David Griesing | Work Life Reward Author | Philadelphia

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Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do

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I’ve always wondered:  how did somebody I meet end up doing the job (or jobs) that they’re doing?  After many of these exchanges, the most telling answers always seem to involve early preferences that they’d chosen to act upon.
 
It’s what you preferred to do when you were bored, where you turned “to make something” when inspired, or the ways you reacted when you’re put in an uncomfortable spot. These decisions reveal almost instinctual affinities, the pull of your strongest magnets. Almost always, they’re more intuitive than rational and you end up trusting them enough to turn them into springboards.
 
Recent evidence has helped to confirm this hypothesis.  

Some family members and friends of Bo Burnham repeatedly made fun of him as a kid. They were amused that he acted “kind of gay” and, by way of response, he proclaimed some of his work-defining preferences not by starting a diversity workshop on his front porch (signaling his flowering desire for a career in HR) or by researching “conversion camps” he might attend (sensing the power of immersive experiences to improve himself and the gravitational pull of maybe working for an investment bank or a major law firm one day). No, Burnham didn’t respond by doing either of these things.
 
Instead, he reacted to the hurt or alarm he felt by leaning into his family member’s and friends’ conformist attitudes and spoofing them (along with his role in triggering their intolerance) in videos he made in his childhood bedroom, posting them on YouTube, and writing the first chapter of what was to become his viral success story. 
 
Burnham’s early-and-often preference for turning uncomfortable situations into comedy—and then sharing his unexpected point of view as widely as possible—had a kind of apotheosis two weeks ago when his Netflix special called Bo Burnham: Inside (about his discomfort at having to relieve his isolation during the pandemic through the screens of his devices) received 6 Emmy Award nominations only six weeks after it was first released (which on top of everything else has to be some kind of record) however terrific it frequently was.
 
I didn’t know Burnham before watching his comedy special but almost immediately wanted to know how he first set sail for the strangely hilarious harbor he was sharing with us. Still in his early teens, filming his reactions to other people’s judgments in his bedroom, and then wanting to get his response to as many people as possible—Burnham had been drawn to blaring situational comedy like a moth to a flame before he could probably explain it. And when he was pulled in that direction, he proceeded to act upon “what that little inside voice” was telling him to do. Now that voice had been given what some might call The Ultimate Amplification.
 
Because at least half of my work today is writing about work, I often ask people I encounter “how they happened to get into…,” and not infrequently, I hear stories about childhood affinities and the aptitudes that helped to further them.  Discounting the occasional savvy marketer who has built an “engaging origin story” around his or her subsequent success, there plainly seems to be more than mere coincidence in the “follow-your-early- preferences” Theory of Workplace Fit. In addition to everyone else that I’ve heard from, it surely applies to my career choices, including what family members and random observers told me “I should do when I grow up” once they had a sense of where I was telling them (subliminally of course) that I was headed. 
 
So on Friday morning, after I’d listened to an interview with a neuroscientist who’d wanted to be either a professional dancer or a scientist as a kid—and then heard him say that the same brain circuits which enable the birds he studies to vocalize may also enable both humans and birds to dance—I knew that I’d be writing to you today about his preference-driven origin story.  
 
Was it a coincidence, or something far deeper, that brought him to a career fork between “obviously dissimilar” jobs early on, but found him discovering, at mid-career, that he’s always been interested in (and his preferences had always somehow involved) investigating the mechanics that make both of these jobs possible?

Illustration by Maiken Scott for the Bird Song episode of her podcast.

The interview with Erich Jarvis (who is a professor at Rockefeller University studying the neurobiology of vocal learning) was on a podcast called The Pulse. The tagline for the pod describes it as “an adventure into unexpected corners of the health and science world,” and since I listen fairly often, I can report that in terms of “adventure” and “unexpected” it often delivers, and certainly did this week. 
 
Jarvis concentrates his research on how birds produce song with the broader aim of finding solutions to human speech disorders in the ways that certain song birds, including parrots and hummingbirds, learn how to sing by imitating other birds and the real world sounds that they encounter. As he delves into the brain circuitry that enables these birds to “learn” their speech patterns, he hopes to find ways that can enable similar circuits (or molecular pathways) in the human brain to fire again as intended once they’ve broken down.
 
As the interview unfolded, I learned that Jarvis grew up in New York City. His mom was a gospel singer and his dad a musician with a deep curiosity about science. Encouraged by their artistic inclinations, he became a dance major at the High School for the Performing Arts in New York City, leading to internships at the Joffrey Ballet and Alvin Alley Dance Company. Notwithstanding his talent as a dancer, Jarvis recalled his deepening fascination with science, which he took from both his father and a high school biology course. On the eve of college, he wondered if he might make more of a difference to others as a scientist than as a dancer. He chose the path of science of course but made a point of mentioning that he still dances as much as he can, including in the studio that he maintained in his apartment during the pandemic-related shutdowns in New York.
 
Elaborating on his research, Jarvis mentioned a couple of widely-viewed video clips featuring performing birds on line. He told us that one of them, featuring a parakeet named Disco, illustrated how birds can learn to mimic surprisingly complex speech patterns. As with all birds and animals that have learned how to mimic, they do so by storing sounds they have heard in their auditory memories, transferring these sound cards through a motor pathway to their voice boxes (a syrinx in birds, a larynx in humans), hearing themselves vocalize, and then practicing until their memories and their voices are aligned—in a sensory feedback loop. When I got to check it out, I had to admit that Disco’s feedback loop was, indeed, pretty amazing.
 
But then Jarvis made his own surprising disclosure:  “Only species that can learn how to imitate sound can learn how to dance.” Apparently, in Jarvis’s corner of of the scientific community, interest in this possible overlap was only piqued after a cockatoo named Snowball was seen by millions dancing to the Backstreet Boys and revealing, among many other things, how clickbait can have entirely unintended consequences once it finds its own feedback loop.  
 
