How to Alter Your Natural Default Setting

The term “Natural Default Setting” comes from a video by David Foster Wallace called “This is Water.”

BEEP, BEEP, BEEP. It’s 6:45 a.m. and the alarm knocked you out of a deep sleep. For the average American, this begins the same routine day after day. You walk to the bathroom, check your e-mails, turn on the shower, make coffee, skip breakfast because you woke up late, and go to work. You manage to make it to work with 5 minutes to spare. At work you sit through pointless meetings, your boss is riding your back about the deadline for a project, your co-worker Bobby keeps complaining about his project, yet somehow you manage to make it through the day.

You get off work, and you can’t wait to get home to relax. You jump onto the freeway only to realize there is a huge backup. It takes you an extra 45 minutes to get home. When you finally get home, you have already missed the evening news, and now you need to start dinner. While making dinner, though, your neighbor comes over to ask for help for their new computer. You are starving, and reluctantly you go over to help. It takes you almost an hour to setup the computer, and then you finally finish dinner. It’s 9:45 and it’s time to sleep so you can do it all over again.

Does this sound familiar?

We’ve all probably had this experience between the pointless meeting, the boss on your back, people complaining about their jobs, the traffic jams that prevent us getting from point A to B, and the neighbor who thinks you have all this free time in your life.

What if meetings didn’t have to be pointless? Instead, you could focus and pay attention to what is going on at the meeting. Listen to what is people are saying. If you are not tuning in then you could miss something important. You can’t offer your opinion or make suggestions if you are not paying attention. You could even help meetings become less pointless, and get those who run the meeting to focus on other things.

Dealing with your boss. Let me set this record straight. It is not impossible that the reason your boss is on your back is because they have a boss who is on their back. I see this often with businesses that have a complex hierarchical structure. Your default setting is to snap back and let your boss know that you are working on it. Try to understand that his skin is on the line just as much as yours. It may help to keep him in the loop, so then he won’t feel the need to always check up on your progress.

Poor Bobby. He hates his job and every day he feels like it is his civil duty to tell you. Instead of blowing Bobby off and telling him to just suck it up, you could help him find a new job or ask him how you both could fix the issue he is facing. Perhaps you share the same boss and he gets tired of him just as much as you do.

How is it possible that a quick trip on the freeway turned into a 45-minute trip home? It could be that someone had a medical emergency, which caused the accident on the highway as a result. When we come to a traffic jam our default way of thinking might be, “how long is this going take?” While the most likely scenario isn’t the person with the medical emergency, we need to remember we are not the only ones trying to get from point A to point B.

While your not so tech-savvy neighbor might always ask for help, they are not doing it to spite you. Start with altering your natural default setting and remember your neighbor didn’t grow up with the technology we have now. They never had a smartphone, a computer, and all the other things we’re privileged to have, while we were still growing up.

There are a lot of ways you can go about living your life, and one way is to believe everything is an inconvenience to your own life. Don’t choose to live that way. Instead, live knowing you have a choice, you have freedom, and you can have the audacity not live in a routine. Don’t let your natural default setting tell you how to react, make the choice yourself, and know that there are millions of other people who struggle with the same thing, if not more than you do.