A pilgrimage needs boundaries, and I defined mine before I took my first step. Rule One was simple and straightforward, I had to be alone. I walked by myself and avoided contact with family or friends so that I could evolve my ideas without the influence of others. For safety reasons, I sent daily text messages to let people know where I was and that I was ok, but that was all I allowed myself.
Rule One did not mean I couldn’t converse with people I met along the way. However, speaking to strangers reminded me of how lonely I was and was left feeling isolated. At other times I actually enjoyed the solitude and through this experience became quite aware of the differences between aloneness, solitude, and isolation – an important trilogy shaping work environments.
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The ability to work anywhere, anytime has led to the development of organisational structures with the potential to inflict Rule One in a distributed workforce. But working alone doesn’t necessarily end in feelings of isolation, just as working with others doesn’t eliminate them – an employee working amongst others can still feel isolated if they don’t feel part of the group.
When isolation does hit, it can lead to depression, stress, lack of motivation and burnout [18]. The impact of isolation on the reduction in lifespan has been equated to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day [19], a contentious but illustrative equivalence.
Let’s return to the tragic incident at the remote station in Antarctica. It wasn’t the spoiler, but cabin fever, the term used to describe irritability due to prolonged isolation, that was later pinpointed as the likely underlying factor that led to the stabbing. The negative effects of isolation can revoke any benefits associated with solitude. The key thus lies in finding the sweet spot of aloneness, not only for our mental health, but also for the health of the idea we seek to incubate through this process.
As a counterbalance to the premise that sent me on my pilgrimage, it has been found that the best outcomes can be achieved by balancing the right amount of one’s own ideas with those of others. By analysing over 10 million financial transactions, a team of researchers showed that investors who were in that sweet spot of their own and others’ ideas outperformed those in the echo chamber who copied each other’s ideas, as well as those who followed only their own ideas [20].
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We can summarise the implications of Rule One in the following signpost:
My second, and last rule, was to avoid distraction. No music or podcasts, no books or anything that might help to pass the time. This rule helped to ensure the pilgrimage remained focussed and not a holiday, but its side effect became obvious on day three when the novelty had already worn off and I got bored.
Really, really, really bored.
At one point, I couldn’t think about anything else other than how bored I was. My boredom was so distracting, it got in the way of the rule’s purpose of forcing me to focus. At that point, I could have been bingeing on a TV series or doom-scrolling on my phone – at least then I would be entertained.
Surprisingly, Rule Two demanded greater effort to follow than Rule One. Well, surprising to me, but not to researchers studying boredom who found that “many [of the participants] preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts” [21]. Thankfully, I came out the other side without resorting to electric shocks and when I did, I was able to appreciate boredom. Once transcended, I found boredom beautiful and a useful thinking tool.
Our next signpost:
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