To resolve the tension between democracy and liberalism: What is a constitution for? 30 Jan 2023 10:48 AM (2 years ago)
Over the long, bloody haul of the 20th century, we replaced monarchy and religion with democracy and liberalism. No longer were we bound by the dogma of religious texts and the dictates of dictators; instead, we insisted on “individual freedom and collective self-governance.” We spoke of liberalism and democracy as inextricably linked and our inevitable destiny — famously captured in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History?
By 1997, Fareed Zakaria had already warned of The Rise of Illiberal Democracy, describing in detail the illiberal actions taken by democratically elected leaders in Russia, Argentina, Iran, Ethiopia, and elsewhere. For Zakaria, the purpose of democracy is to ensure liberalism, protecting “an individual’s autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source — state, church, or society.” But outside of the West, democracy was not uniformly producing liberal outcomes.
While the world at large has become more democratic and more liberal since 1997, two things have changed since Zakaria’s warning. First, illiberal democracy has come to the West, including in the United States where activists from both parties defend the use of illiberal means to (in their view) sustain democracy. Second, critics increasingly question the liberal ideal to protect an individual’s autonomy while loneliness increases and happiness declines. The cover story of this month’s Harper’s asks, Is Liberalism Worth Saving? In the Atlantic, Shadi Hamid describes the divergence of democracy from liberalism and ultimately argues that we ought to respect the outcome of democratic elections, even when we disagree with the illiberal actions of elected leaders (such as Indonesia’s criminalization of sex outside of marriage or India’s decision to exclude many Muslims from citizenship).
Largely absent from the debate about democracy’s detachment from liberalism is whether we ought to consider changes to the democratic process that 1) give citizens more input into defining the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of government and 2) creates a healthy buffer between our commitment to democracy and the contentious debates over social values. Are we trying to do too much with a single constitution?
A few conversations in recent months led me to consider a deceptively simple question: What is the purpose of a constitution? Those conversations began in Chile, where a few friends were working on an ambitious referendum that aimed to replace one of the world’s most conservative constitutions with one of the most progressive. Around the same time, the US Supreme Court overturned the right to abortion established nearly 50 years ago while constitutional scholars debated proposals to reform the Supreme Court. I then traveled to Kenya, which put into place one of the world’s most ambitious and progressive constitutions in 2010 to “seek social transformation through constitutionalism.” But 12 years after the Constitution was established, the Kenyan government has increasingly undermined its importance by ignoring the rulings of Kenya’s Supreme Court. Finally, I discovered US@250, a project to commemorate 250 years of American Independence in 2026 and to imagine how to “to build the America that has never fully been.”
From these conversations, I began to develop a new point of view about the purpose of a constitution: It ought to define the rules of a democracy, not the social compact of rights and responsibilities between a government and its people. In the following sections, I offer three related arguments:
- Progressives (in the United States, in Chile, and around the world) are making a mistake by seeking social progress through legal interpretation instead of political persuasion.
- A constitution should establish the rules of a democracy, not define the political aspirations of its people.
- A constitution should last for at least 1,000 years. But the guiding principles of any society must be revisited and revised every 50 years. Each generation should have at least one opportunity in its lifetime to revise the social compact and define its shared identity.
The mistake of seeking social progress through legal interpretation
Over the past three years, several activist friends in Chile have been hard at work to replace one of the world’s most conservative constitutions with one of the most progressive. Last September, Chileans went to the polls, where they overwhelmingly (and sensibly) rejected the proposed replacement constitution.
Chile is a mostly conservative, Catholic country that only legalized divorce in 2004. But over the past 10 to 15 years, the college-educated children of a growing middle class (including my friends) have become very progressive and politically ambitious. They want to legalize abortion, gender parity on corporate boards, universal public healthcare, guaranteed public housing, and protections for the environment that would slow Chile’s lucrative copper and lithium mining. Their mistake, in my view, was to seek their goals through an all-or-nothing referendum on a new constitution rather than slowly building popular support through persuasive politics and the legislative process.
Over the past 50 years, conservatives in the US have advanced a vision of the Constitution — originalism — to offer a façade of neutrality that, in reality, advances their own political preferences. In response, my colleague Larry Kramer argued on the Ezra Klein Show that liberals must define their own vision of the constitution to compete with originalism. He points to the “Anti-Oligarchy Constitution,” as one example that envisions the Constitution as a charter intended to move us away from Europe’s 18th-century oligarchy and toward increasing egalitarianism. Jedediah Purdy goes a step further, advocating for a progressive constitutionalism that 1) expands access to voting, 2) establishes a concept of economic citizenship, 3) reforms criminal justice, and 4) respects the rights of non-citizens.
Will a new “vision” of the Constitution influence how the Supreme Court interprets it, or should we seek other paths toward egalitarianism that don’t depend on the so-called “judicial supremacy” of nine politically appointed, and unaccountable judges? As I contend below, our collective commitment to the rules of democracy will be stronger if we separate it from the contentious social conflicts that too often are decided through legal interpretation rather than political persuasion.
Designing democracy versus debating our rights
According to conservative interpretation, the Constitution intended to create a country where property is respected, you are free to practice any religion, say whatever you want, and the government should mostly leave you alone. According to the liberal interpretation, the Constitution is an aspirational document meant to nudge us along down the path toward equality and social justice. The actual Constitution is famously concise and lends itself to both interpretations. It establishes a republic that honors both liberty and equality without offering much guidance on how to resolve the inherent tension that lies within.
In fact, the 4,400-word Constitution barely mentions liberty or equality. In its original form, the document serves two functions: First, it creates a national government consisting of a legislative, an executive, and a judicial branch, with a system of checks and balances; second, it divides power between the federal government and the states. It wasn’t until four years later, in 1791, that the Bill of Rights was ratified and the Constitution took on a third function: to protect the individual liberties of American citizens.
The U.S. Constitution is the world’s oldest and shortest active constitution. By comparison, India’s constitution is 30 times longer and Mexico’s is 10 times longer.1 With a handful of exceptions (Norway, the Netherlands, Argentina), most active constitutions were drafted in the past century and serve multiple functions. If you were to read them all, what would you find?
Helpfully, Elliot Bulmer has done the hard work for us, highlighting a menu of eight core possible functions found across many constitutions. Most fundamentally, according to Bulmer, a constitution defines the rules of the game:
Imagine two teams playing a game of football. If the team in possession of the ball could change the rules of the game and appoint its own referee, then the game would hardly be fair. One team would always win, and the other would lose—or simply stop playing. This is like political life without a democratic constitutional order. The party, faction or group in power makes up the rules, and those in opposition are excluded from a game that is rigged against them. A democratic constitutional order acts like the rules of the game, and its guardians—for example, a constitutional court—are like the referee. They make sure that everyone can play the ‘political game’ fairly.
Eliot Bulmer, What is a Constitution? Principles and Concepts
And yet he cautions that “even the best constitution cannot pave a road or build a sewer; it cannot manage a clinic or administer a vaccine; it cannot educate a child or take care of an elderly person.” But that is precisely what the drafters of many modern constitutions aim to achieve. To continue with Bulmer’s analogy, they attempt to not just set the rules of the game, but also how to structure the offense.
Consider South Africa’s 1996 post-apartheid constitution, which guarantees that everyone “is entitled to reasonable access to housing, health care, and education.” That sounds nice, but when the evicted residents of an informal settlement on private land sued the government for their constitutional right to housing, South Africa’s Constitutional Court turned them down. What is the use of a constitutional right if it is not upheld? Similarly, Kenya’s constitution includes a number of social and economic rights, including that “every person has the right to the highest attainable standard of health, including reproductive health care.” Unlike in South Africa, Kenya’s Supreme Court often upholds these rights only for the government administration to consistently ignore their implementation.
Scandinavian countries are generally better than Kenya and South Africa at providing housing, education, and welfare even though these things are not mentioned in their constitutions. Social services have broad popular support in Scandinavia because they have been negotiated and debated in the press, in parliament, and at the dining room table — not decreed by a handful of justices in black robes.
The Bill of Rights was, in the long run, a mistake with good intentions. Whereas the Constitution mostly established the rules of the game for the three branches of government, the Bill of Rights defined the rights of citizens vis-à-vis their government. By placing those rights in the Constitution instead of legislation, we relegated the authority of their interpretation to nine unaccountable individuals on the Supreme Court and made it nearly impossible to revise them.
Consider the Third Amendment, which decrees that during times of peace no soldier can take over someone’s house without their consent. Just imagine, this was necessary to declare in 1791! While the Third Amendment is utterly irrelevant today, others remain perennially pertinent, even if they were drafted to respond to wildly different circumstances.
For instance, the Fourth Amendment says the government can’t search your home unless it has a warrant for probable cause. This was one of the contributing causes that led to the Revolution when British customs officers routinely searched colonists’ homes in the 1760s for any goods that were purchased from Dutch or French traders without paying an import tax to the British Crown. 250 years later, conservative activist Larry Klayman used the same amendment to argue that the Obama administration should not be able to collect information about Americans’ phone calls in its efforts to thwart terrorist attacks.
Should we use a right that was drafted in the context of overzealous tax officials in the 1760s to decide whether the government should be able to keep a database of information about phone calls in its attempt to prevent terrorist attacks in 2013?[2] Do we want that decision to be made based on the legal interpretation of nine Supreme Court justices? Doesn’t it seem important to have a society-wide debate about the trade-offs between freedom from government surveillance and freedom from terrorist attacks? The Supreme Court found that wholesale government monitoring of information about our phone calls was unconstitutional. And yet, when it comes to paying taxes — the original motivation of the Fourth Amendment — state governments can still monitor your cell phone records to determine your residency.
💡 When we can no longer locate the pulse of principled constitutional change in a court, maybe we will again find it in the people. If so, then this passing may ultimately be for the good.
~ Larry Lessig, Fidelity & Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution
When a constitutional right becomes a policy debate
What happens when a rule moves from the legal interpretation of nine judges to the political arena?
No sane person would argue that John Bingham intended to guarantee the right to abortion when he drafted the 14th Amendment in 1866. The constitution was amended to respond to a particular context and then interpreted to apply to another. Specifically, the 14th Amendment extended civil and legal rights to formerly enslaved Black citizens. Whatever your views on abortion, we can agree that the application of the 14th Amendment was a leap of imaginative legal interpretation.