During the scientific debate that Snowball triggered, Jarvis said that he began to extrapolate from what he had already learned about the neurocircuitry of vocalizing animals and humans.

Are there specialized connections that take sound from the ears and integrate them into the brain circuits that control the muscles of the body, [stimulating not only the vocal cords in animals and birds, but also other responses in their bodies]? If those specialized connections and genes that control those connections are the same ones that gave rise to the spoken language circuit…it would suggest that the mechanism of learning how to dance [actually] came from language. What’s interesting about this is that some cultures don’t distinguish dance from music.

Jarvis’s podcast interview never direcly linked this hypothesis to his own career fork in high school, or to the fact that the same mind-body connections might be integral to both of them.  Instead, the coincidence (or congruence) just floated about in the ether for a few seconds before his interview ended.
 
I tend to think there is something behind most coincidences, in this instance how genes and environmental factors may have embedded the career preferences that Jarvis had in high school far more deeply than he ever could have known for sure.
 
I think the good work of his life—as prefigured by his early preferences for dance and science—may have always been about the drive to discover how his mind, was telling his body, what it should do.

The image up top is of a 2006 painting by David Hockney called “Wheat Field Beyond the Tunnel,” one of many paintings he’s done of paths in rural England and what lies beyond them.

This post was adapted from my July 25, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

We Don’t Have To Be Productive All the Time

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Yesterday, when I sat down to write to you I didn’t really feel like making the effort. Instead, a few relaxing hours with a slow cup of coffee were calling to me. But then my thoughts challenged my feelings. 
 
“Being useful on a Saturday morning means writing to you,” I told myself. Producing Sunday’s newsletter is on the schedule, how I’m adding (as opposed to subtracting) something to the cosmic balance sheet on this particular day. 
 
Then I worried:  Is writing this week’s post just one more unnatural way that I contort myself into Being Productive or, because it’s nurturing a community and not merely commodifying one, is what comes naturally to me here fundamentally different from the urgency that drives me at most other times? 
 
I hoped it was the latter, because I can imagine that writing to you is not “more work” (or really “work” at all) but instead its polar opposite:  an essential human interaction that’s valuable in its own community-building way, with no purpose beyond initiating a good conversation around a campfire that we’ll gather around remotely after I press “Send” every Sunday morning. 
 
But as I dug into writing the paragraphs below, every coffee-calling part of me knew that I’d probably gone back to work instead.

We’ll get back to my conundrum later, after considering why it matters to think as well feel our ways through a version of my same, basic question:  

Even when we don’t want to be working, why does it feel like we always are?

The Problem

It’s amazing, really, how much we’ve bought into the myth of continued “productivity” and “usefulness” today.  Indeed, our language tells us about the depths of our belief, since the opposites of these two words (when applied to people) are almost always negative. If they’re not “productive” and “useful,” they must be “lazy” and “useless.”

None of us want to be a parasite (which is another trope). Instead, we want to contribute to that overall balance sheet, and so an entire system has been created to support, measure and reward our productivity and continued usefulness, not for it’s own sake but to sustain the system itself. You could call it 21st Century capitalism or simply a giant hamster wheel that provides all the rationales we’ll ever need to keep on going—never getting off of it until all our energies are spent and we’ve been reduced to uselessness in it’s final form, which, of course, is death.

In the ultimate fantasy about Hamsterdom, maybe our continuous push to be useful (and never concede to retirement) can even delay the inevitable. Not worked to-death exactly, just denying its bitter aftertaste.

She was productive to the very end, god bless her. What a good life she had. That’s how I want to go too! Never a burden to anybody, she worked until the very end.

To some extent, we’ve all bought into this fantasy, but what about the price we’ve been paying to maintain it?  Because oftentimes, work can be “life” (as in “life-force”) threatening.
 
Undoubtedly, it’s why the work we’re always doing feels exhausting. It is exhausting, sucked-dry to the marrow exhausting, because we’re condiioned to work and be productive and never be a burden to anybody, except, of course, to ourselves.
 
In this, we’re both the enablers of and the fuel for Hamsterdom’s productive fires, and, from its system perspective, the best part is that we’ve come to believe that working this much is actually good for us too!  Busy hands are happy hands. Generous hands. Building character.
 
Well, it’s the ultimate hoodwink.
 
Indeed, this colonization of our vital energies is so complete that it’s almost imperceptible to us on most days, but we can still get glimpses of what we’ve lost when we consider our so-called “time off.”  
 
Even our play or leisure time today is increasingly turned into a productivity challenge or been repurposed somehow as a marketable product. 
 
How many photos can I take at a Second-Line parade in New Orleans or while I’m visiting Jerusalem? (Last week’s post.) How many experiences—photographic or otherwise—can I consume on my vacation before I’m “full” and feel I’ve made “the most of my time away?” How many pictures can I post about it? How can I improve my fitness or knowledge or adaptability today, help my kids get into better schools, show my neighbors an even more beautiful garden, whatever it is, because I’ve only got this little block of “free” time before I’m supposedly “back to work”?  
 
Or approached somewhat differently:
 
If we’re smarter than hamsters, why aren’t we working ‘only enough’ to enable us to get off that treadmill for meaningful chunks of time so we can enjoy the convivial life that we’ve otherwise been missing?
 
Part of why I’m asking these questions today comes from reading a series of thought-provoking essays by Tedd Siegel, a prolific writer who’d been wondering the same thing and found himself in conversation with a range of others who’d been wondering about it too. (This will take you to his starting block essay, in a rich and continuing series of them.) Siegel begins with an observation:

[T]he deal we’re being offered (work yourself to death for the next thirty years while you build your human capital) requires each of [us] to take out a mortgage on the self that [we] know can never be paid off. The deferral of most personal goals to an imagined future, in exchange for laboring continually for the goals of their employers, lies exposed as a rotten deal….We’ve played by a set of rules that was too optimistic, too individualistic, and too lacking in urgency for change.

