055 Backward/Forward

Lessons & recollections for the new year

We await 2025 and all its uncertainty; I wish all of you a happy new year and a great trip around the sun. The following are mainly notes for myself but maybe you’ll find something useful to pick out of it, as well—a point I’ll return to by the end …

1. Don’t replace the mess with order borrowed from another source. Embrace the mess, lean forward into it, and if you’re on the right path, a new and organic order will emerge from it in time. So be patient, and trust. (Further reading on messes.)

2. Learn to better distinguish between time spent in curiosity (which is capable of being fulfilled in a lot of different ways, including impartial & imperfect attention) and time spent on clear projects (which often requires some planning or discipline, i.e., appropriate kinds of attention). For me these categories are often amorphous, and that’s not intrinsically bad, but I’m often overwhelmed, paralyzed, or diffuse because something casual seems major, or vice versa. My objective in months ahead is to discern the difference better, act accordingly, and when I’ve achieved a more harmonious balance, then maybe I can see about dissolving the boundaries once more.

3. Too many responses to “art” boil down to some variation of either (a) “I’d rather binge watch Netflix shows than read a complicated book and that’s The System’s fault” or (b) “I’d rather binge watch Netflix shows than read a complicated book, and that’s completely ok, there’s no shame in that, let’s reclaim popular pleasure against The System.” (What is The System? It can be any number of things, like capitalism, “late capitalism,” “woke,” etc.) But at least some of us want to advocate a little bit of effort and its rewards in opening up transcendental properties, something more active and more fun. (The paradigm shift is from consumption back into production…) Which, as an aside, doesn’t mean that I think the purpose of art is to create beauty or to follow any set path toward transcendent values; I don’t think that there is a general purpose to art. However, art can and has been (and will continue to be) put toward all kinds of particular purposes. And repurposes.

4. Organic intellectuals arise and cross-pollinate different domains. My own sympathies are toward epistemological anarchism (cf. Feyerabend) as well as more meritocratic-democratic approaches, i.e., anyone can and should get a shot. I think that most of the smart people I come across online are not siloed in a discipline and a community, but instead draw together and converse with a wide variety of interlocutors and fields of thought. Case in point, Ruby Justice Thelot made a video recently responding to a point by Balaji Srinivasan.

I like how Thelot seems fluent thinking and speaking through both an older, literacy-based paradigm and the post-literate, audiovisual paradigm. This fluency across domains will continue to be, I think, an important part of how thinkers convey their ideas in this century.

5. Two of the things I keep striving to make room for in my life are time to sit comfortably and work on intellectual and creative endeavors without distraction, and time with people who are interested in things that have at least some overlap with the intellectual and creative things I’m interested in. In 2025 I want to continue to experiment and maximize these; they aren’t the only goals I have, but they’re the two big meta-goals most relevant to whatever I write about on Attendance Optional.

6. I want to try to contribute here a little more regularly. I suspect a lot of the material ahead will fall into one of two buckets. One, I’m going to continue to write observations on films, sometimes casual, but maybe occasionally something more formal—but rooted in pleasure, observation, and appreciation. For that reason maybe necessarily “amateur,” not scholarship. Two, I’m interested in exploring ideas in education, creativity & imagination, social epistemology, information & technology, anthropology, ethology, metaphor, aesthetics, and how to live the life of the mind in community—all of these enormous fields of inquiry seem connected in important ways, so the sheer scale of all these can be prohibitive even when the ideas proliferate.

7. I dislike when people judge an opinion on the basis of how viral or upvoted it is, or how many followers its author has. Brain worms. Relatedly I harbor little respect for those perspectives which primarily seem to chase engagement, in the social media manifestation of that term (“likes and subscribes”). I do, however, value engagement in the more, I dunno, prosaic or old-fashioned sense—quality over quantity, I guess you could call it. And while I’ve treated a lot of my writing as different types of public notebooks, over the years, I want to try to treat some of what I write as an opportunity for service. Meaning, maybe I can offer helpful information to people who read this, and help them forge connections just as I’m always trying to forge them. You never know what ideas can be useful or interesting to another person, and part of that involves a little anarchy. At any rate, it’s imperative that we continue to make and circulate samizdat of the attention economy …

Peter Blume, The Rock (ca. 1944-1948)