What happened once the right to abortion was repealed in June? For one, it created a living nightmare for thousands of American women — the “stories that the anti-abortion movement doesn’t want you to know,” as Jill Filipovic has been documenting on her Substack. Also, abortion became a political liability for Republicans — at the federal and state level. Following the Supreme Court’s decision, Americans expressed more support for access to abortion.
Thank you to the millions of same-sex and interracial couples who truly made this moment possible. By living as your true selves, you changed the hearts and minds of people around you. #RespectforMarriageAct https://t.co/o0EeY1vOq7
— Sen. Tammy Baldwin (@SenatorBaldwin) November 29, 2022
Why did Democrats perform better than expected in the midterm elections? According to analyst David Shor, “abortion went from being a somewhat good issue for Democrats to becoming the single best issue.” It also forced Republicans to express their support for contraceptives and policies that support single mothers. By taking away the right to abortion from the Supreme Court, it increased political participation and popular support for abortion access among the people and their representatives.
The worse a society’s politics, the more it will lean on the law to resolve deep-seated disagreements, which tends to deepen them further still.
~ Ian MacDougall paraphrasing Grant Gilmore
You could argue that we needed the Supreme Court to protect the rights of women, people of color, and LGBTQ until there was enough popular support to convert those rights into legislation. I am not making that argument. My argument is that a modern constitution in the 21st century ought to enforce the rules of the political game but not define civil liberties or political aspirations. Let’s use one of the most contentious issues of the day in the United States as an example.
What if the Supreme Court were to issue a decision that guaranteed the right for anyone to enter any bathroom no matter their assigned sex at birth? Or what if they did the opposite? What if they said it was unconstitutional to enter a bathroom that does not correspond to the sex listed on your birth certificate?
Some cisgendered women say they feel unsafe in a bathroom with other women who were assigned male at birth. Some transgendered women say they feel unsafe being forced to use the men’s bathroom just because it was their assigned sex at birth. Some men and women say they feel uncomfortable in unisex bathrooms. How do we resolve these tensions? Do we want to delegate the decision to the Supreme Court? Or should the rules emerge iteratively over time as we try out various approaches?
Separating the Constitution from the Social Compact
“The costs are significant when constitutional law pushes too far into the domain of politics. Today, many of our most pressing political concerns are ultimately resolved in the bloodless vernacular of constitutional law, which rejects the stuff that matters to ordinary people.”
Ian MacDougall
The rights of citizens and responsibilities of the government ought to be debated and updated more often than the rules of democracy – and not just by a handful of justices. A constitution ought to stay relevant for at least 1,000 years, if not longer, while citizens deserve the opportunity to revise the social compact every 50 years as technology, demographics, and social norms evolve. In 2026, the United States will celebrate its 250th birthday. It presents a unique opportunity to revisit our past and reimagine our shared future. As the US@250 project challenges us:
In 1776, the colonies severed from The British Empire in a declaration of independence. In 2026, we can design and choose how we commemorate that revolt. America was—and can be again—a creative act. We have within us the ability to do the work, and strengthen the muscles, to build the America that has never fully been. A nation that still we have the audacity to imagine — and the will to create.
Imagine, the U.S. Constitution was drafted in secrecy by just 55 dudes over five months. The telegraph wouldn’t be invented for another 60 years. The population at the time was roughly 2.5 million, of which around 80% were European immigrants/descendants and 20% were enslaved Africans and African descendants.3 Today, we are a diverse nation of more than 330 million hyper-connected people — descendants of ancestors from all corners of the globe.
A number of recent books have envisioned America’s next civil war, including David French‘s Divided We Fall, Stephen Marche’s The Next Civil War, and Barbara Walter’s How Civil Wars Start. If the first American Civil War was fought over slavery, just what would be fighting over today? Assigned sex and bathrooms? DEI training in the workplace? Pronouns? When we step back from the intensity of the news cycle and social media reactions, it becomes clear that our differences today are minor compared to the past. There is much that holds us together as a nation despite the narrative that we are coming undone.
We can do two things at once. We can process the trauma and injustices of the past while we recreate the solidarity and shared identity of our future. As Keith Yamashita writes, confronting our pain is how we achieve flourishing — both individually and collectively. Imagine if we were to spend a few days, or at least a few minutes, in 2026 to reimagine our social compact, collective identity, and democratic commitment.
Liberalism and Democracy
We consider liberal democracy as an inseparable package because they developed concurrently. And yet the culture war debate over liberalism erodes our collective commitment to the rules of democracy. Authoritarian leaders take advantage of our social divisions to flout democratic rules and consolidate their power. Our commitment to the rules of democracy ought to be sacred, unanimous, and non-negotiable whereas the social compact of rights and responsibilities will always be contentious and influenced by technological change.
For instance, what do we consider free speech versus incitement to violence? How much surveillance will we allow to feel safe? Who benefits from the natural resources beneath the soil? Should all abortions be legal? Who is permitted to become a citizen and what are the rights of an immigrant? How do we correct for the injustices of the past without creating new injustices for future generations? These foundational questions that ought to be debated and revisited by all citizens every 50 years, not decided by the interpretation of old rules by unaccountable judges.
We can strengthen our collective commitment to the rules of democracy by separating it from our debates about the rights and responsibilities of citizens and government.
[1] Wikipedia has a great table listing all of the world’s constitutions, sortable by word count and the date it was ratified.
[2] Of course, there was two centuries of case law that set the precedent for the 2013 decision, but my point is that the concept of the Fourth Amendment should not have been included in the Constitution in the first place. Rather, it should have been a federal law passed by Congress that was revised over the years.
[3] Tellingly, there aren’t reliable Native American population estimates.
Could Kristen Bell, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos end global hunger? 14 Jan 2023 1:20 PM (2 years ago)
I rarely publish essays on my website anymore. For more regular updates, I’ve started keeping a weekly newsletter on Substack.
I subscribe to Yuval Harari’s theory of social progress: society improves when we replace a bad story (slavery is okay, women shouldn’t vote, governments should run businesses) with better stories. So that’s what I’m trying to do with this essay; I’m trying to replace a bad story (“you can save the life of a child by subscribing to a box of granola bars”) with a better story (“we can absolutely prevent hunger over the next decade with the right mix of research, policies, inventions, investments, and government capability”). Okay, here goes!
I thought that we had moved past White Savior Barbie, but then I discovered that Kristen Bell — who literally plays a princess in Frozen — founded a granola bar company called (I shit you not) “This Saves Lives.” 🙄 Every purchase of a gluten-free, non-GMO granola bar will allegedly save the life of a starving child like Chepengat from northwestern Kenya. (The non-GMO part is especially ironic, as we’ll explore below.) Subscribers to a monthly package of granola bars, we are told, will have “3x the average impact” without explaining what “average impact” is or how it is tripled. This is a granola bar for people who want to feel good when they lay their head on the pillow at night … and that’s about it.
I don’t mean to attack Kristen Bell, who has courageously spoken out about her struggles with depression and anxiety. My intent is to criticize feel-good “save the children” initiatives that give peanut butter bars to hungry kids without addressing the broken food systems that cause recurring hunger in the first place.
From the 1960s until 2018, the percentage of undernourished people around the world fell dramatically thanks to gains from the so-called Green Revolution: better seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and farming techniques. But since 2018, hunger and malnutrition are on the rise and projected to continue rising as the world faces:
- A global shortage of grain and fertilizer from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
- Rising food costs from inflation
- Increased frequency of severe weather from climate change, including East Africa’s worst drought in more than 40 years and recent flooding in Pakistan
These three challenges, along with a growing population, will increase hunger over the coming years. (The IMF estimatesthat the cost of protecting vulnerable households just over the next year is an extra $5–7 billion above the usual $6B already spent on food aid.)
Obviously, we have to prioritize getting basic calories to hungry households, but it won’t address the fundamental problem. Last month, reflecting on the lack of progress toward SDG goal #2 to end hunger, Bill Gates wrote an essay (and gave a TED-like presentation) on the global food crisis: “The goal should not simply be giving more food aid. It should be to ensure that no aid is needed in the first place.”
Wakanda and Turkana
I had the disorienting experience this week of seeing two radically different sides of Kenya within just a couple of days. First, I watched the opening night of Wakanda Forever surrounded by the Gen Z children of Kenya’s elite — the so-called “Sarit youth” named after the luxury mall where we watched the opening night of Wakanda Forever in 3D IMAX. A few days later, I traveled to Lodwar in Turkana County, which borders South Sudan and is the site of a years-long drought and hunger crisis. Both glimpses of Kenya are true. Nairobi is studded with Wakanda-like, glistening skyscrapers and impressive infrastructure. Kenya’s GDP per capita has more than quadrupled over the past 20 years. Everywhere you look, young people in the latest fashion are snapping selfies in front of luxury cars. At the same time, some Kenyan children are still dying from malnutrition while inequality has widened. With rose-tinted glasses, Nairobi looks a lot like Wakanda. But take them off, and it’s more like the Capitol of Panem from The Hunger Games.
Devastation In Turkana:
— Citizen TV Kenya (@citizentvkenya) October 31, 2022
Famine ravages villages in Turkana
Shocking images of malnourished children in Turkana
Turkana governor appeals for urgent assistance #MondayReport @TrevorOmbija pic.twitter.com/BFbXzBCrsr
So, why are children are still dying of hunger in Turkana when Kenya’s GDP per capita has quadrupled over the last twenty years and new SUVs search for parking in Nairobi‘s many shopping malls?
In fact, Turkana County is a case of incredible progress since Kenya’s 2010 constitution decentralized public finance and decision-making from the central government to its 47 counties. Before “devolution,” there was practically no presence of government in the area. No roads, no hospitals, no public schools. The few services that existed were managed by the Catholic Church and humanitarian organizations, as Nanjala Nyabola describes in a powerful essay in Guernica:
Under this system, the Catholic Church and international development organizations (which were supporting millions of refugees fleeing conflicts in neighboring countries) were providing key services that the state would not provide, like healthcare and education. “You must understand, for the last fifty years the diocese has been the government here. Only devolution has changed that.”
Today, Turkana has a public hospital, highways, schools, and decent 4G internet. In fact, Turkana has the largest budget of all of Kenya’s 47 counties other than Nairobi. (The amount of money transferred to each county depends on its population, size, and amount of poverty; whereas Turkana is big, poor, and populous.) So if the government is well funded, why then does hunger persist?
