We've forgotten how to lime

The prospect of going to an exercise class has become one of the things that I look forward to most every day. 50 minutes just for me. Locked in. A break for my active mind. The rest of the world on pause for a moment. Familiar faces I see every week - same time, same room, same vibe. It's a ritual. So it's no wonder that a recent conversation I had with my boxing group has stayed with me. We were recalling a guy who used to come to our class. He would turn up, bounce around, ignore the instructor, do his own thing, and all with his airpods on. It was very bizarre. For us, the joy of the class is being there with everyone, vibing to the music as you struggle through together. Instead, this guy turned up and listened to audiobooks throughout the entire class! From his perspective, he was being productive. He was maximising every moment for "continuous learning". It felt straight out of the Steven Bartlett playbook. Optimise. The rest of us were there for the shared experience with a community, but that had completely passed him by. So, was it worth it for him? Did he really learn anything from that audiobook while he boxed, or did he just optimise himself out of enjoying either activity?

I've been thinking a lot about our modern-day obsession with optimisation and efficiency, and its unintended consequences. The integration of technology into every part of our lives has meant that we have made everything inherently more efficient. With so much available at our fingertips, we feel like we constantly have to be doing something. Our minds are always occupied. If we feel a moment of boredom, we reach for our phones, read an email, scroll, or do some admin. How many people these days look up on the tube and let themselves catch eye contact with a stranger, share a smile, and have a small moment of connection with someone they'll probably never see again? Gone are the days we just let ourselves stare out of the window and allow our minds to drift. It isn't a good use of our time - we're missing an opportunity to be productive. Maybe. But are we missing something even more important? The disappearance of blank space is eroding our ability to reflect deeply, observe the small details in life, and be creative. We have become so obsessed with making use of our time that we're no longer making the most out of life. We are losing the opportunity to engage with the world around us, including other people. Boredom isn't necessarily something we should seek out. But maybe we should stop treating it as something that needs to be immediately resolved.

Then, we have people who have gone the other way in the endless search of being present. So much so that we are drowning in the performativeness of it. The idea that being present is like the final level on a video game that we're all trying to reach. If we can squeeze one more inch out of being present, we'll find some magical way of being that will bring enlightened happiness. Really? Is this where we are now? Are we really optimising being present? So much so that we're thinking more about how to be present rather than actually living it. It's absurd that our lives have become so packed that people are actually having to schedule "me time" slots to ensure that they set aside time to be present. This ambition to be as efficient as possible has effectively turned being present into just another thing to be successful at, rather than something that we are actually living and experiencing.

Our experience of life has evolved so much over the last two decades. You really don't need to speak to people anymore. You don't need to go to a shop to pick things up. You don't need to talk to someone to sort out your water bill. We have made life so convenient by reducing the daily friction we used to face. But are we paying enough attention to what our frictionless society is costing us? We've reached a point where we believe that we don't really need each other. We have apps for everything. Life has become transactional and the need for community has fallen away. Independence is the goal.  But, are we missing the point? We've removed so many opportunities for interaction that we've weakened the social fabric around us. We've come to see friction as something to eliminate, rather than recognising that some of it is precisely what brings us together.

I've been listening to a lot of discussions recently about how inconveniencing people is actually a form of intimacy. We are so focused on sparing people from being a burden that we're missing the point that to be a burden is to build intimacy. Connection is built in shared struggle. Leaning on people is how relationships are built. But, in our frictionless and optimised world, we are forgetting that. We think we don't need each other. We're focused on preserving individual happiness over the shared struggle as a community. And that loss of community has a real consequence. I remember one afternoon, when we were kids, my parents left us at our neighbours' house because they had to run errands. I spent the afternoon talking to my neighbour and she gave me a small little stone that I fell in love with and cherished for years - only recently losing it on a flight almost 30 years later (devastating). That was a connection, a lasting memory, built because of a time when community was something we still valued. Where my parents knew that there were people around they could lean on for support. But now, we live in a world where the pursuit of ultra independence is increasing our isolation. We don't feel like we can lean on each other anymore.

Obviously we shouldn't romanticise community. It has its challenges too. It isn't always comfortable. It involves disagreement, compromise, frustration and sometimes conflict. But that's part of what makes it meaningful. Community needs productive disagreement to withstand time and stay strong. We have to learn to navigate differences, accommodate each other and repair relationships when things go wrong. It's easier to walk away than to have conflict, but persisting through is how we build something worth holding onto. I saw this video recently which talked about how trees grow in both directions - before the tree can grow upwards into light, the seed has to grow downwards into darkness, resistance, and pressure. To reach the light, we have to be prepared to do the hard work in the darkness. The absence of conflict isn't necessarily a sign of healthy relationships. Learning to navigate it, rather than avoiding it, is what allows us to build stronger communities and live alongside people who aren't exactly like us.

So if community is what we need, how do we get back there? We need an alternative philosophy. I think we all need to learn to lime more! A friend of mine introduced me to the concept of liming years ago. It's a Trinidadian concept where you get together to do nothing - no reason, no purpose, no activity. It's the art of doing nothing together. Sometimes you might talk. Sometimes you might sit in silence. Sometimes something happens. Sometimes nothing happens. You're just liming. The philosophy centres on slow living and enjoying community rather than watching the clock. The objective is just to sit with each other and enjoy being in the other person's presence with no agenda. It's not about optimising being present. It's about living in the moment. In a world where we have become so obsessed with efficiency, maybe the solution is to make more space for time where the whole point is to be inefficient!

Ultimately, we have become accustomed to eliminating boredom by being as productive as possible, but the solution to boredom isn't about filling the gaps in our time. It's about being intentional about what we're doing and who we're doing it with. And it feels like we have become intentional about the wrong things in life. We have been optimising the individual experience rather than cultivating the collective one. Rather than pursuing efficiency to build a happy life, maybe we should focus on participation. Let's allow ourselves to be interrupted, inconvenienced, bored, challenged, and dependent on other people. I think that's how we can actually build a fulfilling and happy life. I'm definitely going to be shifting my intentions from now on. So... who's in to lime with me?