Siegel writes to agitate for that change, and he identifies several root causes for the state of our near-ceaseless work today. One results from the shift (particularly in developed countries) from a manufacturing to a service and finally to today’s digital economy. (With my asides to Siegel’s observations) this caused:

a qualitative change in our relationship to our jobs. Our jobs are more intimate to us [today], more reliant on our interpersonal aptitudes and emotional intelligence. [We are not just cogs-in-a-wheel making widgets anymore. For this new hamster wheel, we have to go to school first, know how to trouble-shoot, etc.] Neoliberal capitalism [as he calls it], has us constantly concerned with its problems [meaning that we take our work home with us], integrating them into our life problems in order to get things done.

(Once upon a time, a fellow lawyer was onto something when she asked me whether I was billing the time I spent thinking about my cases in the shower.)
 
As he got going, Siegel eventually introduced me to Jenny Odell, who’s a professor at Stanford, and her 2017 book How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.  Two words became important to him and to me in her book title. The first is “Nothing.” Odell doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing nothing at all, just nothing that Hamsterdom wants us to be doing (which includes relaxing and zoning out). The second word is “Resisting.”  
 
Throughout her book, Odell argues that all of us should create an autonomous zone of resistance to Hamsterdom’s relentless demands—a protected and even defiant place where we hold onto aspects of our lives that cannot (and never should be) optimized. It’s making a deliberate conscious choice, every day and maybe several times as day, to carve out a space for living in a way that cannot be appropriated or assimilated by the market’s logic and turned into a deliverable—because we simply won’t allow it.  (For example, in the era of Google and Facebook, that includes taking back our attention from companies that are selling it to others by turning off their apps on our phones and laptops.) Then, and most importantly, the autonomous zone we’ve recovered will allow us, at long last, to enjoy a version of “a satisfying, collective life” that’s entirely apart from work.
 
For Odell, the act of resisting-in-place “is to make oneself into a shape that cannot be easily appropriated by a capitalist value system.” It begins with a very specific way of “doing nothing” that involves learning (or more accurately, re-learning) how “to redirect and enlarge our attention.”  

And how will we spend all of this liberated attention?  Once again, Odell’s answer is something that humans have always known instinctively how to do, at least (it seems) until quite recently. It involves nothing more complicated than rejoining the conviviality of a collective life with other people. 

The Way We Were

Hunter-gatherers

Like Siegel and Odell, James Suzman has been troubled for some time by the impacts of modern work on our lives and wondered, from his perspective as an anthropologist, whether humans are hard-wired “to work this way” or whether it was cultural imperatives (culminating in Hamsterdom) over-riding our essential natures. His research took him to hunter/gatherer communities where he could observe human behavior before “all of this civilization came along,” and it resulted in a series of books, most recently, Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots (2021).
 
Suzman discovered several things in the course of his research, among them that we are not, as humans, naturally inclined to allow work to take over our lives. 
 
In fact, all the way back to our hunter/gatherer forebears, humans viewed their time and proceeded to organize it in ways that maximized the convivial zone of collective life while safeguarding its refuge (by, for example, ensuring that community members never felt devalued by someone else’s status or driven to distraction by internal competition). Indeed, hunter/gather groups like the Ju/’hoansi, some of whom still live in southern Africa, went to great pains to ensure that they only worked the amount that was absolutely necessary to support the time they spent together. Concluded Suzman: 

Half of the value of understanding hunter-gatherer society is to recognise that lots of these things [about working] that we think we are hostage to are actually not a part of our nature.

For example, the Ju/’hoansi have a fundamentally different view of scarcity (or “enough”) than we seem to. In the course of his observations, Suzman found that the Ju/’hoansi rarely stored food that they had hunted down or gathered for more than a few days. Trusting that their environment would always provide for them, they worked to meet their immediate needs and then stopped, rather than worrying about shortages and planning ahead. (By way of contrast, we might ask ourselves: Is our modern view of “enough” programmed and encouraged by a perpetual consumption machine urging us on, or do we actually “need” all the stuff that we buy, especially when we might be doing something far more satisfying with our own “hunting and gathering” time?)

The Ju/’hoansi also go to great lengths to regulate their group dynamics to ensure a general harmony when they do what’s most important to them, namely, sharing in one another’s company. That means they don’t want any hunter in their midst to get too big for his britches. Whenever one of the hunters returns with a big kill, they told Suzman: “we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.” It’s a practice that’s known among researchers as “insulting the hunter’s meat.”

According to Suzman, the Ju/’hoansi also “insisted that the actual owner of the meat, [that is] the individual charged with its distribution, was not the hunter, but the person who owned the arrow that killed the animal.” This helped keep the most talented hunters’ egos in check while, at the same time, allowing arrow owners like “the elderly, the short-sighted, the clubfooted and the lazy [to get] a chance to be the center of attention once in awhile.” Group harmony, not one-upmanship, was important to hunter/gatherers. (We, by contrast, live in countries where someone who is perceived as “the most successful businessman” can be elected president, where nearly everyone can name the richest man in the world [Jeff Bezos], and somebody like Elon Musk has millions of social media followers following his every utterance. Every once in awhile, wouldn’t we be a lot better off “insulting the hunter’s meat”?)

Suzman’s Work book, and his scholarship generally, has provoked a great deal of commentary among professional commenters, including Derek Thompson, who writes regularly for The Atlantic. In a piece from earlier this year, Thompson adds some heft to Suzman’s observations by noting some recent polling data and how the Ju/’hoansi differ from us when it comes to time. (I’d seen this U.S. polling data reported elsewhere, but it had a particular resonance in the context of this conversation.) Notes Thompson:

When a recent Pew Research Center survey asked about the secret to happiness, most Americans, of all ages, ranked ‘a job or career they enjoy’ above marriage, children, or any other committed relationship. Careerism, not community, is the keystone in the arch of life.

This finding is particularly striking since “it doesn’t have to be this way” given our hardwiring as a species. Our preferences today also tend to justify Jenny Odell’s conclusion that our commitment “to working all the time” has been so engrained in us that only “active resistance” will overcome it.
 