There are no silver bullets, no cheap solutions. These things take time. The vast majority of Turkana County’s million residents are nomadic pastoralists whose ancestors came from the Nile River Valley and conquered the Turkana Basin in the 1600s. After resisting British control for a decade, they were ultimately were conquered themselves, and drafted to fight in the two world wars. They weren’t exactly thanked for their service; Turkana was mostly ignored during British rule and not much changed with independence. While there has always been conflict between the Turkana and neighboring ethnic groups, it wasn’t until they were armed and militarized by the British that the conflicts became so deadly.
For 300 years, the Turkana were conquerers. Then, a century ago, they were conquered by the British, militarized, and ignored. Only during the past decade have the Turkana begun constructing a true social contract with a well-resourced, representative government that is building roads, hospitals, and struggling to respond to a long drought exacerbated by climate change for which they are not responsible.
There is only so much progress you can expect in ten years. The photos of hungry children in Turkana are heartbreaking, but ultimately this is a story of progress.
@DCA_Kenya and @SAPCONE are running education campaigns at Natole Primary School in Kalokol to help learners get ready for school. The event, which was attended by parents, BOM, school administration, and the project team, was also an opportunity for parents to register children pic.twitter.com/vo9Xy31FLV
— Sustainable Approaches for Community Empowerment. (@SAPCONE) November 11, 2022
Meanwhile, the international humanitarian organizations like World Vision that have long provided basic services to residents of Turkana over the past 50 years are transitioning to strengthen local government through advocacy, outreach, and accountability (instead of duplicating government’s responsibilities).
With a social contract in place and the emergence of a functional local government, Turkana now has the budget and capacity to implement the new and old solutions that will finally put an end to hunger for good. I will describe some of those solutions below, but first, a quick detour to ponder whether the world’s richest man has enough money to solve world hunger.
Could Elon Musk solve world hunger?
While it feels like a decade ago, it was only last year that David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program (and former governor of South Carolina) got into a Twitter spat with Elon Musk about spending $6.6 billion to “save 42 million people from starvation.” This was a real amateur move by Beasley, perpetuating the narrative that rich foreigners can “save” millions with the signature of a single check. Musk, who was born in South Africa, was right to push back:
If WFP can describe on this Twitter thread exactly how $6B will solve world hunger, I will sell Tesla stock right now and do it.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021
USAID and the UN Food Program have plenty enough money for food aid, which is typically purchased from American farmers and distributed to communities facing hunger and famine. But free food can displace local agricultural production. If you’re a local farmer, how do you compete with free? So, increasingly humanitarian organizations and local governments prefer to give hungry communities cash that they can spend on local food production to boost the demand for local crops.
The Taskforce on Digitizatization of Relief Assistance was over the weekend engaged in public participation in Turkana, Garissa, Machakos, Isiolo, Kilifi, Baringo & Narok counties to get views from community members on the shift from relief food distribution to cash transfers pic.twitter.com/MlKrmyDwTR
— Office of the Dep. Pres.;State Dept for Devolution (@Devolution_254) November 5, 2019
Elon Musk was right to push back against food aid as a band aid for broken food systems. Of course, a year after his Twitter debate with Beasley about $6 billion, he decided to spend $44 billion on Twitter in what
Dave Karpfcalls his midlife crisis. But Musk, with a net worth of $200 billion and a signatory to the Giving Pledge, has said that he wants to step up his philanthropic giving later in life. Bezos just announced that he plans to give away the majority of his $122 billion fortune during his lifetime. So, how could $300 billion help put an end to hunger for good?
- Invest in local production of fertilizer and seeds to end reliance on imports from China, Russia, and the U.S. This is already (finally) starting to happen in Tanzania and Rwanda with some matching contributions from USAID and the Gates Foundation.
- Improve irrigation and access to groundwater. As Michelle Williams wrote in the FT: “the volume of groundwater in Africa is about 20 times that of river and lakes. Yet in drought-stricken sub-Saharan Africa, less than 5 per cent of what is available is currently being used. most countries in Africa have enough groundwater to last decades, even if rainfalls diminish.”
- Better farmer training through agricultural extension workers, who work for local seed and fertilizer companies.
- Decrease food loss from insects between harvest and the point of sale. In Kenya, 40% of food is lost from the farm gate to the family table.
- More efficient supply chains linking farmers to consumers.
- Better data availability about weather, market prices, flood plains, commodity futures, and soil quality to inform farming decisions.
The good news is that these opportunities are all common sense. Ask anyone in Kenya’s government and civil society and they’ll tell you, of course this is what needs to happen. In fact, most of these activities form the basis of Kenya’s National Agriculture Investment Plan.
Unlike climate change, which is shrouded with unknown variables, we absolutely know how to address hunger. For all of the Gates Foundation’s foibles in how it works with civil society, it has demonstrated how to work in partnership with governments to accelerate research and the implementation of agriculture policies that will finally put an end to hunger. (In fact, Bill Gates was here in Nairobi today to discuss food security with Kenya’s new president.) At the same time, a new generation of local civil society organizations like Institute of Public Finance – Kenya and Friends of Lake Turkana is ensuring that the county government carries out its development plan to benefit the most vulnerable communities in the county.
Break out sessions during the capacity strengthening of the Turkana County Budget and Economic Forum on County Planning and Budgeting.This is for enhanced oversight role and mapping opportunities for engagement of the next CBEF.
— Institute of Public Finance (@ipfkenya) May 6, 2022
2/2 pic.twitter.com/ltD4Ubp9Nz
Elon Musk is getting flak for demanding that Twitter employees commit to “hard core.” It’s hard for me to get worked up about Twitter. If it disappears, something else will surely take its place. And yet, “hardcore commitment” is exactly what is needed to improve food systems and end hunger over the next decade.
Hopefully, Bezos will finish his $500 million yacht soon and start dedicating his time and fortune to addressing the world’s most pressing issues. Similarly, I hope that Musk will move past his Twitter distraction soon enough. If electric cars, rockets, and satellite internet aren’t sufficient challenges, then might I suggest that addressing the real roots of hunger will provide him more meaning and impact than working on social media.
The Last and Next 15 Years of Twitter 19 Jul 2022 8:54 AM (2 years ago)
I turned 15 on Twitter earlier this year, a long relationship by modern measures. We had our early infatuation, when we probably spent too much time together. Then we had our glory years as we settled into a comfortable routine. But over the past five or so years we got into a rut and I was preparing for divorce. Another Twitter user DMed me, offering $2,000 for my username, and I figured it was time to go. Clearly, I was at a risk of this turning into a toxic relationship.
But my friend Luis convinced me to persevere. He reminded me of the good times and helped me realize that the relationship could be saved if I were more intentional and made more of an effort. Not only that, we decided to launch a year-long project together that would take place largely on Twitter. We’re calling it The Twelve Inquiries, which sounds a little grandiose, and we’re thinking of it as a monthly conversational salon with internet friends about topics that interest us. I hope you’ll join us. You can read more about it here and subscribe to the newsletter and podcast.
We figured it was fitting for the first of the twelve topics to be Twitter itself. (And that was before the Internet when ape-shit-crazy over the richest man saying he’d buy it on a lark, turn it into a WeChat-like super app, and then … nah, never mind. 🤷♂️) So if you’ve been questioning your own relationship with Twitter, if you want to indulge in some nostalgia for its early days, and if you’re looking for tips on how to make it a more joyful experience, please join us on July 28th at 5pm ET to discuss the best and worst of Twitter with our friends Emily Parker, Lena Zuñiga, and Noah Segan. If you click here, you can set a reminder on Twitter for the Twitter Spaces conversation.
If you're down to explore some old school Twitter nostalgia with us, please join us for a Twitter Spaces on July 28th at 5pm ET. We've got a fun conversation lined up with three Twitter pros: @emilydparker, @lenazun & @kidblue. You can set a reminder here: https://t.co/t5ZjUBiJdD
— David Sasaki (@oso) July 14, 2022
Digital Intimacy & Innocence
Here is one of my first tweets:
trader joes frozen waffles aren't so bad
— David Sasaki (@oso) March 2, 2007
In its early days, Twitter was an online version of what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a “third place.” Not work, not home, but the places in between where community is built: the French cafe, the German biergarten, the English pub. As I looked over my first few months of tweets, I noticed how they quickly shifted from boring updates about my days to witty banter with friends … and then with strangers. It all led to a new feeling of “ambient awareness” that we now take for granted:
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update, each individual bit of social information is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating.
The Gamification of Speech
Back in 2007, when Elon Musk’s net worth was still less than $1 billion, before there was a remote possibility of Trump as Tweeter in Chief, no one could have predicted that Twitter would become “the de factor public town square.” The platform was notoriously unreliable and struggled to compete with more exciting alternatives: Tumblr, Digg, Flickr, MySpace, Foursquare, Delicious, Facebook, and Blogger. What set Twitter apart at the time was its mobile-first design just as Apple began developing its first iPhone.
Twitter was an accident. It started as a side project for programmers to keep each other updated while they developed a podcasting app for the web. There was no vision, no strategy, and no business model. It just sort of stumbled along inelegantly, trying its best to catch up to the homemade hacks of its users: a way to respond to the tweets of others, a way to share others’ tweets in your timeline, and a way to message other users privately. Unexpectedly, these new features would present Twitter with a tempting business model: personalized advertising by tracking every user engagement and optimizing for more time spent on the platform.
They would also lead to what C. Thi Nguyen calls the gamification of public discourse. Gone was the witty, ”third place” banter after a morning cup of coffee or evening cocktail. Twitter transformed from a conversation to a game. The goal of the game is to enhance your brand and influence. The way to score points is by increasing your number of likes, retweets, and followers.
Here’s how Jonathan Haidt describes the transition from coffeeshop banter to performative game:
Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics … By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game … Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action.
Competing Cultures of Use
It has become a cliche for journalists and celebrities to make a big deal about quitting Twitter, only to return with their tail between their legs a few weeks later. As a WaPo article put it, “quitting Twitter is the new moving to Canada.” While Facebook, Instagram, and SnapChat copy each other’s new layouts every quarter, the humble Tweet has persisted as social media’s most durable format.
For all its headaches and annoying sensationalism, Twitter is still a source of useful information, comedic delight, and a measure of the cultural zeitgeist. Where else to turn when you’re not sure if it was an earthquake or a passing garbage truck? Did Will Smith really just walk up to Chris Rock on live television and slap him? What is it like to be living in Ukraine while Russia invades? How are people reacting to the latest political debate, or for that matter the latest episode of our favorite TV show?
