived has now become your weekday dinner spot:

The friends that showed you all those cool cultural things when you first arrived are now people you see every week. On top of that, you often hang out at the same places all the time as well:

The sights you initially paid to go see simply become buildings you pass by on the way to work:

Travel Is No Cure for the Mind - More To That

How to champion the Box of Daily Life.

Abhinandan Ghosh's ideas are part of this journey:

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