Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches.
That is a smart line.
Posts in: Practice
Alan Jacobs has recently posted about his news consumption habits in response to a worthwhile piece by Oliver Burkeman. Taking the latter first, Burkeman says that while there has always been alarming news, “the central place the news has come to occupy in many people’s psychological worlds is certainly novel”. Is this a healthy state of affairs?
Assuming you’re not reading this in an active war zone, it doesn’t follow that you need to mentally inhabit those stories, all day long. It doesn’t make you a better person – and it doesn’t make life any easier for Ukrainian refugees – to spend hour upon hour marinating in precisely those narratives over which you can exert the least influence.
What approach is preferable to marinating in the news? He discusses and dismisses both the “renunciation” and “self-care” approaches. Instead, he says, we should “adjust our default state”. Dip into and out of the news. Take action where you can and then move on. Then guard this practice with some “not-too-rigid” personal rules for handling the information. Rather than marinating in the news, do the good you’re actually capable of: “meaningful work, keeping your community functioning, being a good-enough parent or a decent friend”.
Burkeman’s rules involve putting physical distance between himself and his laptop and phone, along with time limits for their use. Jacobs describes his practices in his blog post:
- “Most important: I avoid social media altogether.
- I always have plenty to read because of all the cool sites I subscribe to via RSS, but not one of those sites covers the news.
- I get most of my news from The Economist, which I read when it arrives on my doorstep each week.
- In times of stress, such as the current moment, I start the day by reading The Economist’s daily briefing.”
I second Jacobs’ recommendation of RSS feeds. I use NetNewsWire and it really is a good way to keep track of writers and sites you’re interested in. Whenever something new is posted, it simply appears in the app and I can read it whenever it is convenient for me.
I also second his recommendation of avoiding social media. I’ve written before (and likely will again) about my discovery, once I closed the accounts, of how much my thoughts were driven by the timeline, not my own interests.
I avoid cable news at all costs. I believe it is, just as much as social media, engineered to hijack your brain. #CNNsucks
I tend to pick up most news through something like ambient awareness. If something is big enough, I usually hear about it one way or another. In times when I feel like I need to attend to the news (as in recent days), I typically go to the BBC news site because
- They have a reputation for being reliable and professional, and
- I don’t constantly hit paywalls, like at the NYT or WaPo, and
- It’s not jammed with video and ads. Again, #CNNsucks.
For me, it is an essential practice (and Burkeman refers to this) to continually distinguish between what I can and cannot control. I have little to no control over much of the awful shit that happens in the world. There are a few practical actions I can take. Beyond that, though, my responsibility is to learn (both for myself and with my family and friends) how best to navigate and understand the world we find ourselves in. It is useful to remember that, if life is the Battle of New York, I am not Thor or Captain America or even Hawkeye. I’m not even the NYPD. I am one of those people in the background scrambling to avoid falling debris.
Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. (Psalm 51:7)
Wherever there is a confrontation with evil, there is a desire to be free from it. The evil must be destroyed - but if it can’t be destroyed, it must be beaten back. And if it can’t be beaten back, then at least we must be personally free from it.
I was born into a group of Christian churches that were either a cult or had cultish tendencies, depending on which individual church you attended. Their singular obsession was purity. Their watchword was ”come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing” (2 Corinthians 6:17). They wanted bright lines of separation from “the world” and its ways; nothing was to be left up to judgment. Women’s skirts must be below the knee. Women’s hair must not to be cut or even trimmed. No makeup. No jewelry. Men’s hair must be short and kept at the natural hairline. No television. In my final months in those churches, I challenged my pastor by saying some of the rules seemed so arbitrary. He replied, “Sometimes the lines are arbitrary, but they must be maintained.”
The Holiness people believed they were surrounded by evil on all sides, every person a possible agent provocateur. They rejected the world around them - including what amounted to all Christian churches - as corrupt and dangerous. They were, in a sense, a protest movement. Protest movements, if they do not mature, often end up as funhouse mirrors of what they oppose. They become attached to their enemies, defining themselves in terms of the opposition.