For me, Thompson’s most insightful paragraph related to our relentlessly future-oriented view of time and our unwillingness (despite the prompts of our yoga apps) to live, even for a few short minutes, in the present and leave our worries about the future behind.

[M]odern civilization is a shrine to the future. The shift goes back to the agricultural revolution, which subjected humans to farming cycles that separated planting and harvest by many months, and continued with the rise of finance. But a fixation on the future by now goes far beyond crop cycles and long-term loans. It is at the heart of our concept of education and corporate development, which presumes that young students and workers will gladly spend decades honing skills that they will be well compensated for only years later. The least controversial values in America today—the importance of grit, the hope for progress, the dream of social mobility—assume that the future is always changing and that our inclination is always to wish for better.

Thompson goes some distance towards explaining why we are where-we-are with our work, but he has little to say about what we can do about it beyond being aware that it doesn’t have to be this way. Suzman presents a longer chronicle of human labor in Work: A Deep History, but he “gestures towards” instead of “describing a way off” of the work wheel that’s endlessly depleting us today. For that, we need to return to the roadmap that Jenny Odell hands to us in How To Do Nothing.

A Way Forward

Getting back to the commons of a non-working life.

Odell flat out rejects two of the most obvious reactions to the burnout of working today, namely: “temporary life hacks designed for increasing productivity once [we go] back to work” and “saying goodbye [to the workplace] permanently, and neglecting our responsibility to the world.” To her, there is essential work that’s always waiting to be done but it is equally essential to nurture our “non-working” lives. 

As already telegraphed above, Odell’s “third way” involves active resistance to Hamsterdom’s forces so we can decide for ourselves—autonomously or outside the logic of the market—that:

Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

To protect these “inalienable rights,” all of us need to create and protectively manage a zone where we can “resist in place” despite the 24/7 ubiquity of modern capitalism’s siren call. 

Like the Ju/’hoansi, Odell asks how much work is “enough work” to maintain this non-working zone, but unlike these hunter/gatherers she recognizes that limiting the amount of work and “resisting in place” will be far easier for some than for others. Economic needs may be so great that some individuals will find her kind of resistance difficult to afford. 

To this quandary, Odell finds hope for “a way out” in “collective refusals,” where groups of people join with one another to hold open a space for more resisters to join them, at least to the extent that they can. Odell’s “refusal, boycott, and even sabotage [would be] like a crowd of Thoreau’s [at Walden Pond], refusing [the unnecessary benefits of modern working life] in tandem.” Amongst these “Thoreau’s,” other resisters might be empowered to work at least somewhat less in order to better enjoy the company of friends, families, and nature, as well as their own curiosity, playfulness, contemplation and “un-marketable” creativity.

Tedd Siegel elaborates on the mechanics of Odell’s resistance even further:

[T]here is a kind of tipping point with respect to immiseration that… brings things out into the open. This is because some people’s misery counts for more than others on the terrain of public discourse. Once the middle class and the professional classes join the ranks of the miserable, it starts to become possible [for nearly everyone] to talk about the problem at the level of the system itself.

In other words, it begins by facing our exhaustion, appreciating that everything from sustainability to human attention is being turned into a commodity, and wondering about the essential pleasures we’re missing as a result because our world of work can’t figure out a way to make a buck off of them. 
 
Isn’t enjoying those essential pleasures more important than working all the time? Then surely we should “make room” in our working lives for them by actively starting to “resist in place”–not tomorrow, but today.
 
Derek Thompson concludes: 

Happiness means being just rushed enough [by all the work that’s waiting for me].

After reading Jenny Odell, I might change this to say: 
 
Working enough to be happy means actively resisting work’s relentless undertow, every single day, in every job that I do.  
 
(Would I be lying if I said that writing this newsletter to you is a fruit of that resistance instead of more of the same? Unfortunately, I may still be too enslaved by the demands of Hamsterdom to even be able to tell.)

This post was adapted from my June 6, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.


The Giving Part of Taking Other People’s Pictures

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It’s harder than ever to maintain, and then safeguard, our zones of privacy.
 
I’ve been thinking about it in terms of pictures that other people take of us or that we take of them—sometimes when those other people are friends, sometimes when they’re strangers, and sometimes when its companies or authorities who are taking them for their own purposes.
 
In these photographs, what is the line between a fair exchange (with mutual benefits) and an unwelcomed intrusion?
 
What exactly are we “taking” when we take a picture of somebody?
 
(When shown their photographs, tribal people often complain that the camera has somehow stolen their souls.)
 
Is there, or should there be, a “give” as well as a “take” with photography?
 
Two encounters this week sharpened that last question for me.
 
A close colleague of mine in counseling work stopped by unannounced with some cookies to end our just concluded school year on a celebratory note. We’d been meeting with our kids on Zoom and hadn’t seen one another in person for months. She was so glad to see me that she wanted to take my picture before leaving, but I waved her gesture off. I’d stopped mowing the lawn when I saw her heading my way and felt that my sweaty appearance would have made a poor souvenir (even though she clearly felt otherwise). “What just happened?” I wondered afterwards.
 
My second encounter came by way of reminiscence.
 
Three years ago this week, I had been in New Orleans and was remembering that unbelievably rich and flavorful time, eager to go back and dig in even deeper. Part of my return trip would be taking in a “second line” street parade, because every week of the year at least one of them takes place somewhere in the City.

A “second line” street parade photo by Aeisha Palmer, May 20, 2007

As you can imagine, these parades (which are sponsored by New Orlean’s “social aid and pleasure clubs”) are a kind of paradise for professional and amateur photographers.  While following a random NOLA thread last week, I came across a story about “the etiquette of making photos” of the performers at these parades. This story also speculated about the “taking and giving” boundaries of photographing other people. For example:
 
Are there different rules for friends than there are for strangers?
 