Twitter has always been a sphere of what Jean Burgess and Nancy Baym call “competing cultures of use.” Brand influencers, academics, journalists, comedians, activists, and investors all have different uses for the platform. In Real Life, activists and investors probably go to different coffeeshops; on Twitter they can’t avoid one another.
Lying beneath the angry, sensational game for influence, attention, and shame is still the quaint coffeeshop and witty banter. Can we still find the best of Twitter without getting distracted by the worst? And can Twitter, in its current state of disarray, find a business model that nudges us to become our better selves online? Or at least not our worst selves?
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I am looking forward to the conversation. I hope you’ll join us on July 28th!
What Strava Segments Taught Me About Striving 1 Jul 2022 10:49 AM (2 years ago)
The pandemic has been a boon to the social training platform Strava, which grew by about two million new athletes each month in 2020. Nearly twice as many cyclists shared their workouts between April and June of 2020 compared to the year before. And if bicycle manufacturers were able to keep up with the demand for new bikes, Strava would likely have grown even faster.
There are two types of social media. The likes of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are ephemeral streams of hot takes and memes, often forgotten as quickly as they grab our attention. A second type of social platform encourages its users to attach their digital fingerprints to things from real life. Think of how GoodReads and Yelp attach your reviews to books and restaurants; similarly, Strava allows its users to do something similar for roads and trails. Somewhere near you is a segment of road that Strava transformed into a monthly competition among cyclists and runners.
Segments on Strava are simply a start point and end point on any stretch of road or trail; for example, this segment up O’Shaughnessy and Twin Peaks, one of San Francisco’s classic climbs with stunning views of downtown framed by the bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other.
But for the cyclist, a segment is more than a start point and end point. Often we’ve ridden the same segment dozens or even hundreds of times. We know every bump, turn, and pothole in the road. Most importantly, we know our PR — our personal record — and how much effort it will take to beat it.
The segment above begins at the last stoplight before an uninterrupted ascent up O’Shaughnessy Avenue, perched above a wooded canyon to the right. As I pass through the green light, a bike computer the size of a fig newton beeps and flashes “Ready? Go!” Like so much in life, the key to cycling is to maintain a steady breath without becoming overwhelmed. Soon, I am approaching the midway point of the segment, a nearly flat stretch that is fully exposed to the warm winter sun. My heart rate is falling, my legs begin to feel stronger.
I’m on track to beat my PR, but I’ll need to pedal just as hard up the second half of the segment, the famed climb from Portola Boulevard up to Twin Peaks. It begins with a steep incline over pockmarked pavement before easing into freshly paved, hairpin turns with expansive views of San Bruno Mountain to the south. At each turn, I know the necessary pace to beat my PR.
My heart is like a hummingbird, my legs are swollen with fatigue, and then finally I come to the top of the climb, greeted with the best views of one of the world’s most scenic cities. I managed to beat my fastest time by 12 seconds. I am filled with a calm contentment as my heart rate and breathing slowed.
Cycling is the only aspect of my life that I am certain I’m getting better at, an antidote to the otherwise pervasive feeling of imposter syndrome. Am I becoming a better manager? A better writer? A better husband or friend? I have no idea. There is no way for me to know if I am improving, merely repeating the same patterns, or actually regressing as I grow older. But with cycling, the evidence is right in front of me; the harder I train, the faster I get, the more confidence I have. I wish I could say the same about my work or my writing; I know that I have good days and bad days, but I never really know if I’m growing or improving.
For a certain type of goal-oriented, analytical mind, Strava segments are an improbably powerful incentive, which is what makes them dangerous. On June 6, 2010, Kim Flint, a 41-year-old electrical engineer, rode his bike down a popular road for cyclists and dog walkers in Berkeley’s Tilden Park. Flint wrote on Twitter later in the day: “49.3 mph, on a bike. How I find religion on Sunday morning.” Flint’s time descending South Park Drive was the fastest ever recorded on Strava. But 10 days later another local cyclist, a software engineer at Strava as it happens, bested Flint’s time by four seconds. Flint attempted to retake the fastest time the next week. Instead, he drifted onto the wrong side of the road, ran into an oncoming car, and died.
Tech writer Kashmir Hill questioned whether Flint’s death was the first “quantified self fatality,” a case study of how the data, gamification, and social prestige of online media push us past our better judgment. Cyclists often complain about Strava’s downsides even as they are unable to resist its addictive appeal. The constant feedback of performance data and social comparison encourages users to constantly strive harder without taking pleasure in the more enjoyable parts of the sport: enjoying the passing scenery, slowing down to chat with a fellow cyclist, stopping for a pastry, and aimlessly exploring new routes without purpose or destination.
We think of dopamine as a chemical reward, but in fact dopamine is released in anticipation of achievement and recognition, whether they are attained or not. The anticipation of seemingly small incentives — the like button on Facebook, the follower count on Twitter, the top ten list for a Strava segment — can trigger our dopamine addiction so that we are constantly seeking, never satisfied.
I am reminded of the ultimate gamification platform, capitalism, and the power of money to bestow prestige and inspire striving. Just as many cyclists obsess over Strava segments, the American Dreamer faces the quantified self of capitalism: our net worth, credit score, and investment portfolio. This omnipresent feedback about our fitness, finances, and online popularity is unprecedented and, it seems to me, under-studied. How are these digital metrics so powerful in shaping our behavior? And what are the downsides to the constant pursuit of excellence?
In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that our economic standard of living would increase by four to eight times over the next century; and as a result, the average work week would fall to 15 hours as we spend more of our time on leisure and less of our time working.
Keynes accurately predicted the rising economic standard of living over the past century, but he was wrong that we would choose to work less as we earn more. In fact, studies of time diaries show that higher wage earners spend more time working than lower wage workers. Why do we choose to work more hours as we earn more money? Why did Americans forfeit 768 million days of paid time off in 2018? How is it that even leisure activities like cycling have frequently become goal-oriented efforts of optimal striving instead of rejuvenating breaks of relaxation? The legal scholar (and now Biden White House official) Tim Wu described the disappearance of amateur hobbyists as a “sign of civilization in decline:”
Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it, not because you are good at it. Hobbies, let me remind you, are supposed to be something different from work. But alien values like “the pursuit of excellence” have crept into and corrupted what was once the realm of leisure, leaving little room for the true amateur. The population of our country now seems divided between the semipro hobbyists (some as devoted as Olympic athletes) and those who retreat into the passive, screeny leisure that is the signature of our technological moment.
Strava segments have taught me that, with moderation, there is genuine pleasure to be found in “the pursuit of excellence” and the satisfaction of simply getting better at something. During the plague of malaise and uncertainty, segments on Strava offered me a reason for aspiration, a small reward for effort. On the other hand, constant striving toward quantified metrics distract us from cycling’s finest rewards: the unparalleled vistas at the top of a ridge, the slow conversations that unfold over pleasantly paced miles, the scenic backcountry roads discovered while meandering aimlessly. Similarly, our credit score is a useful reminder to keep a low credit card balance, but shouldn’t dissuade us from booking that needed vacation. Our net worth may help us plan for retirement, but is just as likely to distract us from appreciating the small moments that make for a meaningful life.
COVID has prompted us to reconsider our priorities and how we use our time and energy. Exhausted by the demands and busyness of modern life, we seek a better balance between the anticipation of striving and the reward of enjoying. I haven’t given up on Strava and I still enjoy the occasional sweaty effort to beat my best time up a hill. But increasingly, I leave the bike computer at home and pedal forth with neither destination nor goal.
A few thoughts on beginning the second half of life, part 1 15 Jul 2020 9:26 AM (4 years ago)
On June 8, 2008, I was living in Medellín, Colombia teaching librarians the basics of digital media, when I used the service FutureMe to send an email to 40-year-old me 12 years in the future:
Steven Johnson was one of my favorite bloggers and authors throughout my late 20s. Though he is more than a decade my elder, I saw something of myself in our shared appreciation of literature, technology, neuroscience, and the amusing absurdity of the human condition. By 2008, I had read three of his books and they gave me hope that there was a market for the type of nonfiction writing that I planned on publishing throughout my 30s. Like Johnson, I wanted to fuse historical research with the ideas of literature to explore the relationships between technology, society, and our sense of self. (The kind of book that Jia Tolentino published last year at just 30-years-old!)
I can picture 27-year-old me seated in the patio of my favorite Medellin coffee shop overlooking Parque del Poblado, reading through the RSS feeds of the 50 or so bloggers I followed weekly. I’m not sure what part of Steven Johnson’s 40th birthday blog post resonated with me then, but I was right that it would resonate with me now. On the acceleration of time as we grow older, Johnson wrote:
One of the things that’s always stuck with me from my research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get — not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person.
The older I get, the more I think that one of the keys to happiness — or at least one of the signs of happiness — is getting to some kind of place where time seems to be passing at the right speed.
Turning 40 by Steven Berlin Johnson
Perhaps 27-year-old me knew that 40-year-old me would still need to read that. While I occasionally get glimpses of the splendor of life when it passes at the right speed, all too often I lament the misalignment between the passing of time and the unreasonable expectations of my mind. A friend once described the barely recognizable background anxiety of time passing too quickly as the hum of a refrigerator: you don’t realize just how much noise it’s making until it stops, leaving you with a sense of peace that you didn’t even realize was missing or possible. I felt that sense of peace last week as I swam alone in the warm waters of Shaver Lake while the sun set behind the horizon of sequoia trees; time was passing at the right speed.
What does it mean for time to pass at the right speed? For me, it means that each moment carries a reasonable amount of significance. Reading a book with the tingling pleasure that comes from making associations between ideas. Or conversing with a friend and recognizing the slow warmth of affection filling my heart. Or feeling moved by a piece of music as if it were a drug. When time moves too slowly, then the weight of significance can be a burden. But much more likely for me is that by trying to cram too much into a single day, each moment loses its meaning, a race between wanting to do more and all of it meaning less.
The Internet is so saturated with unsolicited life advice; why would I ever share my midlife self-absorption publicly? In case it serves someone else, as Steven Johnson’s birthday reflection from 12 years ago served me then, and served me again today. Part 1 focuses on what I have learned about myself; part 2 is about how the world has shaped me, and an examination of my place in the world.
