Why the Depth Year Was My Best Year

Towards the end of last year I proposed an idea that unexpectedly caught fire: what if, for a whole year, you stopped acquiring new things or taking on new pursuits. Instead, you return to abandoned projects, stalled hobbies, unread books and other neglected intentions, and go deeper with them than you ever have before.

The “Depth Year” was supposed to be hypothetical—a reflection on how our consumer reflexes tend to spread our aspirations too thin. Because it’s so easy to acquire new pursuits, we tend to begin what are actually enormous, lifelong projects (such as drawing, or language-learning) too often, and abandon them too easily.

This chronic lack of follow-through makes us feel bad, but worse than that, we never actually reach the level of fulfillment we believed we would when we first bought the guitar or the drawing pencils. Instead we end up on a kind of novelty treadmill—before things click, we’ve moved on to the exciting beginning stages of something new.

People immediately resonated with this dilemma, and its hypothetical remedy. The original article was read by a million people. I went on national radio to talk about it.

But what surprised me most was how many people told me they intended to actually do this Depth Year idea. One reader started a Facebook group for people to discuss their year’s progress, and there are over 900 people in it now.

I felt somewhat responsible for all this enthusiasm, so I did it too. It’s now the end of that year, and I can honestly say my life has changed. Going deeper rather than wider for a year was indeed transformative, but not quite in the way I expected.

Depth is a Mindset

If you read people’s accounts of their own Depth Years, on their blogs or in the discussion group, the first thing you notice is that everyone has a different idea of what “depth” means. To some it’s simply a strict moratorium on new books and new hobbies. To others it’s a more general pruning of waste, a suspicion of the impulse to acquire, and a refocusing on what really matters.

So it’s not surprising that people reported a lot of different outcomes. There were a few common themes, however:

People started making art again. Long-inactive writers, painters, makers and doers of all kinds got their supplies out and actually made stuff again. Later on in my year I started drawing again—after a 25-year hiatus. (There is definitely a curious link between depth and creativity, but I’ll get to that.)

People reinvested in their friendships and relationships. “Meeting new people” is something we tend to try when we’re feeling isolated or stagnant. But there are already great people in our rolodexes, and it’s easy to take them for granted.

People noticed how much they already have. With depth as a guiding principle, we naturally start to look for value in what’s already available to us—in our closets, bookshelves, and address books—and invariably we start to appreciate how much was already there.

That last one probably captures the central insight behind the Depth Year experience: there are vast reserves of untapped value in what we already have. We just need to cultivate it.

The unread stories on your bookshelf alone could change your life—if you read them. You could spend the next few decades enjoying ever-new breakthroughs in a single hobby, such as drawing, writing, piano, or yoga—if you went deeper with those pursuits rather than taking on new ones.

Cultivating that dormant value, however, requires us to stay the course through certain dry and tricky parts where we once stopped and did something else. It is at those moments, those forks in the road between breaking new ground falling back on convenience and predictability, when we can choose depth.

My Depth Year

I didn’t follow the original premise of the Depth Year, which is “no new hobbies, no new possessions.” Instead I simply tried to keep depth at the front of my mind when I made decisions.

To my surprise, my habits began to shift quite naturally. Depth wasn’t so much a game of persistently striving to top myself, it was more like a new lens for looking at the tools and opportunities that had always been there. Essentially, I saw more possibilities everywhere: in my pantry, in my wardrobe, in my bookshelf, in my plans, in the different ways I might spend a spare hour.

Enjoying ordinary things seemed to take less effort. Without anything resembling striving, I derived more satisfaction from meals, furniture, cups of tea, walks to the store, hellos and goodbyes with friends, even odd details like illustrations in books and the shape my own handwriting.

In hindsight I attribute this effect to a deceptively simple shift in where I was expecting to find fulfillment: here, rather than there. As I got reacquainted with the things and people already around me, I started to let go of a certain background belief—pervasive in our consumption-driven culture—that fulfillment is something whose ingredients still need to be acquired.

These changes were all positive and welcome. The real value of my Depth Year, however, didn’t come from this new level of gratitude, or the rewards of taking certain pursuits a little deeper. Something much more significant happened.

Without going into the details, I’ll just say that this year, several lifelong personal issues began untangle themselves in a way I didn’t think was possible. I feel more free and more confident than I have since… jeez… childhood?

A number of factors contributed to this rapid untangling, and the subsequent flood of epiphanies. It couldn’t have happened without the Depth Year lens, though, because of a particular demand the pursuit of depth makes on us: we can’t go deeper in a given area without coming to terms with why we were never able to before.

In other words, we end up having to figure out what’s really stopping us. Why do we tend to back off at a certain depth? I assumed it was simply because it’s always easier to spread out and enjoy the rapid progress at the beginning of something else, than it is to tough it out with irregular French verbs or tricky guitar chords.

Presumably, it is sometimes only that. But I think more often we stop digging because we find something extremely painful about working past a certain point, and we don’t want to sort it out. We don’t want to run into our limits, we don’t want to feel dumb, we don’t want to get rejected. We don’t want to put our hearts on the line if we don’t have to, and all the important things involve our hearts.

Relationships, for example, can only go so deep when you’re afraid to risk rejection, say what you really think, or reach out to people who might respond badly, or not at all.

Creativity is easy to turn away from for the same reason. It’s risky. Trying to draw something for the first time in a decade is terrifying. Showing people your work is even scarier.

So we live in great danger of inadvertently keeping our most cherished pursuits, the ones that promise the most fulfillment, buried down there in the realm of “potential,” where they’re safe from the real world and its limitations. In the meantime, we find other things to do—things that offer less meaning, but more assured outcomes—and we just get older.

Going deeper means finally seeing what’s really going to come of it. And that’s damn scary. Existentially scary. It is our one life, after all.

This is all pretty new to me. But I can tell you two things: as a rule, fulfillment awaits us downward from here, not outward; and from now on, every year will be a Depth Year.

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Photo by Marco Assmann (cropped from original)



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