I Woke Up to Someone Else's Alarm

I woke up to someone else's alarm. Not mine - the guy in the next bed. Or maybe the one across the room. It didn't matter. In a shared dormitory at a spiritual retreat center, mornings weren't yours. Neither were evenings. Neither, if I'm being honest, was anything in between.

I was twenty-six, living at what I thought was the pinnacle of spiritual dedication. An ashram. Meals provided, lodging provided, purpose provided. Everything provided, except solitude.

My alarm was someone's footsteps. My schedule was whatever needed doing. And what needed doing was always something.

It didn't start there, obviously. These things never start at the deep end.

First there were the weekly courses. Material so good I absorbed it like a dry sponge in water. New ideas, new frameworks, new ways of seeing everything I thought I already understood. I couldn't get enough.

Then someone asked if I could help copy some course materials. Small stuff. Photocopies, distribution, the kind of work you say yes to without thinking because it takes twenty minutes and makes you feel useful.

Twenty minutes became two hours. Course materials became brochures, then magazines, then books, then software. Each request slightly bigger than the last, each "yes" slightly more automatic. Not because anyone was forcing me - because each task felt like a natural extension of the last one.

Of course I'll help with the new publication. I'm already here.

Of course I'll take on the software project. Who else understands how it all fits together?

Very generous of me. Definitely wasn't building an identity around being the guy who gets things done.¹

By the time the invitation came to move to the ashram itself - to live there, work there, eat there, sleep there - it didn't feel like a leap. It felt like the next obvious step. A small group of us relocated. We had rooms - shared, naturally. We had food. We had structure. What we didn't have was an off switch.

"Availability is not generosity. It's the most socially acceptable way to avoid yourself."

Work started when you woke up and ended when you went to sleep. Sometimes it bled past that boundary too, because boundaries in an ashram are a bit like traffic suggestions in Southern Europe - technically there, widely ignored.

The thing about being constantly available is that it doesn't feel like a problem while you're in it. It feels like dedication. It feels like you're part of something larger than yourself, something important. And you are. That's the tricky part - it's not a lie. The work mattered. The community mattered. The purpose was real.

What wasn't real was the idea that I could sustain it without cost.

What leaving didn't fix

I left the ashram after two years. The reasons were simple: I was living like a college student in my mid-twenties, sharing rooms with other volunteers, and at some point the gap between spiritual dedication and basic adult life became impossible to ignore. I wasn't growing. I was just... available.

Looking back, I'm genuinely curious how long I would have stayed if the living conditions had been slightly more comfortable. Another year? Two? Five? Add a private room and a small stipend and I might still be there, answering someone else's alarm every morning.² Bless that version of me. He was doing his best with what he understood at the time.

But here's what I didn't expect: leaving the ashram didn't cure the availability problem. It just migrated.

Fifteen years later, I had a phone

Different technology, same pattern. The ashram alarm became notifications. The shared dormitory became a shared attention space - everyone with access, all the time. The unspoken expectation to be useful to the community became the unspoken expectation to respond within minutes to every message, email, and request.

I'd traded one form of constant availability for another. The main upgrade was that I now had a private room to be constantly interrupted in.

There's research suggesting it takes an average of twenty-three minutes to fully return to a task after a single interruption.³ Based on my experience, that's optimistic. And every switch leaves what researchers call attention residue - cognitive fragments from the last thing you were doing, clinging to your brain while you try to focus on the next thing.⁴ You're physically here, but part of you is still processing the notification you glimpsed while walking to the kitchen.

I knew this. I'd spent twenty years practicing meditation for exactly this kind of scattered attention. I could sit on a cushion for thirty minutes and notice my mind wandering.

But I couldn't stop checking my phone during dinner.

Nice boundaries, Soren.

There's a question I didn't ask myself for years, and when I finally did, it was uncomfortable:

Was I available because people needed me, or because being needed was how I knew I mattered?

This connects to something I explored in The Volunteering Trap - how service can become identity infrastructure. But availability goes wider than volunteering. It's the friend who always picks up. The colleague who answers emails at midnight. The parent who never says "not now." The person whose phone is always on, always charged, always ready.

