• by Jeff Einstein , September 27, 2004

Filmmaker and star Albert Brooks started his storied career as a standup comedian. One of his very best routines--one often replayed on Best of Carson reruns--was when he stood before the studio audience one night and admitted that he had run out of new material to perform for them.

Paraphrased, the routine begins as follows: "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Albert Brooks. I'm 26 years old, at the height of my standup career--and can you believe it, I'm fresh out of material."

"Oh, I could make you laugh," he goes on to say. "I could go for the cheap, easy laugh. I could drop my pants to reveal funny faces painted on my knees." Then he drops his pants to reveal--sure enough--funny faces painted on his knees. "But that's not the real me," he cautions. "Or I could have someone rush in from offstage and hit me in the face with a cream pie," followed by the same disclaimer once again, this time delivered with a face covered in whipped cream: "But that's not the real me..."

I mention the Albert Brooks routine for two reasons: 1) It's kind of how I feel about my column this week, and 2) It's kind of how I feel about marketing in general nowadays.

"Oh, I could sell you something," I'd say. "I could blast a million e-mails in a matter of minutes." But that's not the real me. Or, "I could hire some struggling actors to sit in a bar and pretend to be something they're not." But that's not the real me either.

Well, on second thought, maybe it is the real me. As a marketer in today's market, the real me cares more about the advantage than the truth. The real me doesn't think much one way or the other about my own contribution to the degradation of the marketing ecology (see Matthew Syrett's brilliant "The Tragedy of the Advertising Commons" essay).

The real me would rather leverage my own expertise alongside the ignorance of my client than explore what we have in common. The real me would rather meet my numbers than meet my obligations to the marketing and advertising community at large.

"Oh, I could sell you something," I'd say.

Last week I wrote about time displacement as a symptom of addiction. Not only do our addictions and obsessions compel us to do things that we know are contrary to our well being, but they consume time and energy that might otherwise be devoted to other, more meaningful pursuits.

Among the first things displaced by our addictions and obsessions is emotional honesty. All addictions help us defer the emotional moment, whatever its flavor and whenever it arrives. For instance, I have long deployed e-mail at work as a foil to defer my own irrational fears of failure and abandonment. Rather than sit down to the work I know needs doing, I'll check my e-mail first every time I sit down to make sure that the world is still spinning. (It always is.) But the act of checking my e-mail always consumes the better part of five minutes, usually just to wade through the junk. Multiply that five minutes by the ten or twenty times a day that I check my e-mail, and it all adds up to some serious time. Of course, that time represents only the minimum daily adult requirement--the time I commit only if I find nothing in my e-mail inbox that elicits an actual response, a determination typically based on how contentious, defiant, or lonely I feel at the moment.

Before I know it, my fear of failure has evolved into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Playing with my e-mail has displaced at least some of the time required to do the work. Not only have I heightened my fear of failure and abandonment (the eventual result when I get fired for not doing the work), but now I feel lousy because I didn't get the work done on time, or didn't complete it to my own satisfaction. This is a typical addictive cycle: Our fears drive us to act out; acting out helps us self-medicate and set our fears aside for the moment; then afterwards we feel guilty because we acted out instead of doing what had to be done. In the end, acting out only reinforces our fears and feeds our addictions.

In mapping my own behavior, I noted that I had a tendency to check my e-mail whenever I sat down in front of my computer, regardless of the time of day, or the number of times I sat down. In mapping the corresponding emotions, I found myself already growing anxious the very moment I stepped away from the computer. The anxiety would only abate the moment I sat down and checked my e-mail. So I have taken to checking my e-mail only at predetermined times of the day, and I have limited the number of times that I check my e-mail to four each day--sometimes less but never more. No more ad hoc e-mail for me.

The idea, of course, was not to eliminate e-mail from my life, but to eliminate the compulsive behavior associated with it and thereby reclaim the time displaced by the selfsame compulsive behavior. That said, I did encounter some significant emotional and physical turbulence the moment I started taking my own medicine. At first, my anxiety away from the computer--my anxiety between e-mail fixes--gave way to a palpable anger. Upon my return to the computer, the anger would dissolve into a kind of existential emptiness; I would just sit down and stare at the screen. After a few moments of intolerable silence, I would feel suddenly lost and rudderless, and could feel the panic rising in my chest once again. Eventually, I would either succumb to my e-mail beast or stand up and walk away, utterly frustrated. Neither behavior got me where I wanted to go, and I rediscovered the difference between abstinence and sobriety: abstinence speaks exclusively to the absence of a certain behavior, while sobriety speaks to the presence of something more-a quality of intent.

I rediscovered that the act of avoiding one behavior requires a corresponding intent to engage in another. In other words, it wasn't enough to be mindful of what I didn't want to do; I also needed to replace the old behavior with something else.

Accordingly, now I don't sit down in front of my computer unless and until I have a clear intent to do something other than check my e-mail. This intent manifests itself in greater productivity both at and away from the computer. I no longer wonder or worry about who has or hasn't sent me an e-mail. I think less about failure because I have more time to apply to my success.

Recovering addicts often apply a generic acronym to their day-to-day experience: HALT-Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and/or Tired. These four conditions--experienced singly or in concert--act as triggers for our acting out behaviors. Nowadays, whenever I feel hungry, angry, lonely, and/or tired, I find a way--either by phone or in person--to reach out and make contact with someone I trust. E-mail just isn't good enough anymore.

Many thanks, as always, and best to you and yours...

Please note: The Einstein's Corner discussion group at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/einsteinscorner/ is dedicated to exploring the adverse effects of our addictions to technology and media on the quality of our lives, both at work and at home. Please feel free to drop by and join the discussion.