056 Three Digressions Toward a Goal

Micro-strategies for living

1.

With the new year I’ve instituted a weekly “no screen night” for myself. So far it’s been terrific. This practice can be framed in a few different ways. Maybe it’s a prohibition, a discipline. Perhaps it’s self-care, a detox, a dopamine fast, so it’s a luxury that’s also “healthy.” Also, we tend to treat our devices, apps, and screens like demanding little idols, and in a way a screenless evening is a little habit of blasphemy against the gods of our age.

My rules are simple, and not draconian. The gist is that around 6 or so, after I’m situated at home from work, I put my phone away until I’m setting my alarm before bed later, and I don’t look at a TV or a laptop. Then I just occupy myself with other things for the evening—cooking, eating dinner, cleaning dishes, playing guitar, drawing, reading, working on a puzzle. My fiancée may join me, or not. In future weeks I might devote time to organizing my closet or writing longhand or making linocuts. It doesn’t really matter. For me the idea is that I want to tap into that part of myself that seeks stimulation, and wrest back a little more control. The impulse to check devices has become too automated.

Furthermore, I think it’s become too easy to equate leisure with consumption. The riches of both idleness and productivity are too often overlooked when we default to consumption. This isn’t news. Everybody already knows this! Nobody I’ve ever talked to about this seems to enjoy the habit of doomscrolling or robotic binge-watching or of pursuing the diminishing returns of dopamine rushes, however aware they are of it. People seem to want to take breaks from their screens. They’re just stuck in path dependencies and it takes at least a little conscious effort and incentive to pull out of them.

It’s not the devices per se which I want to detach from, but the thoughtlessness. And—practically, empirically speaking—isn’t a lot of that screen time also marked by a thoughtless thrall? If it isn’t true for you, congratulations. It is for a lot of us. Every person I’ve talked to about my little personal experiment seems to think it’s a good idea. (“Oh man, I should try that!”) Maybe you’d want to imitate what I’m doing. Maybe you want to do something entirely different. But perhaps, just a little, you should change your life.

2.

The flattening and standardization of terminology can erase meanings that might be worth our attention. I’m not calling anyone out for it—I do it too. Think of how often you hear people talked about issues: “sensory issues,” “health issues.” These phrases encompass vast ranges of meaning and gravity. Or “worker.” I suspect that at least part of the genesis of “___ worker” is an attempt at class conscious framing—workers aren’t simply people who labor in fields or manipulate machines in factories, but also those who partake in the creative and service-oriented parts of the economy, thus, “art worker,” “culture worker,” “sex worker,” “music worker,” “cinema worker.” Sometimes these phrases imply everyone’s in the same boat, with the same concerns, and I think occasionally this is true. But it also might plaster over important differences, like levels of management or ownership, or different kinds of accountability to customers, collaborators, vendors, and so on.

3.

One person I follow on social media (not a mutual), an intelligent guy who prides himself on his research and his rationalism, tweeted in the wake of Trump & Musk’s USAID demolition something to the effect that previous Republican administrations were not opposed to the government gravy train, they were just envious that the Democrats’ gravy train was so much bigger. He implied that only now was someone cleaning house because it was an ethically “good” thing to do. Well … this guy soon deleted his remark, perhaps because he realized that it must have made him look like a mark. But he’s not alone. It’s the age of credulity for a certain type of intellectual. The type I’m thinking of has cultivated a brand as politically “open-minded,” or even progressive, but after a while, one notices that they’re always very quick to give every benefit of the doubt to Trump and his supporters.

It’s always easy to imagine oneself as a stable and valued part of one’s aspirational world.

One of the problems that keeps manifesting in the “heterodox” commentariat is a kind of audience capture, whereby some writer or thinker’s reputation grows on a brand of open-mindedness, but they evolve from insightful to reactive, and start calcifying into a crusader for an issue or a topic, saying the same thing over and over to an audience looking for another hit that sounds like the previous ones, but just a little different, a little newer. And it seems like a lot of these people are skeptical of so many things that merit skepticism in our world, yet suspend this skepticism for the various heads of a powerful Hydra. One is left with little choice but to disregard the their independence.

I do appreciate when people with audiences mindfully resist this impulse and withhold the “fix.” This is the kind of thing that will aid readers: swerves, samizdat, resistance training. I don’t mean this is a direct antidote to political crises continuing to unfold in my country and the world over, none of which are going to be solved by reading the right kind of book or appreciating the right kind of movie. I usually don’t comment on those issues directly here, not because they aren’t important, but because I don’t see what there is to be gained by rehashing opinions and analyses re: ruling class activities that you can find better and more quickly in so many other places. But I do think that a part of how we all got here has had to do with the reconfiguration of our attention, and so it will help to continue reconfiguring it into better shape.