Depth year
The grass isn’t greener on the other side. It’s greener where you water it.
Go Deeper, Not Wider
The guiding philosophy is “Go deeper, not wider.”
After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need.
No new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started.
You improve skills rather than learning new ones. You consume media you’ve already stockpiled instead of acquiring more.
You read your unread books, or even reread your favorites.
Drill down for value and enrichment instead of fanning out. You turn to the wealth of options already in your house, literally and figuratively. We could call it a “Depth Year” or a “Year of Deepening” or something.
In the consumer age, where it’s so easy to pick up and abandon new pursuits, people usually get sick of being half-assed about things.
If we practice this, we learn not to be so flippant with our aspirations.
By taking a whole year to go deeper instead of wider, you end up with a rich but carefully curated collection of personal interests, rather than the hoard of mostly-dormant infatuations that happens so easily in post-industrial society.
A big part of the maturing process would be learning to live without regular doses of the little high we get when we start something new. If we indulge in it too often, we can develop a sort of “sweet tooth” for the feeling of newness itself. When newness is always available, it’s easier to seek more of it than to actually engage with a tricky chord change, the dull sections in Les Miserables, or the dozens of ugly roses you need to paint before you get your first good one.
The consumer economy nurtures this sweet tooth. There’s just so much money to be made in selling people new paths—new equipment, new books, new possibilities. The last thing marketers want is for people to get their excitement and fulfillment from what they already have access to. They would hate for you to discover the incredible wealth remaining in what you already own.
Among many other possessions, I have a set of watercolors, a guitar and amp, and a bunch of “Learn French” books. If I were stuck in a prison cell with these items I would almost inevitably become the accomplished guitarist, painter and polyglot I wanted to be when I purchased each of those things. But new options seem to enter my life all the time, and so I drift from old ones.
It’s wonderful to have the freedom to continually widen our interests. But like many luxuries, it has an insidious downside. Ever-branching possibilities make it harder for us to explore any given one deeply, because there’s always more “newness” to turn to when the old new thing has reached a difficult or boring part.
The joy and enrichment you could derive from a single musical instrument, or a set of paints, is enough to fill a lifetime, and many people have demonstrated that. But those deeper levels are effectively inaccessible without some limit to the splitting of your attention and interest.
Many bookshelves make our modern day width-to-depth problem obvious. You might acquire several books for every one you read. There’s something fishy about that—you buy the book under the pretense that what you want is to read it. But again and again you prove that you want a new book more than you want the unread books you already own—books you bought months ago under the same pretense, and from which you derived the same cheap thrill of acquiring it.
If books were much harder to acquire, or if flippant new acquisitions were a bit taboo, we might actually crack that Margaret Atwood trilogy rather than tell ourselves we’ll get to it someday, while making another Amazon order in the mean time.
As long as we live in a consumer culture, it may always be easier to go wider than deeper. Going deeper requires patience, practice, and engagement during stretches where nothing much is happening. It’s during those moments that switching pursuits is most tempting. Newness doesn’t require much at all, except, sometimes, a bit of disposable income.
So unless we’re locked up in a room with only a piano and a pile of Tolstoy, or we partake in the fictional tradition of a Depth Year, we need to find a way to put up our own limits. When we give ourselves fewer places to dig, we go deeper, and what we uncover is more rare and valuable than the usual stuff near the surface.
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Comments:
Let’s take David"s idea and turn it sideways. Say that, for one year, we were to have a “breadth year” where your job was to try as many new things as you could, and dive just a little into them, so you could grow. A year of free exploration, with a single caveat – the things you choose should be meaningful and challenging. They should be things that force you to become more than you are. They should be the things that you’ve been avoiding because they would make you feel awkward, or uncomfortable. Learn to dance. Try being fashionable. Learn a coding language. Try to understand the works of Kant. Whatever means something to you, whatever you’ve secretly felt would make you grow but dammit, the thought of it makes you feel just plain timid. How much would you grow by the end of that year, if you were perpetually throwing yourself into the middle of the things you’d always avoided out of an irrational fear of change?
And, to turn things sideways in a different direction, imagine you took a depth year and got very, very good at one or two immensely frivolous things. Like cleaning the doorknobs in your house.
Breadth and depth are just distance, oriented in different directions. If people get caught up on the divisions between the two, they might miss a subtler and more profound point. The pathological pursuit of novelty is often a way to avoid moving any distance at all. It’s a drug to medicate away the feelings of discomfort associated with creating something meaningful; a spoon-and-needle approach to feeling great without doing anything that makes life truly rich over the long run.
What is a depth year?
What if, for a whole year, you stopped acquiring new things or taking on new pursuits. Instead, you return to abandoned projects, stalled hobbies, unread books and other neglected intentions, and go deeper with them than you ever have before.
What is the purpose?
Depth Year - a reflection on how our consumer reflexes tend to spread our aspirations too thin.
Chronic lack of follow-through
Because it is so easy to acquire new pursuits, we tend to begin what are actually enormous, lifelong projects (such as drawing, or language-learning) too often, and abandon them too easily.