Several years ago, Susan Sontag explored these boundaries and expectations in a series of essays for the New York Review of Books, later published in her own book, On Photography. Sontag focused on the “acquisitive” nature of cameras, how they “take something” from whoever or whatever is being photographed, a sentiment that’s similar to those tribal member fears about having their essences stolen. She wrote:

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.

Sontag also commented on the vicarious nature of picture taking. 

Photography has become one of the principal devices for experiencing something, [or at least] for giving the appearance of participation.

The way she saw it, we may not be marching in (or even watching) the parade, “but somehow we feel that we are” if we can capture a picture of it for savoring now and later on. Instead of “being in the moment,” we’re counting on the triggering nature of these pictures to approximate the real experience we’ve missed by “capturing enough of it” to still feel satisfied. 
 
Of course, there are consequences on both sides to this kind of “taking.” A drive to accumulate photographic experiences can not only rob us of more direct engagement with other people and places (say, the actual smells and sounds of the parade, or the conversations we might otherwise be having with spectators and participants), it also raises questions about the boundaries that can be crossed when we’re driven by a kind of hunger to “take” more and more of them without ever realizing the impacts that we’re having by doing so. To our camera’s subjects, it can feel like violation.
 
As I’ve become more thoughtful about these impacts, it’s meant thinking through my picture-taking drive in advance.
 
What is gained and what can be lost when I’m taking somebody’s picture? What is (or should be) the etiquette around photographing others? These are questions that seem impossible to ignore since cameras are literally everywhere today, devouring what they see through their lenses.  As a result, going through some Q&A with myself by way of preparation—whether I’m likely to be the photographer or the photographed—increasingly seems like a good idea. 
 
For instance, what if strangers “who would make me a great picture” are performing in public or, even more commonly, just being themselves in a public place when I happen upon them with my camera? 
 
My most indelible experience of the latter happened at the Damascus Gate, which leads to the “Arab Quarter” in Jerusalem’s Old City. In arcs along the honey-colored steps that sweep down to that massive archway, Palestinian women, many in traditional clothes, were gathering and talking in a highly animated fashion against the backdrop of ancient battlements, but as soon as I pointed my camera in their direction to take “my perfect shot,” they raised their hands, almost as one, and shielded their faces from me. Was that ever sobering! I didn’t know whether they were protecting their souls or simply their modesty and privacy from another invasive tourist.
 
In the story about picture taking at parades in New Orleans, one photographer who is drawn by their similarly incredible visuals observed:

You really have to be present and aware and know when the right time is to take a photo. Photography can be an extractive thing, exploitative, especially now when so many people have cameras. 

To her, knowing when to shoot and when to refrain from picture taking is about reading the situation, 

a vibe. You know when somebody wants you to take their photo, and you know when somebody doesn’t.

Another regular parade photographer elaborated on her comments:

If you carry yourself the right way . . . people putting on that parade see you know how to handle yourself and will give you a beautiful shot.

I’ve also found that performers want you to portray them in the best light and will help you “to light the scene” when you make eye contact and invite them to do so. On the other hand, they will also tell you (if you’re paying attention) when the lighting is off and you should just back off.

Here’s one where I got it right, at least about “working the scene together.” 

Because everybody wants to look their best while being photographed, the same rules usually apply when the subjects aren’t part of a performance but simply out in public, being interesting by being themselves. For the would-be photographer, it’s about initiating a conversation and establishing at least a brief connection before asking: can I take your picture? If they don’t feel “looked down upon” by your interest, they’ll often agree. But as with those “on stage,” these preliminaries can also result in: “No, I’d rather that you didn’t right now,” a phrase that’s hard to hear when “a great picture” is right there in front of you if only you could “take it.”
 
Whenever you know in advance that taking pictures could be uncomfortable for those being photographed, one New Orleans parade regular talked about the need to deepen his relationship with those he wants to photograph before showing up with his camera. Because he takes pictures at NOLA’s legendary funeral parades, he brings club members photos that he’s taken of the deceased on prior occasions so that colleagues and family “have a record of that person’s street style.” It’s his sign of respect at what is, after all, a time for grieving a loss as well as celebrating a life.

We go and we shoot funerals and [then] it’s not a voyeuristic thing. You’re doing what you do within the context of the community

—a community that you’ve already made yourself at least “an honorary member of” through your empathy and generosity. 
 
Then, what you’re giving tends to balance what you’ll be taking.

I didn’t give them glasses of lemonade or anything, but I did ask these two (whom I didn’t know) whether I could take their picture when they walked past my house and both agreed. I had to hope that they were old enough to consent to be photographed.

So what about my cookie-bearing friend who showed up unannounced this week? 
 
Should I have relaxed “my best foot forward” enough to permit one sweaty shot when she so clearly wanted a memento of our reunion after so many months apart?  
 
Yes, probably. 
 
But I’ve become so defensive about cameras taking my picture on every city street, whenever I ring somebody’s doorbell or face my laptop screen that sometimes it’s hard to recognize when “putting down my guard” is actually relationship building and for my own good instead of some kind of robbery.
 
Where zones of personal privacy are concerned, this is a tricky time to navigate either taking pictures of somebody or being captured by one.
 
It’s one more reason to try and rehearse my camera-related transactions before I find myself, once again, in the middle of one. 
 

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(If you’re interested in a photo essay I posted after my last visit to New Orleans, here it is, from May, 2018. Another post, with photos taken at the Mummers Parade in January, 2019, can be found here. Taking pictures has always been a way that I recharge for work, although I’m still in the process of learning its complicated rules.)

This post was adapted from my May 30, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Higher Winds Are Coming

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(illustration by Monica Aichele)

The near future is like a 10-day weather report. It follows the trend lines and makes predictions, which will come true except for all of those times when the unexpected happens. 

I’m in the process of re-building the backyard after loosing 1½ big trees in the middle of it and experiencing the damage to boxwoods and other valued neighbors that came with that. The rebuilding includes a brand new linden tree that will need a four-by-three foot hole to inhabit (after I finish this) and various plugs for the hedgerows. So these days, I’m regularly hoping to minimize any more damage as the yard recovers its good appearance.

