Eyes Closed: A Practice for Developing Appreciation Over Accumulation
During a seven-hour train journey from Milan to Paris, I found myself reflecting on a fundamental tension in modern life: our society’s fast consumption patterns versus our capacity for genuine appreciation. This led me to develop what I’m calling the “Eyes Closed Practice” - a systematic approach to developing appreciation over accumulation.
The Context: Fast Life and Its Discontents
Our society operates on fast consumption where people consume far too much without spending time to appreciate what they’re experiencing. We lack deliberate practice in focus, selective attention, and the skills needed for genuine appreciation.
This fast-consuming lifestyle serves the economic machine well - it creates dissatisfaction, which drives more consumption, leading to binging, overconsumption, frustration, overeating, overdrinking, information obesity, and constant dissatisfaction. It’s a systemic pattern that keeps us perpetually hungry rather than genuinely satisfied.
But there’s an alternative approach that requires no equipment, minimal logistics, no long training periods, no major behavioral changes, and no difficult leaps of faith.
The Practice Framework: CRAFT Structure
I’ve structured this practice using what I call the CRAFT framework - originally developed for AI agent prompting but surprisingly effective for personal development practices. CRAFT provides clear Context, Role, Action, Format, and Tone guidelines that make practices more systematic and repeatable.
Context: Why This Matters
Developing appreciation and attention capacity creates multiple benefits:
- Better life appreciation with less frustration and more gratitude
- Reduced consumption leading to less financial pressure and more resilience during difficult phases
- Enhanced finesse and subtlety that recombines differently across life domains
- Better health through less overeating, overdrinking, and over-everything patterns
- Increased patience and reduced stress
Role: Personal Responsibility for Appreciation
The role here is someone who wants to take care of themselves, become more grateful for life, master satiety in all senses, and live a slower, more fulfilled existence with greater satisfaction from what’s immediately available.
Action: Precision Over Accumulation
The core principle is developing precision and appreciation over vulgar piling-up, gulping, and binging. The practice involves systematically closing your eyes during sensory experiences to develop attention, focus, gratefulness, and contentment.
Eyes Closed While Eating
When alone and eating, close your eyes and savor every flavor. Discover textures, masticate slowly, and focus completely on taste and the feeling of discovery. Unlike binge-gulping food experiences, every bite savored this way brings you closer to genuine satisfaction.
Satiety isn’t only biochemical - it’s behavioral. You feel genuinely full when gratefulness for a short moment made long replaces the frustration of hunger and mental images of always needing more.
Eyes Closed While Listening
Close your eyes when listening to music and sounds. Feel the space, rhythm, and harmony. Discover hidden notes between seemingly disharmonious sounds. Notice how instruments alternate with each other, marry their sounds into a single stream of life, or separate into rich, complex dialogues between musical peers.
Eyes Closed While Touching
Whether with hands, mouth, or body, close your eyes and feel warmth, coldness, softness, firmness, weight, and lightness. Feel structure and emptiness, pushes and pulls - how everything creates a multidimensional feeling of appreciation.
Format: Reflective Documentation
After these experiences, take time to report what you feel. Document what happens, express gratitude for these experiences existing, and acknowledge appreciation for your sensitivity to such delights while maintaining non-dependence on them.
Tone: Integrated Wisdom
The approach combines benevolence, calm, and Epicurean wisdom with the hindsight of Taoists and Stoics. Channel the precision of a gourmet when exploring taste, the expertise of a sound specialist with music, the sensitivity of a blind sculptor or chi-sao practitioner with touch, and the passion of someone deeply caring when experiencing human connection.
The Systematic Benefits
This practice connects to broader principles I’ve been developing around quality over quantity and connection over accumulation:
Attention Training: Like developing connection density in knowledge systems, this practice builds attention density in sensory experience.
Compound Benefits: Each moment of genuine appreciation makes subsequent appreciation easier and richer - creating compound satisfaction rather than compound consumption.
Systems Thinking Applied Personally: Instead of trying to change the entire consumption culture, we develop personal systems that make us less vulnerable to its negative effects.
Connection to Leadership Development
This practice isn’t separate from professional development - it’s foundational to it. Leaders who can appreciate deeply, regulate themselves effectively, and find satisfaction in present-moment experience are:
- Less driven by ego and material accumulation
- More capable of patient decision-making
- Better able to appreciate others’ contributions and perspectives
- More resilient during challenging periods
- Eligible for roles requiring wisdom over mere competence
In the context of concepts like the Cincinnatus Network, this type of personal practice develops the self-regulation and non-material motivation that enables service-oriented leadership.
Implementation Strategy
Start Small: Begin with one sensory domain and short periods of eyes-closed attention.
Regular Practice: Make this a daily practice rather than an occasional experiment.
Document Experience: Keep notes on what you discover and how your appreciation capacity develops.
Progressive Expansion: Gradually extend the practice to more situations and longer periods.
Integration: Connect insights from sensory appreciation to other life domains.
Beyond Personal Development
While this is fundamentally a personal practice, it has broader implications for how we might design more appreciation-oriented cultures and systems. Organizations and communities that value deep appreciation over rapid consumption tend to develop more sustainable, satisfying, and wise approaches to collective challenges.
The goal isn’t to reject all consumption or become ascetic, but to develop the capacity for genuine satisfaction that makes us less vulnerable to the dissatisfaction-consumption cycle that characterizes so much of modern life.
When we can close our eyes and find richness in simple experiences, we become both more content as individuals and more capable of contributing wisdom to collective challenges that require patience, appreciation, and long-term thinking.