You tarried with trifles

What American author Frank Herbert had to say about the lure of the trivial.

Frank Herbert was a noted American science fiction author. His most famous work, Dune, has sold millions of copies.

The book and its sequels contained many memorable quotes. These reflected the author’s own outlook on life as well as those of the characters in the books.

The quote below is from Dune. It captures a universal concern that affects most of us, and it has even more relevance today than when it was written in the 1960s.

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Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.

— Frank Herbert

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What Frank Herbert meant

We can become distracted by the trivial to the point we squander our whole life. We can easily become victims of myopic concerns, oblivious to time slipping away. Then our life can feel like it has been stolen as we become aware our inattentiveness is the culprit in our own demise.

You tarried with trifles. To anyone with regrets, especially in this era of omnidistraction, the notion of a wasted life haunts us. The idea we didn’t just miss out but that we squandered it on nonsense.

For many it is becoming the defining feature of their lives. An endless array of trivialities await those who lack the discipline to exclude them from an existence increasingly characterized by intrusive technology and immersive entertainment.

Drifting through life in a kind of dream

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep?

We can get lost inside our heads and forget there is a real world. The dreams and shadows Herbert references are perhaps the dopamine loops we accept in lieu of the satisfying life we seek.

We can lose years of our lives to this. Today, with distraction driving so much of what we see around us, it can claim an hour, a day or perhaps even a whole life.

A retrospective analysis of this feels like a kind of waking sleep. Did I really lose an entire year doing nothing? Has it been ten, fifteen or twenty years since I left school? By this age my grandparents were married and living in their own house with teenage children and yet I live in a two-room apartment alone. What went wrong?

The jolts of awareness often emerge like this. Some unwelcome milestone shakes us into a reluctant awareness. Where did the time go?

It can feel all too much like a waking dream when we peer back through yesterday, last week or several decades of wasted time.

This slipping by attending to the trivial can become automatic. It becomes habitual. And once that takes hold Herbert reminds us it has an effect.

A stolen life

Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, victim of your folly.

All too easily life slips through our fingers. As John Lennon once said, life is what happens when we are busy making other plans.

Those dreams you dreamt and the sleep-like fog you’ve existed in, those are life too. We get a single existence whether awake or asleep.

Eventually you can reach a point you become unavoidably aware you are the architect of your own downfall. Your lack of discipline, your inability to manage distraction and control the trivial leads to the end of the road.

As a final insult those living like this, and it is most of us, become unavoidably aware of it. We understand the folly and that it is ours, making it sting all the harder.

We are aware we tarried with trifles. We lost time to the irrelevant, not to things that mattered.

That is the epitome of a wasted life. We didn’t try, we didn’t win and to top it all we spent all that time on trifles. Television news, the opinions of strangers, events and happenings with no connection to us, all of it feeling good in the moment, better than the discomfort of doing what matters to us.

Herbert reminds us we can all do this, we can become a victim to our poor focus and bad choices.

We can summarize Herbert’s view as follows:

1. Failure is easy — It is easy to focus on the irrelevant, the trivia of life. It takes effort not to.

2. Focusing on trifles is an expensive way to live life — That feelgood impulse will cost us. It is cheap and easy on the way in, often effortless. But at the end you may lose everything.

3. You cannot hide from your own bad choices — The worst aspect is the inevitable awareness that we made those choices, we charted the path to mediocrity and failure ourselves.

What we can learn from this

Be aware, all those trivialities add up. For the unthinking their life will be nothing but trivialities.

We already know this. Anyone who at least considers what they are doing with their life encounters this from time to time, the observation others are throwing their lives away. It is only a modest effort to turn this critical lens on ourselves.

Much of what stops us is trivial. Typically distractions; social media, TV programmes, mindless scrolling online.

But other trivialities come disguised as anxiety. Fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, an unwillingness to overcome the embarrassment of being a beginner.

Some is laziness. It is easier to watch Netflix than do the work. We can dip in to social media using the handy app on our phone, expertly designed to get you right in, lost in an instant.

We can develop elaborate avoidance tactics to manage anxiety and laziness. These can run deep, especially those developed in childhood. They may grow to define a whole life.

We understand the unexamined life is not worth living, but this is because it consists of too many habits picked up and never checked. Everyone has bad habits. Everyone has this affliction of avoiding scrutiny. But to escape this then some examination of our behaviour and routines is necessary.

Time is often a great healer, but Herbert’s quote suggests this is not always the case. As time passes, as more of our life is lived, we accumulate more examples of trifles that occupy our time and attention, preventing progress.

Often as we age many of our reasons for inaction years or decades later seem trivial even if important at the time. This adds a special agony to our woes as we understand our demise was engineered by things we later find absurd.

As individuals we tend to outgrow our personal demons. The deeply personal things that held us back when younger can feel ludicrous even though we lived through their crippling effects.

Like physical pain, psychic pain is difficult to relive and easy to downplay later as we mature beyond its reach, only leaving the effect. If the effect is unrealized ambitions or a broken life it can trigger an entirely new cluster of anxieties in its wake.

