A Box Theory of Life
Take a look around you. Take a look at the physical space you inhabit at this moment. Observe the shapes, the contours, and the curvature that this space uses to hold your body and stuff.
I’ll bet half my bar-mitzvah savings that you’re currently occupying a box.
A box, you say? How do you mean?
Well, take another look around at the corners of this space. Chances are, you’re in a room that is enclosed by 4 perfectly-proportioned right angles. Imagining all doors, windows and decorations are absent from this space… do you see the box coming to life?
If you are fortunate enough to be in a car, an office, or train, use slightly more imagination and realize that you are still, quite literally, in a human-container.
If your current physical space does not resemble a box in any way whatsoever, I applaud you. Now, notice the shape of the device that you are currently reading this on :)
An awareness of how much time of the day we spend occupying and utilizing boxes has led me to forming what I call the “Box Theory of Life.”
Now bear with me for a moment, and continue using your imagination to indulge my interpretation. The examples used here are metaphorical and figurative in nature, yet still hold literal denotations.
If we grant for a moment that houses are, for all intents and purposes, glorified boxes, we can then estimate that approximately a third of our lives are spent sleeping in said boxes.
Once you wake up and get ready, let’s assume that you drive to work (as 90 % of Americans do on a daily basis) in your 4-wheeled box until you get to work.
Ah, work. The wonderful place where we get paid in green rectangles to enter data into electronic boxes by punching small electronic squares. All the while occupying a more claustrophobic office-box than your home-box.
After a few hours of punching squares into boxes, you trot to the fridge and joyously grab your highly coveted sandwich from its storage box. Luckily, the shop you bought it from made this box look nice and polished.
Once your shift ends, you get back into your car-box to head back to home-box. All of a sudden.. gasp! Traffic appears! An overhead news helicopter takes pictures of the line of boxes slowly rolling down the road, not unlike a factory conveyor-belt.
You get home, wash yourself in your shower-cubicle, and sit down to watch Game of Thrones out of a slightly larger electronic box. Commercials are a drag, but luckily you have your handy electronic Personal Square Device to look at and read about Donald Trump’s most recent provocations. Sleep creeps over you, and you retire to your personal box-room to slumber…
While Box Theory of Life uses its fair amount of imagination, I believe the generalized principle of boxing up our lives can account for many of the afflictions and irregularities we experience in such abundance today.
Let’s begin the discussion with childhood, where our lifelong habits are most deeply ingrained.
Surely we all remember awkwardly kicking a ball around in phys. ed, trying not to embarrass ourselves in front of our high school crush. Gym class was no marathon, but it was better than nothing for getting outside during the day. It’s a shame that since the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act passed, 40 % of American elementary schools have eliminated recess in an attempt to improve academic scores, and only 34% of high school seniors take physical education classes. In fact, many high schools are now allowing their students to take PE classes online.
Participation in school-organized sports has also been declining steadily for years. And in a typical week, only 6% of children aged 9–13 play outside on their own. Overall, children are spending half as much time outdoors in 2016 as they did in 1995.
So where is all that extra time being spent? Boxes seem to be a good culprit. Today, the average American child watches 32 hours of television a week. If your middle-school math teacher got it right, that means that kids watch over 4.5 hours of TV every single day.
And that’s just television — what about the countless other hours kids spend on their gadgets? Before the invention of smartphones, cellular devices seemed extravagant, mysterious, and overall quite unnecessary for children. Today, over 50% of kids aged 6 and up have their own personal cellphone.
A recent study in Denmark compared two groups of children; one in a traditional kindergarten, and the other in a ‘nature kindergarten’, where children remained outside all day long throughout the school-year. Unsurprisingly, they found that the children in the nature group were more attentive, displayed greater emotional intelligence, were significantly more likely to create their own games, demonstrated better social and language skills, and were “magnificently more inventive.”
Without too much extrapolation, studies like this may lead us to conclude that spending more time outside facilitates the formation of imagination, innovation, and creativity. Considering our evolutionary past, it’s no doubt that inventiveness is the human brain’s default. However, by boxing ourselves up in classrooms, offices and cars all day, we are actually leashing our minds from this creative default state.
The Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle, Washington found that each hour of TV watched per day by preschoolers increases by 10% the likelihood that they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders.
One must wonder; is it completely coincidental that the prescription of stimulants (like Ritalin and Dexedrine) for attention deficit disorders has increased by 600% since 1995? What does it mean, that between 2000 and 2003, spending on ADHD for preschoolers increased by 369%? What does it mean that these kids are “deficient in attention”? When you box up a child that’s programmed to run, learn, think and explore, we shan’t be surprised that peculiar consequences will follow.
While children are indeed notorious for their overwhelming use of technology, American adults are hardly any better. In 2015, Nielsen reported that the average American adult spends 11 hours per day on electronic devices.
Now, what I’m not saying is that depression, anxiety and ADHD are all hocus-pocus. I’ve worked with individuals with mental illness, and can attest that disorders of the mind and brain can be as real as any physical injury. But play a thought experiment with me, and consider the last time you went to the zoo. Did those animals seem happy? Did you hear the vitality in their calls? Did you see the hop to their step, the exuberance in their faces, the life in their eyes? When I see animals in zoo enclosures, I see a dragging, depressed, exasperated look of loss in their eyes. Animals don’t belong in cages, and neither do humans.
My intention in writing this piece is not to be cynical. It’s not to disparage our government, to look down upon modern parenting styles, or wag a finger at the public education system. What I am not doing is reducing quality of life to a simple formula of how much time is spent inside versus outside. And most of all, what I am not doing is shaming people who use electronics and spend time in houses. After all, I’m writing this on my computer, and have full plans to sleep in my bed tonight. My intention is simply to point out an interesting paradox of life; that getting “off the grid” is the best way to re-charge.
In the summer of 2016, I worked as an outdoor educator in Colorado for a company called Avid4Adventure. My co-workers at Avid were some of the most amazing and inspiring people I’ve ever had the pleasure of learning from. Each individual had their own passion for the outdoors, their own story of natural pursuit. I’ve worked a healthy handful of jobs since folding clothes at Hollister at 14 years old, and can confidently say that at no point in my life have I worked with a group of people who displayed so much exuberance, so much vivacity, and so much raw energy for life. While we may have had one of the most physically exhausting jobs in the world, you could always count on going hiking, biking, climbing, camping, and every sort of outdoor adventuring with your co-workers after work. I attribute this extreme form of existence to the fact that these individuals lived truly and completely environmentally connected. Each day was an opportunity for a new Earthly adventure, and being constantly surrounded by a community that was so alive was exceptionally motivating in proliferating my own zest for life.
While there are boundless factors that go into both physical and mental wellness, the incidence of exposure to nature cannot be overlooked. Howard Frumkin from the University of Washington is a leading researcher on the importance of nature to our physical health. His research has shown that hospital patients go home significantly sooner when facing a window with a view of trees, rather than a view of a parking lot, and that Michigan prison inmates whose cells faced a prison courtyard had 24% more illnesses than those whose cells had a view of farmland (controlling for all other variables). Japanese researchers have also undertaken a serious investigation into an area of study they call “shinrin-yoku,” literally translated, “forest bathing,” with provocative results. The scientific community doesn’t like to use the word “prove” when forming arguments, yet it is almost indisputable that the effects on the mind of nature — of getting out of the box, so to speak, are tremendously positive.
It seems that as a society, we are suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder, a term coined by naturalist Richard Louv. When we go outside, we don’t just breathe in the fresh air. We connect to the land, the animals, and the food — all major points of disconnection in our cultural paradigm today. But most of all, we re-connect with perhaps the most important disconnection — a disconnection from ourselves. Rather than immediately reaching for a coffee, or your favorite TV show, or any other form of synthetic mood-enhancers, try to look up. Try to imagine the shapes in the clouds, like you once did as a kid. Take a deep breath, smile, and realize that balance can be found just outside the box.
Nate Macanian is a mindfulness educator from New York. He currently lives and facilitates wellness retreats in Boulder, Colorado.
Additional Reading:
3 All-Natural, Science-Backed Ways to Sleep Better
Last Child in the Woods by Richard Louv
