The Anechoic Hell Chamber™
What in the world is The Anechoic Hell Chamber?
I'll answer this with an excerpt from the Think Like a Director™ Field Manual.A few years back, I had a podcast called Five Whole Minutes. It was based on the idea of taking literally five entire minutes of silence.I would give a little prompt to consider and then leave the listener with space to think, with five one-minute periods of literally dead silence. I intentionally created what radio stations call “dead air,” which they consider to be the fastest way to get someone to change the channel. My marketing instincts are admittedly nonexistent.I had about ten episodes or so. The first few did OK with engagement, but then it trailed off. I couldn’t figure out why, until I was doing some research and came across something called an anechoic chamber.If you aren’t familiar with the term, an anechoic chamber is about as close as you can get to near total silence. It’s a special room that uses sound absorbing panels and engineered construction to block out and absorb sound. There’s one called Orfield Labs in Minneapolis that claims to be the quietest place on earth.It’s said that you can’t be in there for more than forty-five minutes without driving yourself nuts. This is because the only sound you hear in there is… you. And apparently, you become disoriented when there is nothing but yourself to listen to.I can’t claim firsthand knowledge of this but I do have tinnitus, and I imagine it follows the same principle. My tinnitus sounds like a high pitched ringing in my ears (the left one especially) and the quieter my surroundings get, the louder the ringing in my ears becomes.There have been a few nights when I have been nearly driven to madness because of this. I always thought those late night TV commercials trying to pitch tinnitus remedies were BS until it happened to me. Once it did, I remember thinking I would pay anything to get rid of it.That is, until I looked into it and they wanted six thousand dollars for special hearing aids to fix it. I didn’t have six thousand dollars so I convinced myself I could put up with the maddening insanity of “sitting quietly in a room alone” (to paraphrase Pascal).Great, now what? Well, I did learn something at the hearing aid place. They gave me a bunch of hearing tests and found out exactly what frequencies I struggled to hear the most. Then they tuned the hearing aids to amplify only the missing frequencies. Once I put those hearing aids on, the ringing disappeared instantaneously. It was magical.The doctor told me it was because my brain knew those frequencies were missing so it tried to fill them in with that infuriating ringtone called tinnitus. So my brain basically yearned to hear what it was designed to hear. It wanted to be tuned into the right things and it knew it was missing out.Now I can empathize with the Anechoic Chamber Madness Theory. I am staying as far away from total silence as I can get. It will take what I know I am missing and amplify it louder and LOuder and LOUDer and LOUDER until I just can’t take it anymore. I imagine this is what hell is like. And I suspect Pascal knew it too. I wonder if he had tinnitus.This is why you hate yourself for getting drawn back into the trap that social media created for you. It’s not because it’s an echo chamber. It’s because it's an anechoic chamber. The algorithms are not just holding a mirror up to you, oh no. That’s not diabolical enough. They are doing something far worse. They are forcing you to listen to your own heartbeat.Your own heartbeat isn't a bad thing. But if it’s isolated and set on repeat and amplified, it’s your Own Personal Algorithmic Anechoic Hell Chamber. Social media has figured out a way to scale Hell and make it seem unique to you. See? Diabolical.But it didn’t start out that way. Almost all social media platforms started with your actual friends, didn’t they? You took what was fantastic in real life – which is community and friendship and connection. That’s the frequency your soul is yearning to be receptive to hearing. And it worked, because that stuff was actually there.But those things are free and can’t be monetized. So the algorithm tries to mimic that frequency. But it can’t. In the process of mimicking it, the true community and friendship and connections drop out and are replaced with an infuriating ringing sound that keeps you awake and drives you to madness. Your personalized algorithm pushes you further and further into anechoic isolation.
And it doesn't stop with Social Media.
It is being weaponized by the Productivity Industry.The way the Productivity Industry forces you into Hell is through the Mathematical Principle of Multiplication and the Mental Gymnastics of Complexity. But these things don’t look like Demons with Pitchforks, because the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, isn’t it? They look like Angels with Little Timers Shaped Like Tomatoes and Ten Dollar Monthly Subscriptions.Let’s take a look at the bill of goods here. Multiplication Of Complexity is a lethal weapon in the hands of the Productivity Industry. Because it feels really, really important. Hey man, I’ve got so much STUFF to DO. It keeps multiplying every minute. And not only that, it’s VERY COMPLICATED. There are VERY FEW people in the ENTIRE WORLD that can do what I do and actually pull it off. They would be screwed if I wasn’t here to handle all of these details.See this Gantt Chart? It has five hundred dependencies. If one of them falls out the other four hundred and ninety nine things fall with it. That would be terrible. Let me make sure they all reflect the ACTUAL REALITY of what we all collectively agree could POSSIBLY HAPPEN in the FUTURE. And each dependency is a task with multiple sub tasks. So let’s make sure we COLOR CODE things for HIGH VISIBILITY and OPTIMIZE FOR EFFICIENCY. Which looks like a bunch more meetings.And so the Gantt Chart starts to take shape. And the shape it takes starts to look an awful lot like a pitchfork. And the pitchfork is pointed at your chest. And the person holding the pitchfork is a Demon demanding things from you. First of all, your Time. Then, your Mental Clarity. Then your Children. Plus fifteen dollars per month for the Individual Plan and only Five Dollars More Per Month for Each Additional Seat. Please Contact Us for Enterprise Level Pricing.Look, your job is probably really important and you are probably really good at what you do. And you probably feel Valuable and Important. Which is a big problem. Or you feel Not Valuable and Largely Unimportant. Which is the same problem, just flipped around.The problem with both of those problems is they indicate that you get your value from the work you do. OK, so what? Well, I’ll tell you what. If that’s true, then that means you have to create more and more value (or at least appear to), in order to have more and more value.So task lists and Gantt charts and emails and endless meetings and telling everyone how Busy You Are Lately and I Had To Miss Another Soccer Game Because the TPS Reports Had to Get Done By Yesterday and I Had To Make Sure Bill Lumbergh Had the Correct Cover Sheet become the measure of your worth. But it's a zero-sum game. It never, ever works.And you become focused on yourself as the answer to your own problems. And The Productivity Industry gives you beautiful tools to do just that. Which makes you feel awesome. You start to think you’re awesome. You Finally Have the Solution This Time. You can hear your own heartbeat again, which is great, until it is isolated, and set on repeat, and amplified and multiplied until you end up in the Anechoic Hell Chamber. Again. Dammit.Look, I love a good Gantt chart as much as the next guy. But I have learned some things over the years and when it comes to selling your soul to the Devil of Productivity, there is only one way to avoid a blood sacrifice. And it’s called Subtraction.Subtraction doesn’t help your ego. It makes you feel Less Valuable and Important than before. This is because you have been trained that your value is the thing you are solving for. It’s like some sort of math equation. Solve for x, where x represents your value. If Bill needs 500 TPS Reports and Sally has 192 Tasks on her To-Do List, how do you measure up?But what if you changed the equation? What if you’re not trying to solve for your value anymore? What if you solve for x, where x represents your freedom? If I have 500 TPS Reports due and 192 minutes to get them done, what do I need to focus on to make that happen? How do I Direct my attention instead of trying to Manage my way out of Productivity Hell?And this, my friend, is where you start to Think Like a Director.