The Art of Disruption (And Why You Need It)

Routine can be a beautiful thing. As a matter of fact, it was developing a healthy and productive routine that got me out of butcher work and into a PhD program.

But routine, like most things, cuts both ways.

Routine can also bring complacency if performed for too long without re-evaluation. It can put blinders on that grow at a fingernail’s-pace over time, causing you to lose sight of what’s important, or blind you from the possibility of considering new activities or perspectives worth adding to your day-to-day routine in place of something that’s overstayed its welcome.

Being too deep in a routine can lower your head closer and closer to your work desk over time to the point that you forget to come up for air. With your head down and your hands hard at work, it becomes increasingly difficult to see anything else. New ideas and new perspective — both incredibly valuable to any line of work — fly over our heads without us even noticing.

This is why you need disruption.

I write about Thoreau a lot. Most importantly, I greatly admire Thoreau because he dared to live against the grain in a way that was productive and had lasting influence on American cultural heritage. But the reason I find great pleasure in writing about him from a scholarly perspective is because a) his work is wildly misunderstood by even those who teach it to impressionable high schoolers, and b) this rampant misunderstanding of his work and thought leaves an abundance of opportunities for me to try and do my part, as many incredible scholars before me such as Jane Bennett and Branka Arsic have before me, in maintaining a just understanding of his work.

One of these misunderstandings is the core tenet of Walden. Too many believe, often because their overworked and under-appreciated English teachers taught them, that Thoreau wanted everyone to give up their lives for good and live in cabins of the wood in a state of perpetual primitivism. (If I were more cynical, I would believe Walden is taught this way to make it comically easy to critique him and discredit him, because the last thing the system wants is for people to second-guess their well-enculturated consumerist tendencies, but I digress.)

Among the easiest quips folks throw Thoreau’s way is: “he wants us to live ultra-individualist lives in cabins, but had his mom do his laundry.”

There are so many things wrong with this criticism that betray a severe lack of understanding of Thoreau and his personal life (or even basic sympathy for a man’s relationship with his mother). But when you consider that he also left the cabin on several occasions to fulfill his duties as a staunch abolitionist, working to repeal fugitive laws and to help runaway slaves establish themselves, suddenly things are more grey to critics. Now, they don’t know what to make of this contradiction. How can he want us to give up everything we own and live in the woods forever, but also want us to be politically active in the pursuit of social justice in modern life? This is because this contradiction only relies on a misunderstanding of Walden’s lessons.

Thoreau never wanted us to abandon modernity to live in cabins in a romanticized pastoral setting, and especially didn’t want people abandoning political responsibilities of social justice.

So what did he want? What was the moral of Walden?

Thoreau critique in academia seems to have, for the moment, landed on two main ideas. The first is that Thoreau as a literalist believed you can’t understand what a home is unless you build one, what nature is unless you live in it, food unless you grow and harvest it, etc. this is further explored in Branka Arsic’s Bird Relics. More relevant to the topic at hand however, in Jane Bennett’s work, she argues that Thoreau believed the only way to see clearly one’s personal situation more clearly, to “trim the fat” as it were, is to temporarily remove yourself from the rut and routine of modern life in order to gain a new perspective and make changes according to what you find when you strip your life to the bare essentials.

But is this necessary to make improvements to your life? Do you really need to screw off into the woods for two years and build a cabin from scratch for clarity while hoeing beans? This would be an unreasonable request of someone who works full time and has bills to pay, but luckily, there are much less extreme ways to disrupt your life but still experience the benefits of a new perspective far from your day-to-day routine. Thoreau merely went to incredible ends to make his point, so we didn’t have to.

Much to the chagrin of my overworked colleagues who believe I “shouldn’t have the time”, I make it a point to grab a campsite in Rocky Mountain park or Roosevelt National Forest at least a couple times a month during the semester to a) free me from the infinite distractions found in a one-bedroom apartment and write in peace to the white noise of the mountains and b) to remind myself that life passes by too fast to keep my head buried in emails and books without pause. Even more audacious, is that I go fishing in the mornings before the work day starts as the perspective offered from fly fishing gives me the clarity and slowness needed to make it through grad life without significant adverse mental health effects. (I have to drive my wife to the bakery at 5 in the morning for work, so I’m up anyway. Make the best of your situation, right?)

At the campsites, I bring my laptop to write without internet. This is where my best writing comes out. And, the amount of times my muscle memory drives me to click into facebook or youtube from my browser while I write is downright comical and always reinforces to me how much I need disruption of this nature.

Now, as a married, stipend-ed PhD student without kids who lives two blocks from the campus I work at in Boulder, Colorado of all places, I understand that I am an outlier in terms of opportunities for disruption of a transcendental nature. But in truth, those of us who have the time and means to read an article on Medium, for the most part, have unprecedented opportunities for “getting away” for a weekend.

And by “getting away”, I do not mean just spatially relocating yourself for a few days.

True disruption of a transcendental nature requires us to strip away as much of the fat as we can from our lives. A weekend trip to an AirBnB or a resort with full-access internet only one click away from takeout is not really disrupting much. There’s very little keeping you from checking your emails, or itching at your neck looking for that next sweet fix of a red notification bubble. There’s nothing stopping you from doom-scrolling. You’re just doing more of the same, but somewhere else.

A weekend campsite getaway, on the other hand, comes with a lot of conditions.

1. You have to set up your own shelter
2. You probably won’t have service
3. Even if you do, you’re gonna run out of charge pretty quick (If you brought enough backup battery to fuel a whole night of entertainment on your phone, then you refused to disrupt before you even left the driveway.)
4. You have to prep your own food without the luxuries of a typical kitchen
5. If you want heat and comfort, you’re going to have to put the time into tending a fire.
6. Noise pollution is nonexistent. You might actually find yourself silently alone with your thoughts while staring at your fire. Speaking from experience — this is terrifying, but we need it.

The reason these trips into the wilderness are so valuable to me, so much so that I still do them religiously in spite of the fact that screwing off into the woods for a night regularly makes me look like a lazy, unmotivated loafer of a PhD student to my colleagues is because of how much I’ve come to appreciate the art of disruption and use it to better myself as a writer, educator, husband, and friend. Without disruption, I would be swallowed whole with the never-ending pointless email chains and busy work that swarms like black flies. At the most basic — I disrupt myself while I can, until the inevitable day comes when I can’t, and I lose myself forever to the void of the mundane and the modern.

But for now, I continue this ritual. Every time I return home from a night in the Rockies, I feel as though I’ve learned something important about myself, my perspective, my habits, and my routine. Through the simple act of taking the opportunities you can to forcible disrupt and remove yourself from the rut of your own routine to see your own life from a different perspective, I can near guarantee you that you will make a concerted effort more often to pick yourself up, and drop into a situation in which you can not rely on your routine or subconscious to guide you through the days.

For you, it might not even be camping. I only use it because I’m a firm believer that forcibly placing yourself into the outdoors for extended periods of time is crucial to your wellbeing. For many, even just a day of hiking interspersed with quiet moments on a rock or stump is enough.

Regardless of the how, I implore you to find more opportunities to disrupt your own life in a meaningful way. You might find that the different perspective leads you to an answer you didn’t know you were searching for.