Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #70

From the art of living to helpless growth, phono sapiens, regretful accelerationism and frodo's smartphone

THIS WEEK → 🎨 The Art of Living 😟 Helpless Growth 📱 Phono Sapiens ➕ Regretful Accelerationism 🚿 Frodo’s Smartphone

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

How can we build a better world? As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 🎨 The Art of Living

A beautiful take by L.M. Sacasas that challenges our life hack, self-optimization, and limitless consumption culture. Living life in an “artful” way also links well with the need for beauty in a world that – in service of efficiency – has become increasingly ugly and grey, which I explored here before, as well as my recent thoughts on aliveness vs. productivity.

“The art of living, like any other art, is the art of learning to work creatively within the constraints of the medium. […]

I’m drawn to the idea of an art of living much more so than to the compulsive search for life hacks, regimens of self-improvement, or self-optimization schemes. These too often feel like a doubling down on the insistence that we can always do more if only we apply the right technique. They also suggest that the path to happiness involves the discovery of a set of methods which I might readily apply to my work, my relationships, my health, etc. independently of any virtues I might need to cultivate or vices I ought to correct. They draw my attention to what more I might do and what more I might have rather than who I might become.

An art, on the other hand, presupposes limits and invites the artist to work with and within those limits. These limits, inherent to the medium itself, can be disregarded, but then you would not have art. The limits of the medium are precisely what call forth the creative effort. They are what create the conditions that make art possible.

Thinking in terms of an art of living also invites me to consider how I might need to change in order to practice it well. It suggests not a set of methods which demand nothing of me, but a set of practices or skills which I must cultivate and whose cultivation changes me in the process. These skills enable me not only to produce something, but also to see the possibilities latent within the medium and to imaginatively draw these out—not to make a demand, but to perceive and respond to an invitation.

By way of contrast, the ideal of limitlessness consumption serves the modern economy quite well, but it does not serve the person well at all. This ideal imparts to us all a spirit of scarcity that darkens our experience: not enough time, not enough attention, not enough capacity to care. But upon what does this spirit feed? It feeds, in part, on the temptation to live as if there were no limits to what I am able to do: the tasks I can accomplish, the things I can care about, the information I can consume, etc. There is no art in this, because the tacit assumption that we must buy into along the way is that there is no limit to what we can consume. […]

But if the constraints of a medium of art appear self-evident—the canvas is only so large, the instrument plays only a certain range of notes—what are the limits of the medium on which the art of life plays. Indeed, what exactly is the medium in view? […]

The constraints of the medium, then, are the constraints of our embodiment, or at least that is my proposition to you. And these are, in part, the constraints of place and time. I can only be here now, and I can be here now only for so long, which means there are only so many things to which I can meaningfully attend at length and at depth. I may choose to accept this reality and respond creatively to it, or I can resist it and seek to transcend it and embrace every tool that promises to help me do so.

To practice the art of living is to learn to see not what we wish were before us but what is, in fact, there, but also what it can be.”

»

The Convivial Society

| The Art of Living by

L. M. Sacasas

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#2 😟 Helpless Growth

Dougald Hine argues that our current progress narrative fuels a deep-seated anxiety. The more society progresses, the more anxious and helpless we get because we become increasingly detached from the production of essential goods, especially food. The solution: Get back involved with the land and soil!

“When we begin to talk in terms of progress, we are drawn into viewing the past as simply a poorer version of the present, the future as the only direction in which we might look for a sense that change is possible, and history itself as though it were capable of being represented on a spreadsheet, its losses balanced against its gains, to produce some notional equivalent of the GDP which would allow us to say whether things are moving in the right direction and at what pace. Founded on these assumptions, the cultural logic of progress, growth and development makes possible a certain kind of knowledge and a certain sense of agency. […]

These assumptions bring certain aspects of historical experience into focus […] but they blind us to others, and the picture of the world which results is increasingly at odds with the lived experience of many of those around us. The logic of progress no longer serves as it once did, as a foundation on which to build political projects or to make promises that ring true. Worse, it ends up blinding us to the forms in which hope could come and the moves that are worth making in times like these. We need to learn how to go on together, how to make lives worth living, in the absence of progress. […]

Let’s bring this back to the helplessness which many of us experience when confronted with what we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change. […] I have come to suspect that there is an important connection between this helplessness and our relationship to land and food. […]

Behind a lot of what is said about climate change, it seems to me, there lies a basic existential anxiety about where our food is going to come from. To make things trickier, this anxiety lives deep in our gut-intelligence, in the parts of ourselves that we share with our ancient ancestors and our fellow animals, while talk about climate change generally takes place in a language of measurements and calculations, problems and solutions, that speaks to a disembodied head-intelligence.