From the outside, it looks like care. From the inside, it can feel like care too. That's why it's so hard to see.

In the ashram, I told myself I was being selfless. After the ashram, I told myself I was being responsive. At no point did I tell myself I was being avoidant - because who avoids things by being too present?

Except I wasn't present. I was available. Those are different things.

Presence means being here, fully, with whatever's in front of you. Availability means being ready to be somewhere else the moment someone asks. One is a state of attention. The other is a state of alert.

I spent years in a state of alert and called it dedication.

Wow, very insightful. I definitely figured this out through calm self-reflection and not because my body started sending invoices I couldn't ignore.

The truth is less elegant: chronic neck tension. Poor sleep. A persistent sense that I was always slightly behind on something, even on vacation. My nervous system didn't know how to stand down because I'd spent years training it to be on call. First in the ashram, then with the phone, then with work, then with everything.

What actually helped

It wasn't a dramatic boundary-setting moment. No grand announcement. No "I'm turning off my phone and moving to a cabin." That would have been on-brand for me - the all-or-nothing approach. Replace total availability with total withdrawal. Very evolved. Extremely balanced.

What helped was smaller than that. Boring, even.

I started noticing the impulse before the action. The phone buzzes. There's a pull - almost physical, like a small hook behind the chest - to check it immediately. Not because it might be urgent. Because not checking feels like leaving someone waiting. And leaving someone waiting feels like being a bad person.

That's the mechanism. That's the whole thing. Availability, for me, was wired to identity. Not checking = not caring = not worthy.

Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

I didn't fix it. I don't think you fix things like this. But I started making different choices. I leave my phone in another room during meals now. Not because I read an article about digital wellness - because I noticed that meals where I was actually tasting food were categorically better than meals where I was half-reading a message.

I respond to most messages within hours, not minutes. The difference this makes to the other person is negligible. The difference it makes to me is enormous.

I ask myself a question before saying yes to anything that requires my time: Am I saying yes because this matters, or because saying no feels like abandonment?

That question sounds simple. It isn't. It took me years of practice - not meditation practice, but the unglamorous practice of sitting with discomfort - to answer it honestly. Sometimes the answer is still "I don't know." That's fine. "I don't know" is leagues better than the automatic yes.

"The most generous thing you can do is be fully present for fewer things."

I think about the ashram sometimes. Not with regret - that part of my life built something in me that I still use every day. The discipline, the capacity for sustained effort, the ability to work alongside people even when you'd rather be alone. These are real skills. They have real value.

But the ashram also taught me that total availability looks like devotion and feels like purpose, right up until it doesn't. And that the transition from "meaningful service" to "I don't know who I am when I'm not useful" happens so gradually that you'll miss it unless you're watching.

Most people aren't watching. Most people are too busy being available.

For You

If your phone is the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you put down at night - I'm not going to tell you to change that. You already know the advice. Everyone knows the advice.

What I'd ask instead is this: when was the last time you were genuinely unreachable for two hours? Not asleep. Not in a meeting. Just... not available. By choice.

If you can't remember, that might be worth sitting with. Even for five minutes.

Continue Exploring

The Volunteering Trap - When service becomes identity infrastructure, saying no starts feeling like self-destruction. Sound familiar?

A Meditation Practice for People Who Hate Meditation - The same practice that taught me to notice my mind wandering also taught me to notice when I'm reaching for my phone. Same muscle.

Notes & References

¹ Research on prosocial behavior suggests that helping others activates the brain's reward centers, creating a feedback loop where the helper becomes dependent on the act of helping itself. See: Inagaki, T. K., & Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). "Neural correlates of giving support to a loved one." Psychosomatic Medicine, 74(1), 3-7.

² This isn't unusual. Studies on communal living arrangements show that environmental comfort is a stronger predictor of departure than ideological disagreement. Most people don't leave communities because they stop believing - they leave because the physical conditions become untenable.

³ Mark, G., Gudith, D., & Klocke, U. (2008). "The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 107-110.

⁴ Leroy, S. (2009). "Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181.