But it’s also a fool’s errand of plans and defenses because gale-force winds regularly whipping down from Philadelphia’s high points in the northwest felled those earlier trees, while countervailing wind-blasts sweep up from the Carolina coast whenever there’s a Nor’easter. The latter can sound like a freight train just outside the bedroom window as they funnel between the house and our 200-year old tulip poplar. 

More trees will surely be lost.

While my inclination is to be defensive (and plant replacements, like the linden, in strategic places), I’m aspiring to a more dynamic point of view that recognizes not only the deaths of the living things that shape this place but also its broader evolution as the climate changes and more that’s unplanned starts to happen. I’m aiming for a healthier and saner recognition that this is a landscape in motion, that less shade and more sun might mean more vegetables, that some former residents (like the rabbits) might return with the carrots, and that I can change and grow with the confusion.

Coincidentally, while I’ve been trying to live my short term forecasts outside, I’ve also been reading one: Fareed Zakaria’s Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World, which came out last October, barely six months into our tribulations with Covid-19.

You might know Zakaria as a charismatic CNN host and columnist for the Washington Post, who also happens to have a PhD in government from Harvard. In other words, he’s one of those “experts” who have attracted a great deal of skepticism over the past decade–particularly when they’re telling us what’s coming next. But hold on, while nine of his ten lessons toe a fairly predictable Center-Left path into tomorrowland, they are introduced by a rule-of-thumb that effectively qualifies all of the lessons that follow. Zakaria’s First Lesson is for all of us to “Buckle Up,” because what’s coming for certain is much more chaos and unpredictability (just like the novel coronovirus), and we can’t simply fortify or plan our ways out of it. We’ll have to learn how to go with, and even take advantage of the future’s chaotic flows.

Great, you say, more Confusion, Incompetence and Internal Divisions. More Infections, Killer Storms, Droughts and Wildfires.  More Mass Shootings, Desperate Migrations and Habitat Destruction. More Genocides, Famines, Despots and Mindless Consumption. Altogether, a seemingly unhappy picture. And just like the weather reports I’m watching, More Unpredictability for the green half acre that I’m trying to care for. But in both spheres, there’s a way to keep our heads above water, and maybe, even to thrive. 

That doesn’t mean that Zakaria’s other Lessons are unsatisfying—in fact, they’re often excellent—particularly Lesson Two (“What Matters Is Not the Quantity of Government But the Quality”) and Lesson Ten (“Sometimes the Greatest Realists Are the Idealists”). But, without question, his most valuable advice is to “Buckle Up” for the chaos coming our way.

Zakaria frames this pivotal lesson by way of analogy from the tech world. Some years ago, technologist Jared Cohen observed that all computer networks suffer from a “trilemma.”  They can have two of the following qualities but never all three. Those qualities are openness, speed and security. For example, if they are “open” and “fast” they are, by their very nature, “insecure.”

Zakaria describes the analogous “trilemma” that confronts our post-pandemic future. We live in a world where: 

Everyone is connected, but no one is in control. In other words, the world we live in is open, fast—and thus, almost by definition, unstable.

It would be hard to bring stability to anything so dynamic and open… [On the other hand,] a fast and stable one will tend to be closed, like China. If the system is open and stable [his third permutation], it will likely be sluggish rather than dynamic. Think of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires: vast, open, diverse—and decaying.

Like the digital tech platforms that impact so much of our lives in the West today, living and working are inherently unstable because we have not made the kinds of investments or prepared ourselves adequately for the kind of future that is the necessary consequence of our “fast” and “open” societies.
 
Zakaria provides several examples that speak to our hoping for the best when we should be preparing ourselves for the worst. He starts, of course, with the current pandemic that epidemiologists and others (like Bill Gates) have been warning us about since SARS, MERS, and Ebola a decade or so ago and Zika more recently. What follows are three more alarm bells that are going off today but we’re largely ignoring, and there are many more instances where we’re neither investing nor preparing to live in an increasingly chaotic future. 
 
MEAT. As a meatlover, this is a calamity that I actively try not to think about, but Zakaria skirts the better-known concerns (like animal cruelty, an unsustainable carbon footprint) to continue his focus on epidemiology. He describes the role that factory livestock farms will almost certainly be playing in global health because we want to get meat to our tables quickly (as “fast”) and with as little government monitoring of safety (or interference with “fast” and “open”) as possible. In light of the research that’s been done, Zakaria argues that not one but two frightening realities loom over our mass production of cattle, chickens and pigs:

These massive [livestock] operations serve as petri dishes for powerful viruses. ‘Selection for specific genes in farmed animals (for desirable traits like large chicken breasts) has made these animals almost genetically identical.’ Vox’s Sigal Samuel explains. ‘That means that a virus can easily spread from animal to animal without encountering any genetic variants that might stop it in its tracks. As it rips through a flock or herd, the virus can grow even more virulent.’ The lack of genetic diversity removes the ‘immunological firebreaks,’ Samuel quotes the biologist Rob Wallace: ‘Factory farms are the best way to select for the most dangerous pathogens possible.’

[And as if that’s not enough]… Factory farms are also ground zero for new, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as animals are bombarded with antibiotics that kill most bacteria but leave those that survive highly potent. Johns Hopkins professor Robert Lawrence calls antibiotic-resistant bacteria ‘the biggest human risk of factory farms.’

We’re now aware of the virulence of Covid-19, can easily imagine worse viruses being “selected” in factory livestock farms, as well as the mistakes and “human errors” that could lead to widespread public exposure. We’ve also read stories about bacteria in hospitals that are demonstrating their resilience to our stock of antibiotics. Despite the horrific cost in lives that seems likely, few people even know about the time bomb that’s ticking in these production facilities. While we’re all interested “in getting back to normal” after Covid-19, an even less healthy and increasingly unstable future seems far more likely. 
 