My twenty-seven years among the Holiness people made me sensitive to the psychological need for purity. Over the years I’ve seen this pattern repeat in activist groups. Because they define themselves by their opposition, they become anxious to eliminate any commonality with their opposite. Their relative positions grow further apart as they eliminate any middle ground. They engage in ideological and personal purges. Purity becomes the goal as they continue to identify themselves in terms of the hated other.
This is not an argument in favor of moderation. The truth does not inevitably reside in the middle. I have opinions that people in the so-called moderate middle would call extreme. What I hope to avoid, though, are opinions that are driven solely by opposition to an “other”, in pursuit of purity.
Because purity is not possible. Especially not in a world as interconnected as ours. In a sense, we have always been interconnected. It has always been true that conflict and oppression reduces the victor as well as the victim. The modern world, however, has made those connections more tangible and obvious.
Refusing to buy from Amazon because you want to avoid complicity with their terrible practices (personal purity) will not work because, if you use the internet, you’re using Amazon Web Services in one way or another since they provide the infrastructure for so, so many websites. Believing you are innocent of global ecosystem destruction and carbon pollution because you recycle and buy “green” products is a delusion. Examples could be multiplied.
The Amish are more complicated than some people think. There is a common belief that their antique way of living is about avoiding the modern world, i.e., maintaining purity. But their decisions to avoid certain technologies are more nuanced than that. The decisions they make are made on the basis of community values, not simply in opposition to the modern world. (Undoubtedly this process itself is not always pure in reality, but this is the way they describe themselves. And it seems to be borne out in many cases.) I’ve seen them make decisions that make no sense if they are in service to purity, but do make sense if they are defined in terms of, for example, maintaining community cohesion.
Give up on purity. Not only is it a goal driven by anxious attachment, it is not achievable. But if purity is not our goal, what could be? I would say that one healthier, more achievable goal is to avoid servitude. If we cannot achieve pure sovereignty over our lives, we can at least maintain some agency directed in terms of our values. I am off social media - but I did not close the accounts because I wanted to be pure. I closed them because my mind was being colonized. My mental energy was being spent on whatever was the timeline’s momentary obsession. Leaving social media has meant that my thoughts are much more directed by my own interests and goals.
What are your values? How can you shape your life in accordance with your values? These are the questions that should occupy our minds. The answers will allow you to build a life for something.
Now reading: “The dropout: a history” at Aeon. I’ve been in a sort of project of disconnection for several months now. Specifically, disconnecting in order to re-connect in a more healthy way. This article provides an enlightening history of the cultural concerns (and paranoias!) underlying the “turn on, tune in, drop out” movement. It’s easy to see parallels in the present day.
It’s a new year - and that means well-intentioned people making resolutions and other well-intentioned people insisting that we’re all good enough as we are. Both are right.
It seems clear to me that most of us could use some improvement and such improvement requires intentionality and planning. The beginning of a new year is as good a time as any to do that.
It also seems clear to me that some of our ideas about self-improvement are driven by corporations intent on exploiting our insecurities for their own profit, a.k.a. marketing.
This tension between self-improvement and self-acceptance is one that has bedeviled me often. I won’t say I have any answers but I do have some experience.
I suggest two words to keep in mind:
Grace
Be gracious with yourself. Something needs improvement? That’s fine! Approach the issue knowing that you are not your enemy. Get out of the conflict frame of mind.
For example, I’ve let my running and meditating practice fall apart over the last couple of months. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. I shrug my shoulders and make plans to gently correct it.
Running: Work back into the practice by running a mile a day 3-5 times per week. Increase that from a mile as I feel like it. I’m in no hurry. I’m not going to die of a heart attack if I’m not running a 5k next month. One mile is better than zero miles.
