Hey all, I’ve been on holiday for a couple of weeks, which explains the radio silence. But other people in the world have written and said plenty of interesting human thoughts in the meantime, so here are 3 new exciting links to share with you:
There are so many excellent blogs and newsletters out there, and I’ve been following David Cain and his Raptitude blog for a while now. He consistently writes excellent short and accessible pieces on how the mind works, with a specific focus on mindfulness. This blog post is about the lack of focus and mindfulness that many people experienced over the pandemic - the elusive lockdown mind fog.
As David says, the most common explanation for this mind fog is stress. As many people have lost their daily routines and sense of security, it’s hard to know whether you’re coming or going. But David offers an alternative explanation of the fog: simply a huge increase in the things that are bad for us anyway, but normally too subtle and in too small amounts to really notice. As he puts it:
“We’re full-time subjects in many mad science experiments: industrialized food, noise pollution, overabundant passive entertainment, decreasing face-to-face interaction, increasing employer demands, blue-light-emitting screens, over-identification with news and world events, lack of physical activity, separation from nature, separation from community, and many more well-known and well-discussed pitfalls of modern life.”
Many of these modern life “experiments” ramped up over the course of the pandemic. It’s like the documentary maker Morgan Spurlock eating nothing but McDonald’s food for a month to show how nutritionally dangerous it is. Modern life can be bad for us in a number of ways. For most of us, for most of the time, we’re able to keep these things in check. But lockdown may have given us a taste of what happens when we don’t.
When it comes to the unhealthy nature of modern life, most people’s minds go straight to new technologies - social media, smartphones, AI and the Internet. We tend to think about these things in fairly black-and-white ways: are they good or bad for us? Is Facebook bad for people’s mental health? Is Twitter destroying democracy?
What I like about the linked conversation with L. M. Sacasas - who has another excellent newsletter called The Convivial Society - is how he doesn’t try to assess technologies as either good or bad, but does explore how deeply they transform our lives. His 41 Questions Concerning Technology are brilliant. Here’s some:
How will the use of this technology affect my experience of time?
How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to other people?
How will the use of this technology affect how I relate to the world around me?
What practices will the use of this technology displace?
What will the use of this technology encourage me to notice?
What will the use of this technology encourage me to ignore?
Does my use of this technology encourage me to view others as a means to an end?
In previous newsletter editions, we’ve looked at how modern life has drastically changed our capacities for boredom and attention, our expectations of work, and our styles of parenting. I’ve written elsewhere that the past 250 years of modernity have been unlike any other time in human history - from the way we treat ourselves and others, to where we live and what we do, life has fundamentally changed.
Is this good or bad? I think that’s the wrong question. What we can say for sure is that life now is incomparably different. Never before have you been able to do something useful, engaging, or productive with every minute of your day. Never before have you known about the tragedies going on in the world, and been able to do something about them. Never before could you go through most of your life as if it will go on forever. These are unchartered waters, and no one really knows what’s going on.
If modern life is drastically different - neither straightforwardly good nor bad for us, just totally crazy and unknown - what about modern society? Is it good or bad? Are we heading rapidly towards civilizational collapse? Or have we never had it so good?
In this brilliant article, by the good folks over at Future Crunch, Angus Hervey argues that it’s not a matter of Either/Or, but Both/And. Yes, the world is on fire. Yes, democracy is falling apart. Yes, people are steadily being reduced to algorithims. AND: More than 30 million Covid-19 vaccines are being administered every day. The world has produced more electricity from solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear than from coal in the past two years. More people around the world are being educated, fewer people are going hungry, and conflict and violence are in steady decline.
There is no one story of modern society. The story of collapse is partly true. The story of renewal is also partly true. How they interact is anyone’s guess. That story is too complex and unknown for anyone to tell with any degree of certainty.
In fact, it’s probably always been this way. As the article points out, it’s only in retrospect that we give periods of history a neat story, such as the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment. Future generations will be able to look back at modernity and tell a story of what it all meant, but not us. We must learn how to make a difference without relying on an overarching narrative of humanity to guide us. Stories are tempting because they give us some sense of security when everything else is uncertain. But, as Rebecca Solnit notes, all we can really do is Hope in the Dark.
Okay, we’re back! Feel free to leave your thoughts below as a comment, or message me directly. All human thoughts are welcome. Go well out there :-)