BIO-WEAPONS. We all know something about the groundbreaking research into messenger RNA that’s behind some of the coronavirus vaccines and the selective editing of human DNA using CRISPR technology that portends the “editing out” of genetic diseases before a child is born or the fabication of “designer babies,” but the likelihood of bioweapons has largely been confined to the sphere of science fiction in our imaginations. Given the widespread use of these innovations in global laboratories today, that’s an irresponsible mistake. And, as Zakaria notes, he’s been worried about this one for awhile:

I have always considered bioterror to be the most important under-discussed danger facing us….And yet…the main international forum for preventing it, the Biological Weapon Convention, is an afterthought. As [scholar Toby] Ord notes [in his book called The Precipice,], ‘this global convention to protect humanity has just four employees, and a smaller budget than the average McDonald’s.’

Zakaria is not an alarmist. Instead, he wants to show us some of the rarely discussed problems (he discusses several others too) so we can either address them before it’s too late or get ourselves more ready than we are today for the even more unstable world we’re sure to be living in when we fail to do so. I’ll break down the last quotation fromTen Lessons into three sentences because each one of them has its own implications for our post-pandemic future.

The costs of prevention and preparation are minuscule compared to the economic losses caused by an ineffective response to a crisis. 

More fundamentally, building in resilience creates stability of the most important kind, emotional stability.

Human beings will not embrace openness and change for long if they constantly fear that they will be wiped out in the next calamity.

In his “Buckle Up” Lesson, Zakaria refers to a ground-breaking idea from another scholar: Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of becoming “antifragile,” which he outlined in his highly influential 2012 book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. The “emotional stability” in an unstable world that Zakaria is talking about will likely require more from us than greater resilience. We’ll need to foster a mindset like Taleb’s that sees instability not as an insurmountable threat to our current “fragility” or merely something to fortify ourselves against. Instead, to be “antifragile” is to learn how to play offense instead of defense. It’s having the agency to be creative and gain strength from the chaos and crises that are sure to come. 
 
In Antifragile, Taleb describes the objective like this:

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile [which fears, to the point of paralysis, both risks and uncertainty]. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.

Taleb also captures his concept’s beauty when he writes later in the book:

Trial and error is freedom. 

Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.  

I want to live happily in a world I don’t understand.

As in the diagram above, to be antifragile is to be enabled (instead of disabled or merely hunkered down) as we face an increasingly unstable world: to incorporate the chaos, turning it into a creative force.
 
Even before antifragile became a concept, I found the sense of swashbuckling opportunism that’s embedded in such an outlook easier to admire in others than to live by myself. It’s hard to be constantly alive to the unexpected while also taking advantage of it. It seemed to be for pickpockets, pirates, Robin Hood’s merry band: people living on the edge of civilization, surviving by making the most out of whatever opportunity presented itself. But I’ve started to learn that an outsider’s perspective like this may be exactly what’s required in the increasingly unstable world that lies ahead. It’s time to step up my game.
 
Perhaps as a result, during the first and second waves of the pandemic last summer, I found some sobering consolation in two very wise people, each of whom had a helpful slant on the perspective we’ll need moving forward. It seems today that they complement both Zakaria and Taleb quite nicely. 
 
In a July post I quoted the heroic Barry Lopez, wondering out loud:

How much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress [that is, have our “fast” and “open” societies] allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly ‘throttled’ world?

He reminds us that we all have what’s necessary within us, only having to remember what we’ve managed to forget.

In an earlier post last May, as the early pandemic chaos compounded and I’d begun to lose perspective, I looked to Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron. With true hope, she says, there is always fear that whatever you long for won’t come to pass. Accepting that your hope is always bound up with your fear—so that you’re as curious about your fear as you are about your hope—can liberate you from your own constraints. What I needed was to face my worst fears more directly, to temper them against that present reality, and then bind them up with my hopes again.

Once again, it’s time to be more curious about our fears and not hide from them. 

It’s time to “remember” our natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another as the challenges compound. 

It’s time to realize that things will not be “getting back to normal,” indeed that they can’t get back to normal in a world that’s as “fast” and as “open” as ours is today.

For the chaos and crisis that surely lies ahead, it’s time to prepare ourselves so that we’re enabled instead of disabled, so we become more resourceful instead of more depleted in the face of what’s sure to come.

This post was adapted from my April 4, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
 

The Spark of Getting Out of Your Head & Into Somebody Else’s

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There are many voices urging us to bridge the divides in our society, but not nearly as many explaining why it would be good for us too if we learned how to bridge them.

Luckily, recent research in neuroscience has been proving that Perspective Taking—or making the conscious effort to stand in the shoes of people who are different from us—activates regions in our brains that make us more innovative and creative overall. In other words, Perspective Taking is not just a one way street.  It also produces reciprocal benefits for whoever’s making the effort.

I’ve talked here several times about how toxic it is to “civic friendship” when we no longer bother to understand where “those other people” are coming from or what we still might have in common with them. Democracy relies on civility and common purpose in spite of our occasional differences, and yet we rarely hesitate before writing off fellow citizens who disagree with us about immigration or climate change or voting. Without even thinking, we ask ourselves: How can they be so wrong when we’re so right?

After the last presidential election, I waded into these turgid waters with two posts. They argued in favor of so-called Blue State Americans shutting down their knee-jerk reactions, shovling their class prejudices about “rednecks” and similar demonizations to the side, and being curious enough about where Red State Americans are actually coming from to make an effort to understand them. Not to agree with, but simply to consider the different priorities that are motivating them. These posts were “Stop the Steal” Throws a Match on a Dry Forrest and Healing a Divided Country Requires Understanding Others.

Now, research is telling us about the rewards that are available when you make the effort to see your life or work from somebody else’s point of view. Whenever you encourage yourself to  “stand in someone else’s shoes” out of curiosity or an acknowledgement of your biases, brain science is proving that your fields of imagination will expand, making you more creative and innovative in all of the interactions that follow.