The second half of life
We live the first half of our life, according to James Hollis, reacting unconsciously to the expectations of our parents — either by attempting to please them or rebelling against them, or often (and certainly for me) a mixture of both. Even if we spend the first half of life rebelling against our parents, we still define ourselves in opposition to their expectations rather than in pursuit of our own ideals and essence. Quoting Jung, Hollis insists that “the greatest burden the child must bear is the unlived life of the parent.”
Hollis calls the first half of life is “one giant, unavoidable mistake.” By ‘mistake’ he doesn’t mean something we should regret, but rather that we have little awareness of the unconscious forces that shape our personalities, relationships, and behaviors. We inherit our parents’ insecurities and complexes, and our personalities develop in large part to protect us from the pains of childhood. Some of us become avoidant or controlling, others develop a deep fear of abandonment, some of us become obsessive-compulsive in an attempt to control the chaos of our surroundings. And it’s not just our personalities; we unconsciously structure the first half of our lives to please our parents. It’s only after coming to a crisis, or reaching some arbitrary metrics of achievement — perhaps a stable paycheck, or owning a home, or starting a family — that we begin “the second half of life” by questioning the patterns of our behavior.
We begin to question who we are apart from our roles in society and the activities that fill our days. What drives our actions? What gives us a true sense of purpose? Does it come from within, or deep down are we still repeating the same unconscious and unattainable efforts to gain our parents’ recognition and pride? The second half of life is an opportunity to understand the forces that shaped our sense of self during the first half of life; and with sufficient courage and determination, it is an opportunity to develop a more authentic sense of self based on what we discover.
Love, Meaning, Health, and Money
One of the great realizations of my 30s came just last year during a long flight from London to San Francisco. I had just finished watching An Israeli Love Story based on the true story of the son of Israel’s second president, who leaves Jerusalem to build a kibbutz, and his wife, who becomes a theater director in Tel Aviv.
Like so many tragic love stories, the film is based on the sacrifices that couples must make as they seek to balance their needs for love, a sense or purpose, good health, and material comforts. Perhaps we don’t pursue a job that gives us a greater sense of purpose because it won’t pay for the material comforts we desire. Or maybe we sacrifice our health — sleeping and exercising less — for the love of our children. Or maybe we choose to walk away from a romantic relationship because we feel it distracts us from our purpose.
Flying over the Rocky Mountains, it’s as if I had put on glasses to see clearly for the first time. It dawned on me with a liberating lightness that those four great needs of life will always be in tension with one another and never fully realized. I felt comfort and satisfaction in having forged something close to a healthy balance throughout my 30s.
Becoming confident in my personality
It took me a very long time to understand the concept of self-love. In fact, my very idea of love was to care about someone so much that I put their interests ahead of my own. I had thought that the greatest indicator of whether I truly loved someone was whether I was scared to lose them.
But over the past few years, my understanding of love has changed. Now I consider love to be a sense of affectionate admiration and a genuine desire for that person to love herself or himself. Or to put it in a way that I would have understood it in my 20s: a desire for someone to be fully confident in his or her personality.
For so long I wasn’t confident in my personality. Why wasn’t I better at telling stories? Why wasn’t I funnier? Why couldn’t I be more charismatic? Why did I get nervous in certain situations? It’s only during the past few years that I’ve genuinely grown to admire my personality. I can see more clearly now how parts of my personality that I disparaged — a chip on my shoulder, a desire to be liked, a reluctant introversion, taking myself too seriously, a contrarian eagerness to argue — have actually served me well throughout my life. I now appreciate those characteristics, especially as I’ve developed greater awareness and control over them.
Life is much easier now that I am confident in my personality. No longer do I feel the need to impress others or hide parts of myself. I spend less of my time in anxious preparation for meetings and presentations, more confident in my ability to show up as I am and contribute something worthwhile.
Gratitude, mindfulness and candor
How did I become confident in my personality? Over the past few years I developed three habits that have immensely improved my relationships with myself and with others. I wish I had discovered and developed these habits earlier in life.
- The first is the practice of gratitude as an alternative to unhealthy comparison. Every morning I receive a notification from the journaling app Day One on my phone to write a 5-minute entry about three things I’m grateful for. At first I was skeptical that I could come up with three new things every day, but now I find it difficult to stop at just three. Previously, I would start my days comparing myself superficially to others, wanting more money, influence, a better physique. Spending five minutes with a gratitude journal every morning shifts my attention to, say, how much I love the taste of salted peanut butter on freshly toasted bread, or the smell of saltwater on my skin after I swim in the ocean, or the way my wife holds my hand when we’re walking together in our neighborhood park.
- Each day after lunch I sit or lay down for 27 minutes and listen to a guided meditation to develop “loving-kindness.” (Yes, even when I worked in an office, pre-corona.) For the first ten minutes, I pay attention to my body and my emotions, accepting how I feel now rather than thinking about the future. For the next ten minutes, I focus my attention on four different people: myself, a dear friend, a random acquaintance, and someone I struggle with. I wish each of these four people to be happy, healthy, and relieved from any suffering they face. Then I picture the four of us all together, each genuinely wanting the best for one another. It’s shocking to me how radically this 27-minute daily exercise changes my perspective and how I relate to people. If you know me in person, it’s likely that I’ve thought about you several times during these daily meditations.
- Last but certainly not least is the practice of non-violent communication. The 5-hour audio book by Marshall Rosenberg is the closest I’ve come to discovering a religious text, a dogma I could subscribe to. Rosenberg’s central tenet is that every time we sulk or grow angry or resentful, it’s because we have an unmet need that we haven’t been able to express to others. The book redefined my notion of maturity: the ability to identify the roots of our emotions and communicate our needs and feelings candidly with others.
My 20s and early 30s would have been so much easier and less turbulent if I had developed these three habits sooner. In a blink, I would have traded in my college education for four years focused on gratitude, meditation, and non-violent communication. Alas, better late than never.
I’m excited for the second half of life. To continue the journey. But also to start new journeys. To deepen my most important friendships. But also to meet new friends. To revisit the places, music, movies, and books of my youth. And to explore new places and culture. And hopefully, for time to finally pass at the right speed.
Why is Karl Ove Knausgaard Afraid of Therapy? 26 Apr 2020 11:30 AM (4 years ago)
Book Six, the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, is a massive 1,161 pages. According to my Kindle, it takes the typical reader more than 25 hours to get through it.
How does the most celebrated and scandalous work of 21st century literature end? More than 400 pages are dedicated to Hitler’s life, including critiques of his previous biographers. It is also an intellectual history of Europe in the 1930s and the social and economic forces that enabled the rise of Nazism. 100 pages are dedicated to Paul Celan’s relatively brief poem The Straightening. (Ruth Franklin describes this section as “essentially live-blogging his line-by-line effort to make sense” of Celan’s poem.) It is an unflinching, brutally frank depiction of his wife’s struggles with bipolar depression and mania. Finally, the book is a tally of the damage done, the pain he caused others and himself, by having shared his most shameful thoughts in public, his “transgressive blurring of the borders between the public and private, sayable and unsayable.” As Evan Hughes puts it, “reading My Struggle is like opening someone else’s diary and finding your own secrets.”
My Struggle is an awe-inspiring effort, which Knausgaard says in the end he did not fully achieve, to break free from the self-censorship imposed by the social world, to attain total liberation from inhibition.
I find visits to bookstores and libraries almost unbearable, an in-my-face representation of all the information I won’t have the time to read, the knowledge I’ll never attain. As a writer staring enviously at shelves upon shelves of published books, I confront the inevitable truth that every story has already been told. There may be a different setting with new characters, but the basic plot and principles and ideas have already been retold millions of times through the same archetypical story structures.
Until Knausgård. Somehow it occurred to a sensitive man from Norway struggling with writer’s block to attempt something that has never been tried before: he would be unsparingly honest about his most treacherous thoughts while describing the banalities of modern life with microscopic detail. The thoughts we all have but would never share with anyone else, except for perhaps a therapist.
A therapist. Writing is clearly a therapeutic, confessional act for Knausgård. As he tells Ryu Spaeth in an interview, “there must be a place where you can be, where you can write, where you can think, without a façade at all.” For most people, that place is a therapist’s office. But toward the end of Book Six, as he describes his wife’s worsening mental health (which he fears he caused by sharing so much of her life publicly), he writes:
She wanted me to help her go back into therapy. Most of all she wanted us to go together. She had wanted that for many years. She knew I would rather die than go to couples therapy, and actually I meant it. If there were a choice between couples therapy and death, I would unhesitatingly choose death.
He repeats the same line in an interview with Ali Tufan Koc: “I’d rather shoot myself than go to therapy.”
How is this possible? How can a writer who demonstrates such self-awareness through his writing be so fearful of therapy? How can he expose himself to relentless criticism by journalists and critics, but not speak with a therapist trained to listen without judgement? If he is racked with guilt for what he has done to his wife, can he not at least give her this?
Writing is the way Knausgaard expresses the emotions that he’s not courageous or mature enough to tell his loved ones in person. Instead, his family, his wife, his friends, (and presumably his children) discover his resentments and regrets when they are given manuscripts to review. He joins a long lineage of mostly male writers who demonstrate startling self-awareness in their prose and yet a total lack of emotional intelligence in the social world: Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Isaac Brock, JD Salinger, Ryan Adams, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac.
How were these writers able to endow their characters with such sentimentality while totally cutting themselves off from the emotional lives of their loved ones in real life? Or is it the inverse? Perhaps their inability to express emotions in person allows the writer’s inner torment to distill through the pen into compelling prose. Perhaps the well-adjusted person, who shares his vulnerabilities honestly in the social world, lacks the burning impulse to produce great writing.
Book Six was too long, too intense, too interesting for me to read in one go. I took several breaks to read other books, including Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, in which she describes her role as a therapist to her clients, and as a client to her own therapist. I read the book because I was just beginning therapy myself for the first time and I wanted to know what I was getting myself into. Like Knausgaard, I had been resistant to therapy. Like Knausgaard, I preferred facing my fears and insecurities through my writing.
As I read Gottlieb’s descriptions of her patients, I began to wonder what she would write about Knausgaard if he were her patient. What would she think about his tendency to consider literary theory or philosophy while his wife was yelling at him? How would she connect it to his descriptions in Book One of escaping to his room as a young boy to read comic books when his angry, alcoholic father lashed out at him? How would she try to help him remain present and grounded when confronted by anger?
