Is the company’s intense approach to both work and play the answer to perennial distraction?
I googled Google before I visited Google, just to know what to expect. Also because I like googling things. I regularly google reviews of shows I like, pictures of old celebrities when they were young, life stories of dead authors, and articles about smart animals (octopuses are so smart that they’re given puzzles so they won’t get bored in captivity). As much time as I fritter away googling, I fritter even more away checking Gmail, even though I don’t like reading or responding to e-mail. It’s a weird thing everyone I know does — complain about e-mail and check it all the time. Gmail has only been around since 2004, as I learned from googling Google, and it’s remarkable how much it’s changed life since then. I read that the irregularity with which e-mail arrives is the pattern most likely to provoke addiction, which led me to a Thoreau quote: “In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.” Thoreau would have hated Gmail, but then he hated a lot of things. I think he would have had a harder time hating YouTube, another Google product, if only because the site has so many nature videos.
With all the sidetracks, diversions, and wiki wormholes, I spent more time googling Google than I planned to spend at Google proper. I was just going there to meet my friend Walker for lunch. He works there, but I don’t know exactly what he does. When we talk about Google we talk only about the unlimited food, the gym, the free gadgets, and the game room.
“Do you want a coffee?” he asked when I arrived, entering through a pristine lobby with a big sign that read: “We’re undergoing renovations, please excuse the mess.”
“Aren’t we going to lunch?”
“We are, I just meant for on the way,” he answered. “I have to stop at my desk and there’s a kitchen right there. You can make yourself a latte.”
You can make yourself a latte every three hundred feet in Google. You can also make yourself a cocktail and a bowl of theater-quality popcorn, a snack that pairs nicely with a Netflix session in one of the nap pods. More than a couple of people were doing this at 12:30 on a Thursday afternoon. Never have I wanted to work at a tech company so badly.
“Yeah, it’s great,” agreed Walker. “But,” he quickly demurred, “they’d probably pay us more if they didn’t give us all this stuff. So, there’s no free lunch, right?”
The saying lost some of its poignancy because I was about to eat a really incredible free lunch. The dessert bar was so fantastic that I went back twice. The only jarring note was a warning on a pan of strawberry-walnut pudding: “contains: beef and pork.” “From the gelatin,” explained a Google employee next to me, a short guy with dreadlocks wearing a T- shirt with a line of code printed on it, as if someone had told him to dress up like a Google employee.
The whole office was like that, so exactly what I expected that it felt staged. Everyone was young, and everyone was either racing around or aggressively relaxing. One room had a wall of drawers full of different-colored Legos facing another wall lined with Lego structures — houses, dinosaurs, double helixes — that employees had built. Another room was designed to look like an old-timey train station, with subway car conference rooms. There were massage chairs, pinball machines, and pool tables. People zipped past us on scooters or stood rapt behind standing desks, brows furrowed in enviable concentration. The only thing missing was a Ping-Pong table. “Too Facebook,” said Walker, “but we do have an amazing video game collection.”
“Hmm?” I had lost track of what he was saying as I stared at a woman lying back in one of a row of massage chairs, laughing out loud at a show on her phone. She was about my age, and I could picture myself in her place, my restless mind at peace, recharging for another bout of focused work. This version of me wouldn’t work herself into an unrecognizable state, googling like a child on methamphetamines. She didn’t need to google; she was Google. I choked on something, either a laugh or a sob. To clear my throat, I took another sip of Google latte, my second coffee in two hours. It was delicious.
Suffice it to say, things hadn’t been going so well. It was the middle of the semester, I had multiple research clients, and work was piling up, my weekdays slowly blending with my weekends in one long, tepid slog; my only breaks not proper breaks at all, but frequent and unnecessary visits to Google or the New York Times webpage or my e-mail inbox, anything allowed by my productivity software (which blocks things like Netflix and Instagram with the passive-aggressive question “Shouldn’t you be working?”). Reading the news and doing the Times mini crossword had the additional advantage of allowing me to half believe that I was broadening my perspective and exercising my mind instead of procrastinating, even though procrastinating was exactly what I was doing. Restlessness was causing me to waste time, even as it increased my anxiousness over the scarcity of time. It had gotten so bad that I’d actually visited a psychiatrist to see if I could get ADD medication, but after a consultation and a test he advised against it. “I don’t recommend it for people with a history of anxiety,” he explained. “Anyway, you don’t need it. Your test scores were excellent.” But he couldn’t tell me why my perfect focus on the ADD test didn’t translate to perfect focus at work. I can’t even pass an ADD test, I thought; I’m failing at everything.