Meditating: Work back into the practice by meditating 20 minutes at a time. I was meditating for longer periods of time and there’s a voice in my head that wants me to believe that 20 minutes (or even 10 or 15 minutes on really distracted days) isn’t good enough. But I will be gracious with myself. Ten minutes is better than zero minutes.
Whim
I was reading The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction this evening when it occurred to me that Alan Jacobs’ discussion of Reading at Whim might apply here also.
The Eat Your Greens school of reading (see Adler/Van Doren in How to Read a Book) would have us read the right books in the right way and - most importantly - have the right opinions about them. Jacobs offers a different approach: Read at Whim.
Eventually, however, he comes upon a problem similar to the self-improvement/self-acceptance conundrum. Not all books are equally valuable (some are more like junk food) - yet he still maintains that the Eat Your Greens school misunderstands the point of reading.
This is where he distinguishes between whim - “thoughtless, directionless preference that almost invariably leads to boredom or frustration or both” - and Whim - “based in self-knowledge.”
Capital-W Whim includes a playfulness grounded in a person’s knowledge of their own interests, capabilities, etc. It is not based on what others believe you should do, much less on what will enrich people wholly unrelated to you.
Grace applied to self-improvement means you will be kind to yourself, refusing to see yourself as your enemy. Whim applied to self-improvement means you will approach it with a certain playfulness, always with reference to what leads to your own flourishing.
Together this means that self-improvement is best approached through love and patience. The same approach you would take with a beloved friend.
For the last several months in response to all this, I’ve been reading about solitude and silence - and making some attempts at practice. No one needs me to tell them that the world is in trouble. What I’m looking for is a way to live with the trouble, without falling into the destructive patterns of behavior we see around us. It seems that more silence is either a way to that way, or the way itself.
Obviously, when I talk about the value of silence, I’m not talking about absolute, unending silence; otherwise I’d be quite a hypocrite for writing this. My interest is in silence as a space to inhabit, however temporarily, and from which to act.
The non-action of the wise man is not simply inaction.
It is not a studied thing and thus cannot be upset by anything.
The sage is quiet, not because he wills to be quiet
but because he is not unsettled.
(Zuangzhi, as found in Beaulac, Sitting with Lao-Tzu)
Silence separates you from the multitude of voices that would control you. It is a way to understand yourself as yourself and clarify your mind. Acting out of that place, rather than in reaction to the multitude of voices, is far better. Thomas Merton:
He who attempts to act and do things for others or for the world, without deepening his own self-understanding, freedom, integrity, and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others. He will communicate to them nothing but the contagion of his own obsessions, his aggressiveness, his ego-centered ambitions, his delusions about ends and means, his doctrinaire prejudices and ideas. (Thomas Merton, Contemplation in a World of Action)
All of this, by the way, I write aspirationally - because I know how noisy my own head is and how tempted I am to stop resisting the ever-present distractions. It is a real struggle to separate yourself from the insanity of social media and cable news and scrolling scrolling scrolling. Listen, life is hard and you’re an adult, so you’re free to do with your life what you want. Just make sure it is what you want in your deepest self.
Some good writing on this subject:
- Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits by Bill Porter
- Hermits by Peter France
- Solitude by Anthony Storr
- “Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude” by Thomas Merton, published in Disputed Questions
Merton’s essay is particularly rich - and his struggle with his monastic superiors to get the solitude he wanted is also instructive. (I can’t find where I read about that but I’ll link it here if I can find it.) One of the lines that spoke most deeply to me is the following. My reasons for withdrawal weren’t nearly so grand - I just wanted some peace! - but I love the idea of healing in yourself the wounds you see in the world.
Such men, out of pity for the universe, out of loyalty to mankind, and without a spirit of bitterness or of resentment, withdraw into the healing silence of the wilderness, or of poverty, or of obscurity, not in order to preach to others but to heal in themselves the wounds of the entire world. (Thomas Merton, “Notes for a Philosophy of Solitude”)