On the last day of a beach vacation before coronavirus put an end to beach vacations, my wife and I had a brief exchange of mutual annoyance, the kind of interaction that happens nearly everyday between couples, the type that Knausgaard describes so poignantly. But this time, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I was hurt and offended. I didn’t say anything in the moment, for the intensity of my emotions was totally disproportionate to what had happened. I spent much of the afternoon sulking like a fool and the next day I spent by myself.
Once I was able to write, everything came pouring out with surprising eloquence. I was triggered, of course. The words staring back at me revealed the obvious connection between what happened and how I was treated by my mother growing up. I saw how the minor interaction was a symbol of something larger, a departure from my idealized notion of a caring relationship. Now I knew what I needed to communicate to my wife; not so much what she did, but how it made me feel — and why.
We met that evening for dinner. I ordered a mezcal and she had a cocktail. She knew I felt unsettled and she was waiting for me to explain why. But I couldn’t find the words. Just hours earlier I had written with poetic eloquence what I wanted to express. I had metaphors, stories from my childhood, raw vulnerability. And now, even after my mezcal, all I could muster up was, “So, how was your day?”
How was this possible? Did I lack the ability to communicate, or did I lack the courage to express myself? The next day we were laying in bed and I managed to tell my wife, the person in this world who cares the most about me, that I was hurt. She acknowledged my feelings, she expressed her remorse, and we agreed that we could both do more to communicate better in the future.
It was a liberating conversation. I wasn’t trapped by the trauma of my past; I could break through and become a different person. But why was it so immensely difficult?
Karl Ove Knausgaard and I share similar childhoods and dispositions. We share the same taste in music, literature, and film. Deep down we are both committed progressives, and yet we rebel against the social pressure of political correctness. When we were young men, we wanted more than all else to become great writers, to develop an authentic voice, and to push the boundaries of literature. Knausgaard did this by turning his attention inward to the self, where he encountered a subject that had never been fully, honestly treated despite the thousands of memoirs and autobiographies. My curiosity drew my attention outward to the larger world, where I spent my 20s trying to make sense of the cultures, people, and places I encountered.
We were both seeking a form of liberation. I sought to transcend the boundaries of my own culture by embedding myself as much as possible in other cultures. In his own words, Knausgaard, “tried to transcend the social world by conveying the innermost thoughts and innermost feelings of my most private self, my own internal life, but also by describing the private sphere of my family as it exists behind the façade all families set up against the social world.”
In the end, Knausgaard became the great writer. I became an office worker in Silicon Valley. Just a couple months shy of 40 without having published any work of significance, I ask myself, would I rather be a great writer or a good person? Would I rather be creative or kind? And is it possible to be both? These are the questions for the next 40 years of my life.
There is a tension in life, one that I feel every day, between being present in the moment, attentive and kind to our loved ones, and producing great art. By focusing all of his attention on his writing, Knausgaard gave his readers an inspired work of art. By ignoring his wife, violating her privacy, and sleepwalking through his social life, he lost his family and has surprisingly few friends.
“What reality does, and brutally so, is to correct,” writes Knausgaard in the section on Hitler. “And a prominent trait of the young Hitler’s character is precisely an unwillingness to accept correction.” From recent interviews, it seems that Knausgaard is accepting correction. Divorced and living in London with a new partner, he no longer yearns for liberation from the social world. Perhaps he even sees value in liberation from the trauma of his childhood.
He certainly sees value in being more present. In an interview with Joshua Rothman, he acknowledges his unhealthy tendency to be pulled “away from home and into art.”
It’s much better now—I think I’ve managed to fasten my gaze somehow—but I’ve struggled with that throughout my life. Because nothing is as defined in life as it is in literature or in art. If everyone fastened his gaze on life, there would be no art.
It’s true. A world of constant attentiveness would be a world without culture and art, not the kind of world I want to live in. Like Knausgaard, I will continue to seek insight and beauty through writing. But all in moderation. I will also fasten my gaze on life, and on the people I love.
Bicycle Diaries Part 2: The Stories We Tell Ourselves 16 Jul 2019 8:16 AM (5 years ago)
Continued from part 1 here.
Cazadero is at the base of King Ridge Road, one of California’s most scenic (and fun) stretches of cycling. But first you must pay the entrance fee: a steep, curving climb up, up, up alongside a river that becomes a creek and narrows to a trickle at the top.
Soaked with sweat, my water bottles nearly empty, I arrive to the top of the ridge, and I felt like a king. After 40 minutes of slowly grinding up a steep grade at no more than 8 mph, now I was gliding effortlessly 25 miles per hour along the ridge with expansive views across the valleys below to my left and right. I was tempted to take photos at every turn, but I was having far too much fun to use my brakes. Only the occasional crossing cow convinced me to slow down.
For 99% of visitors to Mendocino from San Francisco, there are two ways to arrive. Either you take Highway 1 as it wraps along the scenic coast, or you take the 128 through bohemian, hillbilly, rapidly gentrifying Anderson Valley. In between those two highways is a network of desolate forest roads that curve through pine and redwood forests, rising above orchards, ranches, and vineyards onto exposed ridges and descending down into shaded gulches.
My destination was Point Arena, a small fishing community with a pier, a movie theater, two restaurants, a library and a bar. I had reserved a room on Airbnb in a single family house on Main Street that belongs to a painter in her 50s with gray hair and sparkling, attentive eyes. “How long have you lived here?” I asked, and her answer was right out of a novel: “I was living out of a bus, traveling around the country with my two boys in the 1990s, and when we arrived here we decided to stay put. That was over 25 years ago.” A quarter-century used to sound like a timeframe beyond my comprehension. Now I regularly recall stories from 25 years ago, or introduce friends who I’ve known for over 25 years. I paused a moment to imagine the woman in front of me 25 years ago, then in her early 30s, younger than I am now.
In fact, her story was straight out of two novels I had read: Dave Eggers’ Heroes of the Frontier, and TC Boyle’s Drop City. My impression of the woman in front of me was shaped by my feelings toward the characters from each novel. As I looked around the house, scanning her bookshelves, I thought about the power of stories, how they fill the gaps of information about the people we meet, and how they inspire us to develop narratives that become the maps for our lives. From the stories we encounter come the archetypes we embody. Do we even have an individual essence that transcends the stories that shape us?
At one point in Martin Scorsese’s new documentary on Netflix, Bob Dylan mumbles into the camera that life isn’t about finding yourself or knowing yourself; it’s about making yourself, crafting an identity, creating a myth, something that Dylan did better than just about anyone, a Jewish kid from Minnesota turned philosopher-poet-prince of Greenwich Village. My Airbnb host, too, seemed to have crafted a life by chasing after a myth while the majority of us merely react to the opportunities that present themselves. Or don’t. My host and I finished talking and I excused myself to take a badly needed shower. Her artwork hung on every wall of the house, an eclectic mix of Renaissance motifs, playing cards, and pop culture. In one painting, the queen of arts is reading the New Yorker with a smirk.
The next morning I ordered a big plate of eggs, hash browns, and bacon at the local diner and then stocked up on snacks at the market across the street, where bluegrass streamed from Spotify on the stereo. A sign by the cashier asked for donations to repair the espresso machine. It didn’t strike me as any more ridiculous than the “living wage” surcharges that have become so common in San Francisco. “Just $12 for your avocado toast and a $1 surcharge to pay our employees a living wage.”
On the third and final day of my journey, I rode along the coastline from Point Arena to Mendocino, fighting against a headwind that wanted to blow me back south to San Francisco. But I didn’t mind, the views were too beautiful to be bothered by uncooperative wind.
The passing weekday traffic mostly kept at a respectable distance, at least until a raised white pickup truck came within a foot of me, accelerating to intentionally blow black exhaust on my face straight from the tailpipe as it sped past. My heart pounded for a few seconds of delayed reaction. I filed the experience away in my mental archive of evidence affirming a friend’s theory that trolling is merely the online manifestation of a deeper impulse to be mean, to poke people without reason, the way young children shine a magnifying glass on a harmless ant, or how a middle-aged woman turns to whisper a gratuitous critique as a friend leaves the lunch group for the restroom.
But then I was reminded of opposing evidence from two days earlier when I suffered a flat tire, my first in over a year, on the side of the highway. Not only did every passing cyclist ask if I was okay, but two drivers also slowed, rolled down their windows, and asked if they could offer any help. Why were they so eager to lend a helping hand to a complete stranger in distress? (Or not in distress, as happened to be the case.) I thought of a recent study suggesting that we have selectively bred dogs so that they give us that puppy dog look, those raised eyebrows, that conveys their dependence on our generosity. Bent over my bicycle, repairing a flat tire, I was the equivalent of a dog making puppy eyes, and the passerby in cars felt good by offering me their kitchen scraps.
These are part and parcel of the human experience, the unprovoked impulse to blow exhaust into the face of a solitary cyclist, the desire to help out a stranger.
I arrived to the Navarro River, a deep turquoise blue that flows under a fairytale redwood forest until it opens up at the mouth of the Pacific. Today it mostly attracts hikers, fishers, and whitewater rafters. It is pristine, protected, and unpolluted, just like it was 170 years ago, when it was one of the main sources of nutrition for the Pomo People, who settled the area around 6,000 years ago.
6000 years! Think about it: the Pomo people inhabited this region for 97.6% of the past six millennia. Then in the middle of the 19th century, an unlikely combination of Russian settlers, Spanish priests, British fur traders, and poor European & Chinese migrants in search of gold came to the region and violently forced the Pomo people (those that did not die from smallpox and measles) to relocate to the Round Valley Reservation further inland. When the Pomo people rebelled against their inhumane treatment, they were shot down in a massacre by the United States Cavalry.
How did I not know this history? How is it that I’m more familiar with the Ottoman Empire’s attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1915 than I am with the genocide of Native Americans in the 1850s? How is it that I’ve read so much more about mass murder and repression in Germany, Yugoslavia, Zaire, Rwanda, Tibet, and Xinjiang than in neighboring Mendocino County?
What we know about the 19th century Pomo Indians comes from the observations of European settlers. “Until the lion tells the story,” as the saying goes, “the hunter will always be the hero.”