This chronic lack of follow - through makes us feel bad, but worse than that, we never actually reach the level of fulfillment we believe we would when we first bought the guitar or the drawing pencils. Instead we end up on a kind of novelty treadmill - before things click, we’ve move on to the exciting beginning stages of something new.
Most people resonate with this dilemma.
Some people that followed/implemented the depth year honestly say that is has changed their lives. Going deeper rather than wider for a year is indeed transformative, but not quite in the ways some people expect.
Depth is a Mindset
By reading people’s accounts of their own Depth Years, the first thing we notice is that everyone has a different idea of what “depth” means. To some, it’s simply a strict moratorium on new books and new hobbies - no new hobbies. To others, it is no new possessions - a more general pruning of waste, a suspicion of the impulse to acquire, and a refocusing on what really matters.
The people that follow it report a lot of different outcomes. Here are some of the common themes:
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People start making art again. Long-inactive writers, painters, makers and doers of all kinds get their supplies out and actually make stuff again. Some people did these things - after a 25-year hiatus. There is definitely a curious link between depth and creativity. -
People reinvest in their friendships and relationships. “Meeting new people” is something we tend to try when we’re feeling isolated or stagnant. But there are already great people in our rolodexes, and it’s easy to take them for granted. -
People notice how much they already have. With depth as a guiding principle, we naturally start to look for value in what’s already available to us—in our closets, bookshelves, and address books - and invariably we start to appreciate how much was already there. -
That last one probably captures the central insight behind the Depth Year experience:
there are vast reserves of untapped value in what we already have. We just need to cultivate it.The unread stories on your bookshelf alone could change your life - if you read them. You could spend the next few decades enjoying ever-new breakthroughs in a single hobby, such as drawing, writing, piano, or yoga—if you went deeper with those pursuits rather than taking on new ones.
How to cultivate it?
However, cultivating that dormant value requires us to stay the course through certain dry and tricky parts where we once stopped and did something else. It is at those moments, those forks in the road between breaking new ground and falling back on convenience and predictability, when we can choose depth.
Simply, try to keep depth at the front of your mind when you make decisions. Surprisingly, our habits will begin to shift quite naturally. Depth is not so much a game of persistently striving to top yourself, it is more like a new lens for looking at the tools and opportunities that had always been there. Essentially, we will see more possibilities everywhere: in our pantries, in our wardrobes, in our bookshelves, in our plans, in the different ways we spend a spare hour.
Benefits
Enjoying ordinary things take less effort. Without anything resembling striving, we can derive more satisfaction from meals, furniture, cups of tea, walks to the store, hellos and goodbyes with friends, even odd details like illustrations in books and the shape our own handwriting.
We can attribute this effect to a deceptively simple shift in where we expect to find fulfillment: here, rather than there. As we get reacquainted with the things and people already around us, we start to let go of a certain background belief - pervasive in our consumption-driven culture - that fulfillment is something whose ingredients still need to be acquired.
These changes were all positive and welcome. However, to some people, the real value of Depth Year does not come from this new levels of gratitude, or the rewards of taking certain pursuits a little deeper. Something much more significant can happen. Several lifelong personal issues will begin to untangle themselves in a way they don’t think is possible. They feel more free and more confident than they have since childhood.
A number of factors contribute to this rapid untangling, and the subsequent flood of epiphanies. It couldn’t have happened without the Depth Year lens, because of a particular demand the pursuit of depth makes on us: we can’t go deeper in a given area without coming to terms with why we were never able to before.
In other words, we end up having to figure out what’s really stopping us. Why do we tend to back off at a certain depth? Is it simply because it is always easier to spread out and enjoy the rapid progress at the beginning of something else, than it is to tough it out with irregular French verbs or tricky guitar chords? It could be that simple. Or, there could be another reason for that. More often, we stop digging because we find something extremely painful about working past a certain point, and we don’t want to sort it out. We don’t want to run into our limits, we don’t want to feel dumb, we don’t want to get rejected. We don’t want to put our hearts on the line if we don’t have to, and all the important things involve our hearts.
For example, relationships can only go so deep when you’re afraid to risk rejection, say what you really think, or reach out to people who might respond badly, or not at all.
Creativity is easy to turn away from for the same reason. It’s risky. Trying to draw something for the first time after a long time away from drawing is terrifying. Showing people your work is even scarier.
So we live in great danger of inadvertently keeping our most cherished pursuits, the ones that promise the most fulfillment, buried down there in the realm of "potential," where they’re safe from the real world and its limitations. In the meantime, we find other things to do - things that offer less meaning, but more assured outcomes - and we just get older.
Going deeper means finally seeing what’s really going to come of it. And that’s damn scary. Existentially scary. It is our one life, after all.
Fulfillment awaits us downward, not outward.
If you think about what you’d do if you suddenly couldn’t acquire anything new for a year, I’m sure it would become quickly obvious how much is already at your disposal.