There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things.
I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why, exactly, something seemed so amazing to our younger eyes…but this feels less bad for me as I get older in the same way that opening a can of almost textureless factory-made “ravioli” in a sugary orange sauce loses its comfort and becomes more of a moment for a satisfyingly rueful chuckle at how low my standards once were.
I’ve been indulging myself with some comfort reads, as well, revisiting old and beloved books for a little of that satisfying feeling one gets from retreading old paths where great stuff lies, and I’ve largely been finding new details tucked into the old like little notes pencilled into the margins of a book that inspires such annotations. It’s a task intentionally not taxing, and a pursuit to wage a proxy war of the thought-out against a stretch of external idiocy, but I find, more and more, that I reveal more than just another strata of narrative in the familiar.
Ringworld, the 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, is a terrible book.
There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.
I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).
We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.
All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
—Blaise Pascal, Penseés
But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.
So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.
The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.
I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.
I woke from an inadvisable after-work nap with a thought wedged in my head:
I am closer to 70 than I am to 40.
How did this happen?
But hell, I know. I lived, I ran, I suffered, I danced, I triumphed, and fell. I’m scarred, I’m neurotic, I’ve seen things I wish I hadn’t and done worse things to people I cared about, though I reassure myself that I didn’t know. I didn’t know.
It’s certainly the truth that, unless science makes a major breakthrough and quick, I’m in the last third of my life, or fourth, if things turn on me.
What’s it mean to age beautifully, to look to those ahead of me who somehow managed to slide this way in lush embrace of what life is, in its silky, spiky, wild wholeness, and not that mythical thing we all seem to chase for far too long—the imaginary, perfectly, finely-tuned life that we aspire to?
What’s it mean to look to the people who were our friends when we were just kids and they were where I am now and really seek what magic there was in that?
It’s where we live best, and live longest, slowing the swirl to the drain, when we can master what those people knew and I didn’t, except to be drawn to their energy.