In this case, the hunter is a sympathetic figure with good intentions who nonetheless contributed to the white savior trope that still dominates Western storytelling, from Friday Night Lights to Game of Thrones. (The list of films on the Wikipedia page on White savior narrative in film is overwhelming.)
The most prolific documentarian of Pomo culture was Grace Carpenter Hudson, a progressive, feminist artist, who painted nearly 700 portraits of Pomo Indians in Mendocino, mostly children, and advocated for their protection from exploitation. She also spoke openly to the New York Times in 1895 about deceiving Pomo mothers, who opposed portraiture, in order to photograph and paint their children without consent. It’s complicated to judge such actions today; our future generations will, similarly, judge us harshly for our meat-eating, gas-guzzling, and self-deceit. Hudson’s most famous painting, above, is titled “Little Mendocino” and features a crying baby meant to provoke sympathy from the viewer, just like puppy eyes or a stranded cyclist changing a flat. In fact, Hudson’s first portrait of a Pomo child did include a dog with puppy eyes to make the association explicit.
Notice the difference between the dignified, muscular, independent Pomo fisherman in the canoe photographed above compared to the vulnerable and dependent Indian babies in Hudson’s portraits, which became a cultural meme stamped onto post cards and advertisements.
I shifted into an easier gear and climbed the last hill approaching the coastal village of Mendocino. To my left, down on the beach, was the site of the area’s first timber mill, which carved up century-old redwoods from upriver and shipped them down to San Francisco to build a city to support a gold rush. My left knee was beginning to ache and I was looking forward to a hot coffee and slice of pie. With just 20 minutes of cycling to go, I thought of one last excerpt from the Ezra Klein – Alison Gopnik podcast. Klein brings up a Wall Street Journal column that Gopnik wrote about the difference between how humans interact during the day versus the evening. An anthropologist working in Southern Africa in the 1970s recorded the daytime and evening conversations of the Ju/’hoansi people:
The daytime talk was remarkably like the conversation in any modern office. The Ju/’hoansi talked about the work they had to do, gossiped and made rude jokes. Of the conversations, 34% were what Dr. Wiessner scientifically coded as CCC—criticism, complaint and conflict—the familiar grumbling and grousing, occasionally erupting into outright hatred, that is apparently the eternal currency of workplace politics.
But when the sun went down and the men and the women, the old and the young, gathered around the fire, the talk was transformed. People told stories 81% of the time—stories about people they knew, about past generations, about relatives in distant villages, about goings-on in the spirit world
Campfires Helped Inspire Community Culture, Alison Gopnik, WSJ
They told these stories sitting around the glowing embers of a fire facing one another. We still structure our days this way, exchanging criticism, complaint, and conflict during the day and mythic stories at night. We stare at the glowing embers of our flat screen TVs and handheld devices. Just last night, my wife and I were enraptured by a story about past generations, distant villages, and goings-on in the spirit world. It was called Stranger Things.
We tell stories because they give our lives meaning, and meaning is the life force that convinces us to keep on keeping on. I am telling you this story, a quilt of reflections and observations, because it made my cycling journey to Mendocino more meaningful to me. It poured out of my fingers onto my keyboard, almost in its entirety, while eating a slice of pie with a cup of coffee in Mendocino. But then as I left the coffeeshop, I began to doubt whether I would publish it online. Why add to what David Foster Wallace called Total Noise, “the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective”?
That hesitation stays with me now. But deep down, every storyteller wants an audience. And so if you made it this far, I am grateful to you for the time you’ve allowed me to tell my story around the glowing embers of some device somewhere in time and space.
Bicycle Diaries Part 1: Esprit de Corps 30 Jun 2019 8:50 AM (5 years ago)
It was surprisingly easy to wake up at 4:30 in the morning. Well anyway, it was easy enough to wake up when Iris gently shook my shoulder to point out my buzzing, beeping cell phone on the night stand.
Through the living room windows facing south, San Francisco was utterly dark, the street lamps of the Excelsior neighborhood twinkling on the hillside beneath the crest of MacLaren Park. In the dimmed light of the kitchen, I spread extra chunky peanut butter across a lightly burned piece of toast and drizzled golden drops of California honey from a plastic bear over slices of a 20-cent banana from Central America. A Nespresso machine forced steam through a little plastic capsule and into my favorite espresso thimble, a miracle of capitalism, a peril of convenience.
Various layers of spandex and nylon covered most of my body. The pre-dawn air was cool on my legs, but not uncomfortably so as I pedaled slowly up O’Shaughnessy overlooking Glen Canyon to the right, a refuge for the city’s controversial coyotes. Just after 5am, the sky was already turning a lighter shade of blue to the east above the bay. Sutro Tower was enveloped in morning fog with the top three prongs stretching upwards like zombie fingers with satellite dish warts.
I timed this year’s trip so that it would start on the solstice and end on my birthday. Each solstice, my local cycling club organizes “the longest day” ride, and this year they would pedal up to the Russian River and back down, 170 miles in total and about 10 hours of continuous riding through San Francisco, Marin, and Sonoma counties. The rough equivalent of a marathon in cycling is a “century,” 100 miles of pedaling in four to six hours depending on your speed. This was nearly twice that, an ultra marathon on a bicycle. I would join them for the first half to Cazadero, just north of the Russian River, nestled under a canopy of old redwoods along Cazadero Creek.
There were 20 of us and we were to meet at sunrise, 5:48am, on the south side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Around 5:30, I pedaled by the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park and I was suddenly overcome by hyper-sensitive wakefulness. All week I had struggled to wake up before 7 to beat the morning commute to the office, half-listening to NPR with puffy eyes and a cloudy mind. But here I was, alone in the quiet dawn of the empty city, its greedy sci-fi speculation still dreaming, and I felt wide awake to its beauty, its possibility, the way it has always attracted weirdos and hustlers and mavericks, people who don’t fit in, not even with one another. I was excited about the day ahead, all the beauty and suffering that awaited.
As we set off into the sunrise, I remembered a conversation I had heard recently between the journalist Ezra Klein and the developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. We divide our lives between exploiting and exploring, Gopnik suggested. Exploiting is everything we do to extract utility, to earn a paycheck, save for retirement, pay off the mortgage. Exploring is what we do without purpose. I make it sound like she’s merely describing the difference between work and leisure, but it goes deeper than that. Exploiting is how most adults live our lives, constantly in search of achievement, reward, and recognition. Exploring is how young children (and adults on psychedelics) spend their time, exploring the world around them with curiosity, sometimes fantasizing, other times paying focused attention to the small details we take for granted.
The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard describes this difference of experiencing the world vis a vis his young daughter:
I thought about something Vanja often asked, about why grown-ups never played. She couldn’t grasp that we found it tedious, and the conclusion she drew was that in that case she never wanted to grow up. Life was running around and laughing, playing with long-maned plastic ponies and little Japanese figures with big eyes, swinging on swings, spinning on carousels, climbing in trees, splashing in wading pools and pretending to be a whale, a shark, a fish. Not sitting in a chair reading a newspaper, looking serious. Or, like now, sitting still at a table and talking, with long pauses in between where nothing was said and no one did anything.
You would think that cycling 100 miles is the epitome of exploit, an activity in search of achievement and recognition. But for me, it’s the closest I get to the childlike wonder of fantasizing in the backyard on a lazy summer afternoon. There is no purpose to cycling such long distances, other than moving forward and observing what passes you by. In fact, the reason I train throughout the year is so that I can enjoy such a seemingly long, strenuous activity without pushing myself too far into discomfort.
Or so I thought. It wasn’t even 10am and we had already cycled more than 65 miles. My hamstrings were beginning to tighten at the coffee shop rest stop across from the farmers market in Tomales. I had already eaten a croissant and an energy bar, and now I was munching on a tuna fish sandwich. Typically, after 65 miles of riding I an close to returning home. But I still had another 30 miles to go and the rest of the riders were just over a third of the way done.
Ian, a soft-spoken and chivalrous Brit who has been living in San Francisco for the past 25 years, put his water bottle between his knees while he removed his gloves. Oops! Out squirted an ejaculation of Gatorade into the air and splat on the concrete. Patricia, who is active on Twitter and helps women in Silicon Valley battle the tech sector patriarchy, let out a playful ‘whoa!’ “You’ve already got your #metoo tweet of the ride, Patricia,” I joked with some trepidation, but it was received with the warmth and humor with which I had intended. Cycling long distances entitles both men and women to escape the social taboos that usually cause shame. We blow snot rockets, we fart, we adjust our genitalia as if we were merely sneezing. A recent ride organized by a group of women in Santa Cruz was endearingly called the “kitty crusher” for the genital hardships of an entire day sitting atop a narrow saddle.
Nothing builds solidarity like shared suffering, an esprit de corps. As we continued north toward our next stop, an easy-to-miss taco shack in Occidental, I thought of Sebastian Junger’s book Tribe, about why soldiers return home only to miss war. Against an ideological enemy like the Nazis, war creates purpose. But more than that, it is the experience of overcoming hardship with other human beings, of depending on others for your safety and survival, and the unspoken gratitude that permeates silently when you return unscathed.
A group of cyclists riding together is called a peloton, from the French word for platoon. And that’s how it feels, like a platoon of soldiers or a pack of wolves spreading out in search of something. Our bikes are within inches of each other, sometimes mere centimeters, as we travel 25mph down a country backroad.
We had been cycling for 85 miles and it was just past noon when we arrived to my turnoff, Cazadero Highway. I waved enthusiastically to a chorus of farewells and good lucks. I felt like I was departing from a group of close friends, even though I had only met the majority of the cyclists just six hours earlier.
Grateful for a morning of intense solidarity, now it was time for some solitude. Cazadero Highway was completely shaded by a canopy of old growth redwood, and it felt 15 degrees cooler than the main highway under the midday sun. I pedaled along slowly, contently, listening to the trickle of the creek and the occasional wind blow through the pine needles. Part of exploring is novelty, experiencing something for the first time, trying to understand a new landscape or person or piece of art uncolored by previous experience. This was my first time in Cazadero: cabins perched up on the hill looking over the creek, little kids, pale skinned and dark skinned, all immigrants from one time or another, splashing together in wading pools of the creek, while their parents looked on, segregated by the color of their skin. When I came upon stretches of road that were recently paved, the slick tires of my bicycle rolled along in total silence.