Part of it is going deeper than appearances and ferreting out information that challenges your preconceptions. For example, Niccolo Machievelli (who’s often described as a “classical realist”) wanted to discover everything he could about his opponents before he was facing off against them. 500 years ago, he wrote:

“Men judge generally more by the eye than by the hand, for everyone can see and few can feel. Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

A deeper understanding of others applies to more than political adversaries, of course. It can be your customers and clients, the co-worker who’s always challenging you at meetings, the regulator who suddenly shows up in the workplace, the protestor who’s in your office parking lot. The more you know about where “these other people” are coming from, the more effective you can be when interacting with them. (What “hot buttons’’ of mine are they pushing and how do I turn them off? What are our shared objectives, where is our common ground?) By asking and answering such questions, you can gain a broader perspective along with the new options that it affords.

When I was still practicing law, Fran and I co-wrote an article about perspective taking, although we didn’t call it that back then. We titled the piece: “Why Didn’t My Attorney Call Me Back (and How Do Clients Feel About That)?”  

Sure, lawyers are busy—shuttling from one crisis to another—but being unresponsive to your other paying customers says loudly and clearly, “my time is more important than your time,” and it’s one of the legal profession’s most persistent complaints. On the other hand, understanding client irritation to the point of changing the way you practice makes your work more valued by others, more profitable to you, and ultimately more satisfying too because perspective taking literally “hacks” your job. Once you understand a need that you failed to appreciate before, it forces you to become more innovative and creative in meeting it, leavening other aspects of your work at the same time. 

In other words, your discovery that others see your priorities differently leads you—through a more creative application of your problem solving skills—to a broader perspective on your work than you had to begin with. In a burst of discovery, you’ve realized that you’re not the only one who is right all the time.

Today, brain science is providing us with a view of the neurological processes behind Perspective Taking. While there are technical descriptions of the brain’s functional areas in the following quotation, the gist of it should still be pretty clear. 

When we are trying to solve a problem, the frontoparietal attention network activates, meaning that areas at the front and the side of your brain are at work. However, when we take the perspective of another person, we engage a different network, often called the “mentalizing,” or theory-of-mind, network. This has two key components: the temporoparietal junction, located just above and behind the ear, and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which lies just behind the middle of your forehead. These areas help us understand what others know, want, need or find important.

Importantly, the “mentalizing” network partially overlaps with the so-called default mode network. This term was initially chosen because researchers at Washington University in St. Louis discovered that this network became active when people took a break from active problem-solving. After years of research, we now know that this network is activated during exploration, imagination, innovation, thinking outside the box, and engaging in mental time travel by thinking back to the past or imagining possible futures. For those reasons, we often call it the “exploration” network. Thus, perspective taking engages both the mentalizing and exploration networks, perhaps because getting inside someone else’s head requires getting outside our own.

To summarize: the Attention network (or rational problem solving) plus the Mentalizing network (trying to understand others) in our brains also activates our Exploration network (thinking outside the box). Obviously, this is a richer and potentially more fruitful mix of brain power than relying upon the problem-solving function alone.

The description of brain coordination above was provided in an article called “Perspective Taking: A Brain Hack That Can Help You Make Better Decisions.” It was one of several offerings this week in the KnowledgeWharton newsletter from Penn’s Wharton School of Business. Intriguingly, the authors’ lab at Penn was “investigat[ing] what happens when we turn the [Exploration or thinking outside the box] network up or down” by improving perspective taking. Does it make people in the workforce more innovative and creative overall?

Their answer was a pretty emphatic “Yes.” .

What the Penn researchers concluded was that “practice makes perfect” when their study participants combined both perspective taking with problem solving and started appreciating the work-related benefits that follow. As neuroscientists, they might also describe their findings this way: our neural pathways become more fluid when we traverse them more frequently because of the advantages that we feel we are gaining by doing so. 

In the course of their research, these neuroscientists also developed several exercises that improved the brain’s fluidity and the creativity and innovation that it unlocked. 

They asked study participants to reflect on recent perspective taking and share the experience with colleagues. In a second study, they asked them to visualize future applications of perspective taking, paying attention to the details and writing them down beforehand. Other “muscle building” exercises for the brain included having more conversations with total strangers, trying out new things (like learning a new language or playing a new instrument), and reading novels that transport you into the minds of different characters. 

By encouraging exercises like these, the researchers were taking advantage of the fact that: 

the human brain is nature’s greatest statistical pattern learning device. This means that the more you exercise perspective taking (whether remembered, imagined or real), the more it will be reinforced. Over time, perspective taking is likely to become more automatic.

In sum, as you start to experience the value of this way of mental processing—by inviting the perspectives of others into your problem solving—you’re likely to keep repeating it. 
 
Wishing to share their Eureka Moment more widely, the Penn researchers also developed something that they call The Nano Tool so that the rest of us can become more creative and innovative at work and outside of it. Despite the fact that its name conjures (for me, at least) a headset with beeping electrodes and matted hair, it’s actually more of “a hand-out” with additional exercises that can be used to activate more “problem-solving through perspective taking.” It’s well-worth checking out.
 
Finally, while perspective taking provides the kind of problem-solving boost that business school types are always eager to promote, I can easily envision some of its most transformative applications in our collective considerations of politics, race, class, religion and other social dividers. We might quickly discover that we’ll be benefiting ourselves at the same time that we’re strengthening our social bonds.

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Post-script:

Along with you I suspect, I’m finding the transition period between a hard year and what I’m hoping will be an easier one a bit of a challenge. As my mother used to say, I’m feeling “betwixt and between” or “at 6’s and 7’s.” Anyway, I saw the picture below after the devastating floods in Australia recently, and thought it seemed an apt metaphor for today, but I’m not sure why. (Maybe I’ve just taken on Wally’s perspective.) If you have any ideas about why this picture of dogs in crates being rescued seems right for these times, feel free to send them along.

This post was adapted from my March 28, 2021 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and occasionally I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe too by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

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