It didn’t make sense — I feel lucky to have two great jobs, but still I’m restless and distracted. At least I’m not alone: a Times op-ed about this exact problem was side-barred with a long list of comments along the lines of “Clicking on ‘Addicted to Distraction’ as I try anything to avoid writing my paper . . .” and “As I was reading this very excellent article, I stopped at least half a dozen times to check my email.” I read all the comments, as I increasingly did for most articles. I hadn’t seen a movie or read a book in what felt like ages, but I somehow found the time to read hundreds of Internet comments written by strangers for “research.” Mine was the strange half-life of the fad dieter, gorging on an entire loaf of tasteless gluten-free bread and congratulating myself on my virtuous abstinence.
But what could I do? I’d already read more than enough articles about digital detoxing. It’s one of our perennial topics now, like parenting and healthy eating — just one more thing to collectively worry about. Baratunde Thurston wrote one of the earlier pieces on the subject, a 2013 cover story for Fast Company, and I called him up to ask his advice. Baratunde has been giving me advice since I first met him, back at The Onion in 2009, where he was director of digital and I was an editorial intern and he sat down with me to tell me everything I needed to know to be a freelance social media manager, which was how I paid my rent for three months between jobs.
Social media is his forte; it’s where he works and plays and spends so much time that he once had to quit the Internet just to get his life back, which is what he wrote about in the Fast Company cover story. “But I couldn’t keep that going forever and function in the world,” he told me. “Now I end up doing most of my creative work on the train. It’s the only place where I don’t have cell service.”
Digital detoxing just didn’t seem to get to the root of the problem. It was more complicated than that. Well before the coining of the term “digital detoxing” or the creation of the Internet as we know it, back in the eighties, the social critic Neil Postman warned that television had “made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.” If that sounds overdramatic, just chew on this sampling of news stories from 2015: President Obama urged religious leaders to write more entertaining sermons in order to compete with terrorist recruitment videos, the news anchor Brian Williams admitted that he out-and-out made things up in order to make his war stories more compelling, and MIT designed an algorithm to predict whether people will find a given photo interesting or boring. They’re making it into an app to help us all be more fascinating for one another.
No wonder I’m so distracted. No wonder we all are.
The problem isn’t technology per se, but the expectations it has engendered: a steady stream of entertainment and stimulation. Or, as Bertrand Russell — who lived through the invention of electric lights, radio, and television — put it: “We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man.”
The Google office, crammed as it was with games and toys and dessert bars for grown-ups, was an unlikely alternative. On the surface it seemed like just another part of the problem, and I knew, practically speaking, that Walker was right — there is no such thing as a free lunch, and even companies with game rooms and massage chairs don’t always promote the perfect balance between work and leisure; odds were, at least some of those Google employees who appeared to be hard at work were actually looking at Facebook or watching Beyoncé videos. But I liked that there was an ideal, even if it didn’t always pan out: the employees were expected to work hard at their standing desks, then relax hard, repairing to a game pod or massage chair — never fracturing their time and thus achieving Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow in both activities. There was something attractive and old-fashioned about this, reminiscent of A. J. Liebling, the mid-twentieth-century New Yorker writer, who apparently wrote so physically that he’d sweat through his shirt, occasionally laughing out loud at his own prose. Afterward, he’d go out for an outrageous meal, consuming at least two bottles of wine and several whole birds. I prefer movies to meat, but some combination of Google and Liebling would really be proper living. It was worth a try, anyway.
Excerpted from YAWN: Adventures in Boredom by Mary Mann. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2017 by Mary Mann. All rights reserved.
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