Fear of speaking in public, worries about disappointing parents, a fear of rejection or failure you’ve long since overcome, all are examples that mean much less years or decades after the fact. Mild embarrassment, social awkwardness, acne, a childish nickname, events we can’t quite recall, the list is long. Many of us have something like this haunting our memories.

The concept of trivialities — things that are of an insignificant nature — is often a retrospective judgment, not a reflection of their immediate impact. Their effect can be crippling at the time we experience them.

This retrospective assessment is a kind of sting in the tail of allowing the trivial to dominate. The hold trivialities will have over us may not last but the effect can define our life, or, indeed, the sense one has been robbed of a life that ought to have been more thoroughly lived.

The horror of this awareness is key to overcoming it. Identifying the trivial helps spot it. Where appropriate trim it, remove it.

This is important. Be aware of the insignificance of the thing holding you back.

Some attempt to think on a larger scale can provide a brief flare of insight to jolt you out of this mental smallness.

Most failure is an attempt to avoid only mild discomfort. Will you care about being embarrassed ten years from now, or one year from now? Will picking up the phone to accomplish some off-putting task feel quite so daunting next week?

If you have an important task you wish to accomplish, particularly a big, life-changing one, can you prioritize it over mindless scrolling online or social media use?

If a year from now you have not accomplished this task would you be willing to go back and trade all the social media or television-watching time for working on this important thing today? If the answer is yes then you can use this fictional time machine to do just that. You are back to now with this enhanced awareness, so use the time wisely knowing what a year from now could look like.

Stepping back helps reveal the trivialities as trivial even if they feel important or oppressive just now.

Once this awareness begins to blossom we become less likely to be brought low by the trifles we will eventually outgrow anyway.

All of us know most of the news is extremely forgettable. Social media feeds have no real use beyond distraction. And worrying about a job interview or asking someone out for a coffee are things we can easily imagine being unconcerned about within hours of doing them.

As for distraction, most recognize it as such even while succumbing. This requires a change in habits. But again, awareness of what trivialities can do to a life helps in this, it provides some focus for the effort to change destructive routines.

What are we to make of this?

Frank Herbert understood none of us want a trivial life. Even those who don’t strive for greatness and consider their own ambitions to be modest are upset they can be run off track by nonsense.

Much of life is trivial. Today we swim through an ocean of the insignificant. Worse, the digital trinkets we seek come wrapped in an addictive package that does its own damage.

Whether it is compulsive doom scrolling or Tik Tok video bingeing, the behaviours to access the frivolous content can themselves damn us to mediocrity.

Just getting to the social media videos that are ravaging our attention spans involves navigating a mental opium den of temptation that will damn you for life. Such is modernity, life-destroying dopamine traps wrapped up in digital perception mazes people cannot escape.

For anyone with things to accomplish much of this has to be discarded. At the very least strict rationing along with inner questioning about the value of these activities.

And of course an awareness of Herbert’s insights. He understood the words he used. He used “trifle,” implying more than just unimportant, an activity recognizably superficial and worthless, a dissatisfying way to live a whole life.

It is all there, easy to see in the careful language he employed. We are the architects of our own lives. Build up a good life or squander it on the irrelevant. The choice is ours.

Herbert talks of time slipping away. His counter claim would be something like, don’t let it slip. Pay attention to time. If possible control your time. Above all control your attention during this timebox you are trying to manage, whether an hour or a day or a whole lifetime.

That is just one method. We all have trivial things in our lives. But a life focused on them will slip through our fingers as we drool over digital addictions and immersive entertainment that takes more than it gives.

This slipping is avoidable, but it takes effort.

Herbert’s quote, found in Dune, was intended as a funerary lament to a young man who died fighting a duel. An unnecessary fight over a perceived slight. An incident that ought to have been trivial and brushed away but ended his life instead. Just one of many petty moments we assume characterized his short life.

Within that glimpse of a small individual world Herbert saw a whole cosmos of opportunity, both embraced and missed. Such is insight where even the bleakest of circumstances offers us hope of a better life.

We too can do this. We all have this attraction to nonsense tripping us up. A proper clearout begins with a little awareness and a willingness to cull the unnecessary. To drop the trivial so we can better focus on the important.

For most of us immediate examples will be television and internet-based entertainment. Social media features in many people’s lives. Most are aware their relationship with the digital world is unhealthy. For human beings in general it is novel as it didn’t exist at all only thirty years ago so we have few methods to defend ourselves.

But Herbert means something much deeper than just addiction and bad habits. You tarried with trifles. Your life meant little. You did nothing with it. It was inconsequential. An existence limited by the wrong choices.

He is warning us about our entire life. We have to think bigger. We have to zoom out and look at it all. We must occasionally at least ask the hard questions. Am I where I want to be? Am I paying attention to what matters to me? Am I distracted or am I focused on important matters?

For all its bleakness and funereal tone Herbert is giving us a lifeline. He is reminding us we can avoid being a victim of bad decisions since we are the ones making them. Our follies needn’t destroy us completely, but only if we have the courage to act. And the thing we are acting upon is a tendency to lose ourselves in irrelevance or distraction and not properly attend to the stuff of life.