I had another five miles to go until my bed and breakfast, and I became lost in my thoughts. I was thinking about the similarities between exploring on a bicycle and exploring online, or what’s left of exploring online. I was thinking about a book excerpt I had read a few months earlier by James Vlahos about the implications of search transitioning from a list of text-based results on Google.com to a single oracular answer from Alexa or Siri or Cortana. Exploration on the Internet used to be intoxicating; I still remember the miracle of using Google Earth for the first time, zooming in on the planetary marble in space. A curious question would lead to a list of results: magazine articles, blog posts, Wikipedia pages. My time spent online was driven largely by my intentional curiosity.
Around 2014, that began to change. What I read and watched was now based on recommendation, whatever came at me via some social stream or group chat. There was always more to read than time to read it — and the more I read, the less I remembered. On several occasions I would spend an entire Saturday morning reading articles that I had saved throughout the week based on others’ recommendations. Then over lunch, my wife would ask me what I was reading about all morning and I could hardly recall. The most honest answer would have been that I had read a bunch of random and disconnected articles recommended by people I rarely see.
In his article for Wired, Vlahos describes how we’re in the midst of another transition in how we discover information. By next year, it is estimated that half of all searches will be spoken. Kids growing up with Alexa are used to asking it questions and receiving the one answer in response. They are not used to sitting down at a computer, typing in a few keywords, and following a trail of websites about the history of Cazadero, which then leads you serendipitously to more reading about Fort Ross, a 19th century Russian settlement, and then somehow to an entertaining public letter by a Sonoma County Supervisor to the men-only members of exclusive Bohemian Grove.
From 2000 – 2015, the dominant medium of the Internet was hypertext: connected, descriptive, explanatory, and introspective. It was a hell of a lot more interesting, at least to me, than 90s television. But that was just a moment in time. We’re now returning to an oral and visual culture where good looks and charisma are what count: YouTube personalities, Instagram models, and celebrity podcasters. Few people have the time or interest to read texts like this one. And I’m not a talented enough thespian to perform it on YouTube or via podcast. The culture passed by my communication capabilities and I failed to adapt, a useless scribe in the age of the printing press.
Like Neil Postman, I think we underestimate how our culture informs how we experience the world, how technology influences culture, and just how dizzingly fast all three are changing in a very short period of time. The person I am now is only one version of me, embedded in a culture and surrounded by the technology of the day. I would be a different me if I grew up in China, or was born in the 17th century before photography or film. Hell, I was a different me before the smart phone and social media.
I arrived to “downtown” Cazadero, a single block of general store, hardware shop, and Catholic church. At Cazadero Supply, a man in his 60s with a thick mustache and giant hands inflated my tires and sold me an extra tube for my bike as a matter of precaution for the next two days of desolate riding. Across the street I ordered an iced coffee and turkey bacon avocado sandwich at the general store. “I should probably pay the extra dollar for the home-smoked turkey, right?” It wasn’t really a question; it was an invitation for the cashier to talk up the turkey, or describe how often they smoke it. With a blank face, she responded, “it’s up to you.”
I took my sandwich with me and checked into my creek-side cottage at the bed and breakfast. My intention was to read a novel with my tired feet cooling off in the creek. But as soon as I connected my phone to the Internet, I was sucked into an attention black hole of social media and group chats. My body and mind were exhausted and the switching between so many apps on my phone was making me even more tired, but I wasn’t able to put the screen down. Two hours went by until, disgusted with myself, I turned off my phone and went for a late afternoon walk along the creek. During their conversation, Gopnik and Klein observed how it is usually when we are the most tired that it is most difficult to resist our phones, an endless cycle of tiredness and distraction in place of intention and exploration.
Back in my cottage, I kept my phone off for the rest of the night, played a CD by Natalie Cole on the old-school stereo, and read my novel while sipping from a mini bottle of red wine procured from the general store. Everything was perfection.
What is the Meaning of Life? 14 Apr 2018 1:47 PM (7 years ago)
My fourth and final post of notes from the School of Life conference. Previous posts: Life is Hard, Conversations are Hard, Love is Hard, and Work is Hard.
For most of human history, meaning was not made by individuals but imposed by authorities.
Today, we are so embedded in the logic of Capitalism that it’s almost impossible to imagine how we’d derive meaning from the human experience without it. Capitalism makes everything easier; we can construe purpose from a collection of seemingly achievable goals and markers of status. What is our salary? What is our job title and profession? When were we last promoted? How much money is in our 401k? Where can we travel to on holiday? How smart and photogenic are our children? Can we afford a vacation home? How many likes on our last Instagram photo? These markers of success and status offer a helpful replacement for meaning and purpose. They provide us with the necessary fiction that we are working toward something with dignity and significance.
But really, what is the meaning of life? Who knows. A more practical question is: How can we have more meaningful moments in life? Imagine if we could have just three meaningful moments every week. We’d be so satisfied that we would no longer question the meaning of life. Perhaps the meaning of life is beyond our capacity to understand, but meaningful moments are special because they provide us with glimpses into something larger and more powerful than ourselves.
The sources of meaningful moments are different for everyone. For some, it’s the soothing touch of a friend’s hand while drinking tea on a quiet afternoon. For others, it’s a near-death experience climbing a mountain. For some it is sex, for others a day alone in the museum. Often they are moments that remind us of our own vulnerability. Ironically, it is our vulnerability that is at the root of both meaning and anxiety.
We desire calm and serenity, but we succumb to stress and fretting. Most of our anxieties and annoyances are not random. They are encoded signals about what is amiss in our lives. We can’t ignore or transcend our anxieties, but we can become more skilled in decoding their deeper meaning and psychic history. We can choose to comprehend and address what lies submerged beneath the bubbling signals of shame, resentment, nervousness, envy, and sulking. “Every failure of calm can be analyzed in order to reveal something worth knowing about ourselves.”
Meaningful moments await us constantly when we lower our expectations and pay more attention to what’s around us. Appreciation is simply a newfound consciousness of beauty and complexity. What is art? Art depicts extremely modest things looked at with special attention. Appreciation. We become numb to art when we stop observing with special attention, when we rush through a museum or stroll mindlessly through a stream of photographs. Too often we are neglectful of phenomena and beauty that lack social prestige.
So, how do we lower our expectations without suffocating our aspirations? Few of us suffer from too few dreams. Many of us are enslaved by too many, unrealistic dreams. We must learn to let go, or we will forever be disappointed and distracted from the beauty and complexity we routinely fail to appreciate.
Resilient thinking is the opposite of optimistic thinking; it obliges us to consider what we’d do if we lost everything rather than what life would be like if we could have anything. It’s not how much money that defines you, but how you’d react to losing it all.
We can find meaning through the deliberate indulgence of drugs, anything that alters our mental state: coffee, chocolate, art, pomegranate juice, Mozart’s Arias, a nap, psychedelics, meditation, a walk through the woods. When used occasionally and intentionally, they offer us glimpses into that something larger than ourselves.
The anchors of happiness are love and work. But those are also the things that bring us the most strife and suffering. We must distinguish between meaningless and meaningful suffering, and only avoid the former. Suffering is meaningful when it a byproduct of our search for the sources of meaning. A meaningful life is different from a happy life.
In short, even if we never discover the meaning of life, even if we fail to transcend the constraints of Capitalism, we can experience many more meaningful moments by:
- Lowering our expecations
- Practicing appreciation with focused attention
- Embracing our vulnerability
- Embracing suffering in search of meaning
- Embracing drugs with moderation and variety
- Expecting the very worst and striving for the best
Work is Hard 5 Apr 2018 8:17 PM (7 years ago)
My notes from the School of Life conference continued. Previous posts: Life is Hard, Conversations are Hard, and Love is Hard.
What are we working for?
Unlike previous generations, we no longer look at work simply as a source of income. We want our work to expand our sense of identity, meaning, and purpose. And yet, once we graduate with our diplomas and idealism, Capitalism seems to force us to choose between money and meaning, between a decent return and higher goals. Sometimes it feels so stark as to choose between a wealthy path toward mindless consumerism or an impoverished path toward high minded intellectualism and art.
The modern world demands one thing above all: that we succeed. Snobbery used to be reserved for class and title. Those born into the royal court would look down upon the humble peasant born to poor parents. It was a snobbery based on the birth lottery. Today we base our snobbery on business cards. We perceive it with a pang of anxiety every time we’re asked the ultimate American question: “So, what do you do?” Though seemingly meritocratic, job snobbery is just as superficial. It judges someone’s value from their profession.
As our careers develop, we soon realize that professional success depends as much on our confidence as the abilities we acquire through years of expensive education. We believe that we are stuck with the confidence levels we were born with. In fact, confidence is an acquirable talent that is disregarded by formal education. It is a skill founded on a set of ideas about the world and our natural place within it. Put simply, our self-esteem is the amount of success we’ve experienced in our careers divided by our expectations. Paradoxically, we increase our confidence when we lower our expectations, admit our ignorance, and embrace our failures. By embracing our true selves, we overcome the impostor syndrome and overcome shyness about earnestly advancing our own plans.
Can we find a middle path between wealthy, mindless consumerism and impoverished creativity and intellectualism? Can we rebel against or reform Capitalism?
- First we must rebel against the tyranny of our parents’ expectations. We owe our families respect and (probably) kindness. We do not owe them our whole lives.
- Second, we can rediscover the values and pleasures we seek in our work by remembering what brought us joy as children. Most of us have a hunch about a job that would make us happier. We lack the courage and confidence to try to succeed on our own terms.
- Third, we can choose to value time over consumer products. Advertising is simply a reminder of what we really want in life with the false promise that spending money on a product will serve as a substitute. We see it in every magazine advertisement for an overpriced watch. What we really want are good family relationships, connections with others, freedom and joy, and to be loved. All those things take time and attention, not money.
- Finally, we can reform Capitalism by operating within it. We can build products and services that truly enhance meaning and purpose. Most corporations cater to the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Capitalism has been unimaginative in addressing the top of Maslow’s pyramid, our personal growth and self-actualization. But there is no shortage of opportunities. We need help finding partners and friends based on who we really are. We all need a therapist and life coach who can guide us based on our true selves. We need help to become more intuitive in reading the moods and emotional currents of those around us. We need help finding a sense of community and authentic connection with those around us. Why do we have so many choices of headphones and so little help in connecting with our neighbors?
We are much more than our jobs. The antidote to job snobbery is authentic friendship. But too often we lose our authentic friendships in the pursuit of professional success.