I suggest that the best response to the helplessness which many of us experience when the realities of climate change come home to us is to recover another sense of growth: not as an ever-increasing bundle of commodities, traded through markets and treated as though they were interchangeable, but the cycle of seasonal growth on which all of our lives continue to depend. I mean this literally: contrary to the logic of progress and the pride it encouraged us to take in our distance from the land, it would be a good thing for far more of us to get back involved with soil and gain at least some skill and experience in growing food. […]

Getting back involved with land and food under difficult conditions will be a humbling experience. It will call for all of our human cleverness, but also more of our capacity for attention, patience and care than the patterns of industrial activity have generally allowed for. We can begin practising this today, in gardens and public spaces, reclaiming abandoned patches of land in our cities or bringing life to depopulated rural areas, building culture and community through these efforts. There are almost certainly people near you who are already doing this.”

»

Writing Home

| Helpless Growth by

Dougald Hine

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#3 📱 Phono Sapiens

Some extremely thought-provoking statements below by philosopher Byung-Chul Han regarding our modern digital lifestyles and the resulting de-humanization of storytelling: “We were storytellers; we have become storysellers”.

"For Han, Homo sapiens have degenerated into “phono sapiens”.

A nice phrase, but what does it mean? Han’s suggestion in more than 20 books since 2015 is that we are all Big Brothers now. The smartphone is Catholicism with better technology, a modern rosary that is handheld confessional and effective surveillance apparatus in one. [...]

In this new book, Han describes the deleterious effects of that degeneration on storytelling. Storytelling used to bind us communally over the campfire; it connected us to our pasts and helped us imagine hopeful futures. The digital screen has replaced that fire, making us individuals performing factitious versions of ourselves to unseen peers, tailoring our looks, lives and opinions to fit prevailing norms. “This smart form of domination constantly asks us to communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to post, share and like messages,” writes Han.

We were storytellers; we have become storysellers, he says – a phrase he likes so much he repeats it frequently in this book.

We deploy heart-rate data from Fitbits to tell yawnsome just-so stories about fitness journeys; we embellish the tale of what we did on our holidays with selfies and soft-porn snaps of the meal we had at that cute bar we found, according to the permissible parameters of human leisure time, in Oslo.

Something has gone missing in all these stories: our individuality, our humanity, our ability to tell convincing narratives rather than perform ourselves.

And when we aren’t producing stories, we are consuming them. [...]

The result? “Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle,” writes Han. “Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in late modernity.”"

» The Guardian | The Crisis of Narration by Byung-Chul Han review – how big tech altered the narrative by Stuart Jeffries

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➕ Extras

“To put it more bluntly, despite the fact my personal and professional life are centered on — and blessed by — the Internet, I’m increasingly skeptical that it can be, as it was in Ready Player One, portrayed as a distinct development from a world increasingly in turmoil. Correlation may not be causation, but sometimes it absolutely is.”
Regretful Accelerationism by Stratechery

“The modern condition has resulted in a profound separation of mankind from the natural world. likewise we insulate our personal selves from our own natural state. Increasing diagnosis of mental and physical malaise, are met by an eager pharmaceutical industry offering chemical interventions.”
Panacea by Cale Dox (thought-provoking art)

“For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate". How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relationship with the breathing earth?”
The Spell of The Sensuous by David Abram

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🚿 Shower Thoughts

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That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

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Thomas

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PS: I recently sent a little update to everyone who downloaded my report Alternative Prosperity: Reframing The “Good Life”. The update includes a simple canvas-style tool that will help you reframe the prosperity narrative of a system – e.g. a business, an industry, your life, or a certain project you are working on. And if you haven’t downloaded my report yet, click on the link above to check it out!